Maria Antoniak is a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence on the Semantic Scholar team. Her research is in natural language processing and cultural analytics, and she has a PhD from Cornell University in Information Science and a master’s degree from the University of Washington in Computational Linguistics. She has worked with Microsoft Research, Twitter, Facebook, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Maria Antoniak
Contributions
The Afterlives of Shakespeare and Company in Online Social Readership
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 (SC) 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 SC and Goodreads communities. By quantifying similarities and differences, we are able to 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.