The Afterlives of Shakespeare and Company in Online Social Readership
Maria Antoniak David Mimno Rosamond Thalken Melanie Walsh Matthew Wilkens Gregory Yauney
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.