November Novel Writing Month

Unbenownest to Joe and I when we started our Paragogy Vision Quest this November, it is officially National Novel Writing Month. One gentleman started the month a few years back and now it has turned into an annual happening. I would love to have some learning analytics data from these writers in terms of how many sign up, and then exactly how many novels are finished during the month. Amongst those finished, how many were started before November 1st, and how many after?

Those basic building blocks would be nice as a way to graphically display paragogy I believe. I would be shocked if the numbers were not positively correlated between the number of peers involved and the number of novels produced.

This reminds me of a common question of peer learning: Sure, learning HTML from a peer is cool, but do I really want my brain surgeon's education to come from peers online? Perhaps the gravity is less with a novelist than a surgeon, but still the question of quality remains. These works authored and shared at the end of November, what kind of quality are they? This gets into a whole nother region of ambiguity, judging the quality of a novel.

Nontheless, we push on. Let's say the literature quality could be measured by what high-brow publications reviewed the work, and impact quality by how many copies were sold. This assumes we hold America's trusted critics (i.e. New York Times Magazine, Chicago Reader, etc.) as the gatekeepers of literary merit, which is probably fair.

That aside, impact is more important, in terms of reaching readers and making scratch. Measuring these two aspects would be easier. So, if we could have sales and readership data plus an index (perhaps modeled on Rotten Tomato) of the literary merit of a work (i.e. 1 point for a review by an independent blogger, 1,000 for New York Review of Books) and evaluate finished novels by those factors, that would also yield helpful information on how Paragogy can work well.


 * Growth over time?
 * Chart would be nice.
 * Dude who started its book.
 * And derivations thereof.
 * How have peers worked together to solve this goal?

=Comments=

Joe: ''I think it would be very interesting to create something like nanowrimo.org or 750words.com with a much more "social" aspect to the writing. Instead of just keeping track of who is writing, the system could do some light-weight text analysis (e.g. using my current favorite algorithm for this, the Concept Forest algorithm) to help people connect with each other, by finding people who are writing about similar topics, for example.''

Joe: ''A quick guesstimate would indicate that by the end of the month we will have written around 70% of the 50,000 word requirement for NaNoWriMo. We can do an actual analysis of the numbers later. Note that had we both written exactly 750 words per day, we'd have done 90% of the requirement. To do it solo, one would need to write about 1666 words per day. Anyway, we now have a nice body of text to work with if we want to do further editing and refinement (which I suspect we will).''