The Afterlives of Shakespeare and Company in Online Social Readership

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Antoniak, Maria, Mimno, David, Thalken, Rosamond, Walsh, Melanie, Wilkens, Matthew, Yauney, Gregory
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Antoniak, Maria
Mimno, David
Thalken, Rosamond
Walsh, Melanie
Wilkens, Matthew
Yauney, Gregory
author_facet Antoniak, Maria
Mimno, David
Thalken, Rosamond
Walsh, Melanie
Wilkens, Matthew
Yauney, Gregory
contents The growth of social reading platforms such as Goodreads and LibraryThing enables us to analyze reading activity at very large scale and in remarkable detail. But twenty-first century systems give us a perspective only on contemporary readers. Meanwhile, the digitization of the lending library records of Shakespeare and Company provides a window into the reading activity of an earlier, smaller community in interwar Paris. In this article, we explore the extent to which we can make comparisons between the Shakespeare and Company and Goodreads communities. By quantifying similarities and differences, we can identify patterns in how works have risen or fallen in popularity across these datasets. We can also measure differences in how works are received by measuring similarities and differences in co-reading patterns. Finally, by examining the complete networks of co-readership, we can observe changes in the overall structures of literary reception.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_07340
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Afterlives of Shakespeare and Company in Online Social Readership
Antoniak, Maria
Mimno, David
Thalken, Rosamond
Walsh, Melanie
Wilkens, Matthew
Yauney, Gregory
Computation and Language
The growth of social reading platforms such as Goodreads and LibraryThing enables us to analyze reading activity at very large scale and in remarkable detail. But twenty-first century systems give us a perspective only on contemporary readers. Meanwhile, the digitization of the lending library records of Shakespeare and Company provides a window into the reading activity of an earlier, smaller community in interwar Paris. In this article, we explore the extent to which we can make comparisons between the Shakespeare and Company and Goodreads communities. By quantifying similarities and differences, we can identify patterns in how works have risen or fallen in popularity across these datasets. We can also measure differences in how works are received by measuring similarities and differences in co-reading patterns. Finally, by examining the complete networks of co-readership, we can observe changes in the overall structures of literary reception.
title The Afterlives of Shakespeare and Company in Online Social Readership
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07340