Percentage of Jeopardy questions about literature over time.

Most referenced authors

How Jeopardy authors conform to literary canonicity

• Shakespeare is Shakespeare
• Nineteenth-century novelists rank highly
• Authors from before the 19th century must be major: Homer, Cervantes, Chaucer, Milton, Dante, etc.
• Few contemporary authors. Most have already “passed the test of time.”
• Top 50 authors’ identities:
  • Entirely western
  • Entirely white, except Alexandre Dumas
  • Mostly Anglophone
  • Mostly male (5 of the top 50 are women)

Clue face value != clue difficulty

Hardest authors by clue position

This only counts authors who have appeared in 40 or more clues, i.e., more than once per season on average.

Easiest authors by clue position

Interpretation of relative difficulty

• Authors in harder clues are more canonical.
• Authors in easier clues are more associated with popular culture and literature for young people.

Literature on Jeopardy

• Jeopardy rewards a (largely) Anglophone literature that reproduces the traditional literary canon in both form (a hierarchical list) and content (familiar names).
• But its view of literature does not reproduce the academic canon directly. It mixes the popular and the prestigious.
• It reinforces the high vs. low culture distinction through the difficulty of its questions.
  • High culture more valuable than low culture.
  • High culture more valuable because it is rarer.

Next steps?

• Improve classification and extraction steps
• Conduct similar analyses with works
• Reconcile entities by referencing external sources
  • Authors to VIAF
  • Works to MLA International Bibliography entities and tags

Thank you!

Jeopardy per Bourdieu?

Extracting structured data (complex)

{
  "authors": [
    {
      "id": "a1",
      "name": "Herman Melville",
      "birth": 1819,
      "death": 1891
    }
  ],
  "works": [
    {
      "id": "w1",
      "title": "Book of Genesis",
      "container_id": "w2"
    },
    {
      "id": "w2",
      "title": "Bible"
    },
    {
      "id": "w3",
      "title": "Moby-Dick",
      "year": 1851,
      "author_ids": [
        "a1"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

How Jeopardy authors break from literary canonicity

Promoted

• Playwrights other than Shakespeare (e.g., Williams, Shaw)
• Genre fiction (e.g., King, Christie)
• Children’s literature (e.g., Carroll, Baum)
• Works with film and TV adaptations (e.g., Tolkien, Mitchell)

Demoted

• Poetry
• Antiquity (other than Homer)
• The Renaissance
• World literature
• And much more…