Petiton to rename sub to AcademiCarriehrman

Just kidding! As you all remember a couple of years ago (naturally), I mentioned I'd like to graph everyone mentioned in the sub as I reckoned Ehrman would be the top name mentioned. More recently we had this thread which prompted me to actually get on with it, because by golly, the love affair with Ehrman seems overwhelming. Is it?

[Narrator: He was right]

There are 3 ways of getting data from Reddit (if you care): the first is to go via pushshift download the subreddit for the month and then parse that, or use the online access via pushshift and query that way, or go use PRAW and then mine it for all proper nouns and that would give the most accurate count. However, doing that that requires Python and then some database of what constitutes a proper noun, and I've got PERL and cba with a database, so I went the hard way and went through 200 posts manually. I did the first 100 posts starting recently (whatever was posted by about Friday backwards), and the second 100 was taken from 2016-2017 via redditsearch (which due to changes in the Reddit API, only returns 100 results anyway).

Some limitations:

• I reckon my accuracy is around 95% and I think that margin of error is quite high, it's probably closer to 98% but I'll hedge on the safe side.
• I ignored u/nightshadewine (sorry!) comment trains as they tended to be a long series of quotes stitched together on mostly Egyptian issues.
• I ignored quotes that included other scholars - so I only took the initial quotee (?)
• I sometimes didn't recognise last names, so a few of those got missed out (maybe 10 in total)
• I ignored people who I recognised as not having written anything about biblical studies

So here's what I unscientifically gathered - I've probably screwed something up somewhere, so YMMV.

Across the most recent 100 posts:

• 144 people named for a total of 340 mentions
• 106 of those people were mentioned once.
• 38 were mentioned twice or more.

I can't really fit everyone on the axis at the bottom, but we can zoom in to the top 10 and see who figures most prominently. To my vague surprise, Ehrman actually comes in second place behind Carrier. As you can see, mythicist-y people figure quite prominently.

Across the 2016-2017 historical 100 posts:

• 163 people were named for a total of 1207 mentions
• 95 were mentioned once
• 68 mentioned twice or more.

Again, too many to neatly fit but it gives you an idea of the distribution. Out of the top 10^1 we see the distribution a bit clearer, with only 2 mythicists creeping in, but with a shared high % of the total mentions.

^1. Now with Robert M Price's clone removed! Thanks u/niado

Overall Combined:

• 266 people named, for a total of 1547 mentions (remember some appear on both lists)
• 166 of them mentioned once (~10%)
• 100 of them mentioned 90% of the time

Here are the top ten people to be mentioned across the 200 posts. If we expand that list to the top 20, we're only starting with people who were mentioned 8 times or more.

Things I learned from doing this:

• The majority of posts go unsubstantiated by any academic standard :P Vast threads often had no mention of anyone at all.
• Certain people are responsible for some of the names almost exclusively - Dykstra, Vinczent, Klinghardt, Crossan (iirc) all pretty much come from 1, perhaps 2 people.
• Ehrman is really popular and has a 22% chance of being mentioned at any given point. Also, too many people call him Erhman, me included. Curiously, he's hardly ever cited for his textual criticism (with or without Metzeger) but mostly for his sort of popular works.
• u/kevotrick is probably responsible for at least 1/3 of unique references in the most recent 100 posts, and I wouldn't be surprised if that hit 50%. Go you for expanding the list of resources known!
• New Testament stuff is more popular than OT :( I'm guesstimating looking at the list, but maybe 10-15% of the people mentioned are OT.

Edit: I used to wonder how on earth idiots people could spend all this time on a post and fail to spot spelling errors in the title and now I know.

Editedit: fixed link

Editeditedit: downvoters = bart-hurt apologists