Melanie Walsh is Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. Her research is in the areas of data science, digital humanities, cultural analytics, and literature. She is the author of a free online programming textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python. She is also co-editor of the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data, and she co-directs the AI for Humanists project.
Melanie Walsh
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.