The Afterlives of Shakespeare and Company in Online Social Readership
This provides a novel quantitative comparison of historical and contemporary reading communities, though it's incremental in applying network analysis methods to literary reception studies.
The researchers compared reading patterns between the interwar Paris Shakespeare and Company lending library records and modern Goodreads data to analyze how literary popularity and reception have changed over time. They quantified similarities/differences in co-reading patterns and network structures to identify shifts in which works rose or fell in popularity across these communities.
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.