The Goodreads “Classics”: A Computational Study

https://post45.org/2021/04/the-goodreads-classics-a-computational-study-of-readers-amazon-and-crowdsourced-amateur-criticism/

by polm23 • 5 years ago

66 19 5 years ago

post45.org

orsenthil• 5 years ago

I want a link to this collection so that I could shelve and read these books.

dumpsterdiver• 5 years ago

Mmm, pretty colors. Disclaimer: I didn't read the article, but I did inspect some of the elements. I like the graph at the top of the page. It calms me, somehow.

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

This is a very thorough and methodical analysis. Is this what library science is?

thisjepisje• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

thundergolfer• 5 years ago

It is pretty impressively thorough. I was wondering half way through if it was done by a hobbyist, which would have been remarkable. It’s done by a PhD candidate and a Postdoc, both in Information Science. Still impressive, but explains how they could manage the time to build such a detailed and expansive essay.

mxxc6• 5 years ago

i find it interesting that these days many articles emphasise (lack of) diversity within a given topic and then introduce some biases themselves that will inevitably skew their results, e.g. in this case focusing the bulk of the work on english reviews in order to do text mining, instead of maybe spending some more time figuring out whether the rankings, most read, ratings, etc. apply to everyone else.

also, i hope garcia marquez is rolling in his grave at the thought of being referred to as "latinx".

Freak_NL• 5 years ago

If you're going to nitpick you might want to address the lack of capitalization and diacritical marks in his name (García Márquez) in your comment. Most people appreciate it being written correctly (although the dead probably don't feel too strongly about such worldly concerns).

mxxc6• 5 years ago

in most recorded history people have been writing things the way they wanted to, which is why we encounter a lot of different spellings of the same names, and in several languages occasionally we'd get this or that corruption. it could be that i don't have a lot of education and you are patronising me for that, or it could be that i am highly educated and i can't be bothered to use the shift key. could be many things ;)

truth_• 5 years ago

You yourself are a victim of west-centrism.

A lot of Buddhist abbots from India went to Thailand, Tibet (now in China), Sri Lanka, Cambodia, etc. and due to very wide differences in languages, they would have a new name or a weird version of the Indian name. They didn't mind. We are talking about renowned scholars going to some countries on the invitation of the monarch there. The reverse also happened.

A famous scholar, Lama Tarnath, was known as "Anandagarbha" in Sanskrit. His Tibetan name waa Kun-dga'-snying-po. Indians just translated his name to Sanskrit. He didn't mind.

In some cultures, not putting the accent marks in names amounts to disrespect, but in some ancient cultures, only the meaning of the name was important. Not how you say them.

barry-cotter• 5 years ago

It’s not just the dead who object to Latinx.

only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

pjc502• 5 years ago

They go out of their way to qualify that remark:

There are also works by Laura Esquivel and Gabriel García Márquez, who would likely be read as Latinx from the perspective of U.S. racial logics, and Kahlil Gibran, who would likely be read as Middle Eastern or North African from the same perspective.

"read as .. from the perspective of .." is different from "identifies as"

mxxc6• 5 years ago

tomato tomato. "identifying as" is also a modern mostly anglo-saxon concept. the world is much more complex than individual egos.

idoubtit• 5 years ago

The USA's obsession with race is still surprising, from my perspective. The article believes that (English-speaking) users of Goodreads read few "Black writers" like Alexandre Dumas because they're mostly White people. I read many novels of Dumas, decades before I learned he had Black ancestors. Why does the color of his skin matter? It has no visible (at least to me) influence on his novels. Forcing him in a racial category seems ridiculous. Supposing that one day he had an affair with a man, would Dumas be classified as a LGBT writer?

I can understand that people would select books because of the cultural or racial themes they contain (James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer...), but the nationality or the "race" of the author is a poor discriminant for this. When I read "Cry, the beloved country", I wondered the author was a Black South-African, but I didn't care enough to search for an answer to my own question. And maybe Jorge-Luis Borges in in the "Latinx" category and Ohran Pamuk is a "Middle-Easterner", but are their books less "Western" than those of Herman Hesse or Nicolai Gogol?

A nitpick: Khalil Gibran is certainly not a "North-African" writer. He lived in Lebanon, USA and France, and, as far as I know, never went to Africa.

mxxc6• 5 years ago

i agree with all of the above. i learned that alexandre dumas had caribbean ancestry in this article. would have been more interesting to add more details, like the fact that his "caribbean ancestry" was due to a nobleman marrying a slave, which definitely gives an indication of the class dynamics of the time and could be an interesting fact in itself.

i would go one step further and, exaggerating, claim that putting alexandre dumas and chinua achebe in the same bucket is, in fact, racist.

arbitrage• 5 years ago

from my perspective

Since it is the first thing you mention, what is your perspective, then, that makes your opinion extra qualified?

mxxc6• 5 years ago

it's several people's perspective. labelling authors and personalities according to 2021 america's standard of race is a bit ephemeral, as it assumes that a. everybody agrees with america's definitions b. those definitions are here to stay. assuming that rashid al-din, al-idrisi and khalil gibran have anything to do with each other despite coming from three extremely different places and three very different historical periods is a bit obtuse and doesn't do them any justice.

it's fine that america labels people by skin colour for their own political purposes – although i'd be interested in seeing what the difference between the average italian and the average lebanese is, in the classification – but if we're doing any sort of analysis of humanities, it seems a bit amateurish.

SiempreViernes• 5 years ago

Though more than 90 million reviews have been published on Goodreads in the site's history, one can only view 300 reviews for any given book in any given sort setting, a restriction that was implemented in 2016.

This seems pretty scummy to me, not only does your writing suffer the usual risk of oblivion in the firehose of the internet; Amazon makes your writing undiscoverable by technical means, which is an intensely user hostile choice.

The Goodreads “Classics”: A Computational Study

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