Banned Metadata

Intro

I'm writing this at the end of Banned Book week 2024, which in recent years has become much more poignant as there are literally books being banned in the US. PEN America released info that for 2023-2024 there is over 10,000 instances of books being challenged or banned. They haven’t released the data or details for this year, but they did create a spreadsheet of books that were challenged or banned last year, July 2022 - June 2023:

PEN America's Index of School Book Bans (July 1, 2022 - June 30, 2023)

This spreadsheet has about 3300 challenges or bans on about 1500 unique titles. I was curious if I did the work to pull the metadata for each title if there is anything interesting there.

Data

Here is a updated and enriched spreadsheet with new fields added: Enriched PEN 2022-2023 Book Bans by Author Title

I added a number of fields including, LCCNs, ISBNs, LC NAF Labels, Subjects, Genres, date, wikidata ID. Some fields have multiple values separated by a pipe “|”. The data is also available as JSON with better structure: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thisismattmiller/book-bans-2023/refs/heads/main/data/titles_compiled.json

And when possible I included the MARC file for each title (links in the spreadsheet as well). For the analysis below if you want more details, such as specific titles, I would recommend heading over to the spreadsheet and start filtering on values.

Subject Headings

A big thing that is added in cataloging is subject headings, so I wanted to see what subject heading were on books that were challenged/banned. This first list takes LCSH headings and breaks them apart into individual components. This is not how they are used in cataloging but it does allow better aggregation of terms for counting.

This list shows the subject heading component and the number of bans/challenges associated with it:

{{subject[1]}} - {{subject[0]}}

This next list doesn’t break them apart and just shows them how they are used on the resources. Again the heading and number of bans/challenges associated with it.

{{subject[1]}} - {{subject[0]}}

Subject By State

The PEN data provides the ban/challenge by state, so I was curious if there were any patterns between what subject headings were on books banned/challenged in specific states. Again the number is the count of bans/challenges associated with that term from that state.

Arkansas

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

California

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Colorado

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Florida

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Georgia

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Idaho

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Indiana

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Iowa

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Kansas

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Kentucky

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Maine

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Massachusetts

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Michigan

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Minnesota

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Missouri

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Nebraska

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

New Hampshire

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

New Jersey

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

New York

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

North Carolina

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

North Dakota

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Oklahoma

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Oregon

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Pennsylvania

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

South Carolina

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

South Dakota

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Tennessee

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Texas

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Utah

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Virginia

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

West Virginia

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Wisconsin

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

Wyoming

{{subject[0]}} - {{subject[1]}}

By Date

This zoomable bar chart shows the number of books banned/challenged by year, as you can see most are recent works but there are some quite old.

By Author with Awards

As linked data systems have developed more we can start moving beyond the strict bibliographic data. I was curious how many award winning authors were included in the list. So when possible (this is not comprehensive, there is likely missing data) the process looked the author up on Wikidata to see if they have any awards documented and then compiled that list below with the titles that were challenged/banned. This doesn’t mean the title listed won an award, just that it was written by an award winning author:

{{auth['bans']}} bans/challenges

{{auth['awards'].length}} Awards

{{auth['titles'].length}} Titles

Conclusion

These were just some quick ideas I had about the data, I’ve made it available (linked above) if you want to explore further and I will try to run the same process if the data for 2024 becomes available this fall.

Code on Github

Matt Miller