Identifying Mormon authors

The implementation of Common Knowledge clouds this week has motivated me to try to identify authors who are/were members of the LDS Church. I've been typing "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" into the Organizations field of LDS authors and have changed some existing entries in that field that were variations of this. I've taken care of just about all the authors identified as LDS in GospeLink 2001 plus some others. Right now there are 433 authors with this entry, making it the second largest item in the Organizations cloud, but I imagine that it will gradually drop down to its demographically-appropriate place as others start using this field.

If you choose to join me in this task, I suggest you phrase the entry the same way I did for consistency. (It was already the most common way of identifying LDS authors when I started working, so I adopted it.) If you want to add extra identifiers to the entry (e.g. "(President of the Church)"), if you put them in parentheses at the end the author will apparently still be counted as part of the main organization.

Thanks for the note. I will keep it in mind.

Just now reading this - great idea! I'll follow your start when I see LDS authors who aren't identified. Thanks!

A status report:

We're up to 1446 LDS authors now, and I've still got some low-hanging fruit left to pick. (I've been making heavy use of BYU's Mormon Literature database.) Once I run out of easy stuff, I'll try to give a more informative report with, in particular, a list of the top LDS authors in order of the number of copies of their books on LibraryThing. This will be nontrivial to put together because the CK search facility is disabled, but I think I can work around that using Google.

Awesome!

I'm going to guess that Stephenie Meyer will be at the top. ;)

Actually, I stand corrected: If you add all copies of their books together, then Orson Scott Card is at the top.

As of July 10, we have about 1600 LDS authors identified on LT. In a few days, I'll post the top 50 by number of LT copies and give a link to a spreadsheet with all authors with their copy count. To whet your appetite, here are the top 20 "A"s and "B"s:

1. Amanda Ashley (2526)
2. Wayne C. Booth (1648)
3. Martha Beck (1095)
4. Caralyn Buehner (1007)
5. Elizabeth H. Boyer (947)
6. Fawn M. Brodie (791)
7. Glenn Beck (587)
8. Richard L. Bushman (524)
9. Mike Allred (343)
10. Jack Anderson (210)
11. Leonard J. Arrington (201)
12. Ezra Taft Benson (171)
13. Jeff Benedict (162)
14. M. Russell Ballard (134)
15. Heather B. Armstrong (130)
16. Elizabeth Petty Bentley (125)
17. Helen B. Andelin (118)
18. Juanita Brooks (112)
19. John Bytheway (108)
20. Stephanie Ashcraft (105)

(Regarding 3 and 6, "LDS author" means "member of the LDS Church at some time".)

I noticed that one of those, Martha Beck, is a formerly LDS author. Are you planning to just list them all, and not worry about current affiliation? I have no opinion either way, so it's not a criticism. Just wondering. :)

Re #9:

Both 3rd-place Martha Beck and 6th-place Fawn Brodie (and perhaps others in this list) left the Church.

Here's my rationale for including them:

(1) They were members of the LDS Church at some point in their lives.
(2) It's customary to list organizations that a person belonged to at some point in his/her life in the CK Organizations field even if he/she didn't remain in the organization till his/her last day on Earth. Picking a random example, I see that Isaac Asimov has "US Army" listed in his CK Organizations field even though it seems unlikely that he was still in the army at age 72.
(3) Therefore, it's reasonable to put the LDS Church in Beck and Brodie's CK Organizations field.
(4) If a list of "LDS authors" is going to be based on data stored on LT, I don't know what else to base it on other than the contents of the CK Organizations field.

This does mean that those members of the LDS Church who want to use this list to claim bragging rights might make themselves look foolish by doing so! On the other hand, some of the 1600 authors in the complete list that are indisputably Mormon are nothing to brag about! (As authors, I mean.)

The spreadsheet of LT LDS authors as of July 10/11 is now available at:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tFz51Of-yrtBvIHgivg2PdQ

The top 50 are:

1. Orson Scott Card (70,848)
2. Stephenie Meyer (65,538)
3. Christine Feehan (18,656)
4. Anne Perry (12,707)
5. Stephen R. Covey (9,614)
6. Shannon Hale (5,160)
7. Dave Wolverton (3,494)
8. Lynn Kurland (3,404)
9. Brandon Sanderson (3,136)
10. Richard Paul Evans (3,084)
11. Joseph Smith (3,068)
12. Amanda Ashley (2,526)
13. Wayne C. Booth (1,648)
14. Clayton M. Christensen (1,621)
15. Tracy Hickman (1,572)
16. Brandon Mull (1,397)
17. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (1,375)
18. Zenna Henderson (1,287)
19. Gerald N. Lund (1,139)
20. Martha Beck (1,095)
21. Caralyn Buehner (1,007)
22. Kerry Patterson (969)
23. Elizabeth H. Boyer (947)
24. Glen A. Larson (936)
25. Hugh Winder Nibley (885)
26. Terry Tempest Williams (849)
27. Fawn M. Brodie (791)
28. Gordon B Hinckley (749)
29. Sean Covey (703)
30. Obert Skye (699)
31. Virginia Sorenson (696)
32. Eldridge Cleaver (676)
32. Sandy Petersen (676)
34. James E. Talmage (674)
35. W. Cleon Skousen (670)
36. Dean Hughes (667)
37. Brenda Novak (638)
38. Rick Walton (629)
39. James A. Owen (625)
40. Margaret J. Wheatley (615)
41. Beatrice Sparks (589)
42. Glenn Beck (587)
43. Jessica Day George (583)
44. Brady Udall (544)
45. Richard L. Bushman (524)
46. Walter Kirn (490)
47. Bruce R. McConkie (484)
48. Alane Ferguson (481)
49. Kip S. Thorne (468)
50. Chris Heimerdinger (452)

Edited to correct inexplicable omission of Richard Paul Evans.

When I saved the LDS author list as a Google spreadsheet, I didn't realize you wouldn't be able to access it without creating a Google account (if you don't already have one). If that's a problem for anyone, let me know, and I'll find a way to make it more accessible.

shes uh-mayzingly awzum :

stephenie meyer woops i guess i fergot to put her name XP

notice how she never directly says that they had sex.. she just kind of implies it.... so thats not bad right?