Replication Data for: 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 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.

诸如Goodreads、LibraryThing这类社交阅读平台的兴起，使得我们能够在超大规模、极高精细度的维度上开展阅读活动分析。但21世纪的此类平台仅能呈现当代读者的阅读图景。与此同时，莎士比亚书店（Shakespeare and Company）的外借馆藏记录数字化项目，为我们打开了一扇观察战间期巴黎规模更小的早期社群阅读活动的窗口。本文旨在探究我们可在多大程度上对莎士比亚书店社群与Goodreads社群展开对比分析：通过量化两组数据集的异同，我们能够识别文学作品在这两类社群中受欢迎程度的升降规律；我们还可通过分析共同阅读模式的异同，衡量不同社群对作品的接受度差异；最后，通过完整剖析共同阅读关系网络，我们可窥见文学接受整体结构的变迁。