TY - JOUR
T1 - The rise and fall of genre differentiation in english-language fiction
AU - Sharma, Aniruddha
AU - Hu, Yuerong
AU - Wu, Peizhen
AU - Shang, Wenyi
AU - Singhal, Shubhangi
AU - Underwood, Ted
N1 - Funding Information:
Material support for this project came from NovelTM, directed by Andrew Piper and funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Funding Information:
Material support for this project came from NovelTM, directed by Andrew Piper and funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - The organization of fiction into genres is a relatively recent innovation. We cast new light on the history of this practice by studying the strength of the textual differentiation between genres, and between genre fiction collectively and the rest of the fiction market, in a collection of English-language books stretching from 1860 to 2009. To measure differentiation, we adapt distance measures that have been used to evaluate the strength of clustering. We use genre labels from two different sources: the Library of Congress headings assigned by librarians, and the genre categories implicit in book reviews published by Kirkus Reviews, covering books from 1928 to 2009. Both sources support an account that has genre differentiation rising to (roughly) the middle of the twentieth century, and declining by the end of the century.
AB - The organization of fiction into genres is a relatively recent innovation. We cast new light on the history of this practice by studying the strength of the textual differentiation between genres, and between genre fiction collectively and the rest of the fiction market, in a collection of English-language books stretching from 1860 to 2009. To measure differentiation, we adapt distance measures that have been used to evaluate the strength of clustering. We use genre labels from two different sources: the Library of Congress headings assigned by librarians, and the genre categories implicit in book reviews published by Kirkus Reviews, covering books from 1928 to 2009. Both sources support an account that has genre differentiation rising to (roughly) the middle of the twentieth century, and declining by the end of the century.
KW - Cultural analytics
KW - English literature
KW - Fiction
KW - Genre
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M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85095966520
VL - 2723
SP - 97
EP - 114
JO - CEUR Workshop Proceedings
JF - CEUR Workshop Proceedings
SN - 1613-0073
T2 - 1st Workshop on Computational Humanities Research, CHR 2020
Y2 - 18 November 2020 through 20 November 2020
ER -