About
Author: Amanda D. Filchock
This project is to fulfill the capstone requirement for the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center’s MA Digital Humanities program. It is accompanied by a white paper that is published on CUNY Academic Works.
Glossary of Terms
While discussing attempts to ban books, there are a few ubiquitous terms and phrases to define.
Administrative Challenge: This is when a school staff member or multiple staff members brought forward a book for banning to the school principal or district.
Banned/Removal: Both terms refer to a book being challenged and then ultimately removed from school shelves. Educators cannot assign it as required or optional reading as part of the curriculum. Librarians at public schools cannot allow the title to be accessed on shelves or checked out by a student.
Banned from classrooms: This is a decision where the book can no longer be used in curriculum as part of instructional materials, nor can it be accessible on a classroom bookshelf for independent reading. The book can still be available to access in the school library under this definition.
Banned from libraries: The book has been removed from school libraries so that no student in any grade level can access it. This is important to call out because it could be that the book is still used in a higher grade level’s curriculum, but the original complainant does not think the title should be available to students younger than that grade level.
Banned from libraries and classrooms: The title has been removed from school classrooms as curriculum material or off-the-shelf reading and also from school libraries so that no student can request to check it out.
Banned pending investigation: Sometimes the decision process for banning a book can extend for months or even over a year. This definition reflects that at the time PEN America published their final dataset, the decision was still being determined by various school boards and staff tied to that particular case.
Censorship: This term describes an act when access to a book or any other material is reduced based on a group or individual’s belief that the content shared in that title is harmful or offensive.
Challenge: In the context of book banning, this term represents when a book is brought forward by someone who wants to challenge its presence in public schools.
Complainant: The person or persons responsible for the original challenge or complaint of material being available for students. This could be a parent or guardian of a student enrolled at the local school, a member of the community/citizen who does not have a student enrolled, a school staff member, a district member, a school board member, or a group of people that are made up of the same or a variety of these roles.
Dataviz: Short for data visualization. This term represents the interactive graphs, tables, and maps that are published on this site. They are intended to display data in ways that spark observations that would otherwise be overlooked by relying solely on a static dataset.
Formal Challenge: This is when someone(s) submitted a challenge in writing to the school principal or administrative staff.
Informal Challenge: This is when someone(s) submitted a challenge either verbally or over email/text message/social media.
Legislative Action: This indicates that the challenge came from the district, county, state, or school board and should apply across all schools within its purview.
Objection: Similar to ‘challenge’, this term describes when a book is brought forward by someone who objects to its presence in public schools. In the context of this project, an objection describes when a title was unsuccessful in its attempt to be removed. In other words, the book was attempted to be banned from shelves, but it failed during the process and remains on school shelves.
Origin of Challenge: This represents the individual or group that put forward the book for consideration for a removal from the school.
School district: This is in reference to the Department of Education at the district level. A district is made up of multiple public schools of any K-12 grade level. Policies enacted at the district level will apply to all public schools within that district.
Shadow banned: A practice where books or materials are quietly removed from shelves accessible to students or library patrons. When this happens, the instance is not reported to schools, districts, or the organizations tracking book ban attempts and therefore the instance is not counted in the comprehensive tally. Because of shadow bans, the data published here and by organizations bringing awareness to book ban trends is not 100% accurate.
State: This is in reference to the Department of Education at the state level. Policies enacted at the state level will apply to all public schools within that state.
Unclear Origin of Challenge: PEN America is not sure where the challenge came from.
Sample Observations
This project is intended to be a resource for users to make their own discoveries about the data provided. It’s an intentional choice to not provide the author’s own opinions or discoveries (either political or cultural) about what the dataviz elements reveal. That said, the following observations and questions are provided as samples that might spark further interpretation or research. The hope here is that users are inspired to come up with their own after reading through samples.
Comparing 20th and 21st Century Reasoning Terminology:
There’s so much to unpack when looking at the list of categories for why each complainant is bringing forth a book to be banned. It’s especially interesting to compare the terms used in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Notice that book ban attempts from the 20th century use the term indoctrination to describe a reason for why the material should be removed from access. More common removal reasons in the 21st century include terms or phrases like sexual content, sexualization, and inappropriate. What stands out about those differences in terminology choices? Do you notice more frequent complaints about sexual content presented to students in complaints made in the 21st century?
Consider how the term explicit (21st century categorical term) characterizes the source of the work versus how the term indoctrination (20th century) describes the impact of reading the source or its effect on the reader.
Are there any cultural connections that can be made between the commonly used terms and each moment in time? Can an argument be made that citizens of the 21st century are more sensitive to language choice or sexual content, for example, than those in the 20th century?
Are the 21st century complaints mainly against titles that have been published in the past few years? If so, does it mean that because there aren’t as many complaints made about books published in the 20th century or even early 21st century those titles just aren’t assigned as part of the learning curriculum? Or is it because works published by authors in the 21st century include more instances of content that is considered inappropriate by complainants?
Origin of Challenges:
It’s incredibly interesting to dig into the data around who is initiating the book ban attempts and where.
Notice that in Florida’s data, the highest amount of complaints come from Conservative Groups. While in Maine, the highest number comes from parents or citizens. What does this reveal about what titles are attempted to be banned? What might this information tell us about how successful each complainant type is at removing books from schools and libraries?
On the U.S. Book Banning Trends page, scroll down to the table with the full list of 2022-2023 book ban attempts. Search by state and look at the Origin of Challenge column. See whether the complaints are coming from legislative action or a formal/informal challenge from someone. What do you notice about the titles and the amount of titles that are brought forth for banning by legislative action versus the formal/informal challenges?