Matthew Wilkens is Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell, where he works on quantitative methods for literary and cultural history. His current research also explores computational analysis of online health communities. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Cultural Analytics, directs the Textual Geographies project, and co-directs the BERT for Humanists project. He is the author of Revolution: The Event in Postwar Fiction.
Matthew Wilkens
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.