This new essay published in Post45 is about the relationship between prizewinning novels and their economic counterparts, bestsellers. It is about the ways in which social distinction is symbolically manifested within the contemporary novel and how we read social difference through language. Not only can we…
This past weekend I participated in an interview with Jeanette Kelly on the CBC to discuss our new work on using computers to predict bestsellers and prizewinning novels. In it I discuss the Devoir challenge in which local Quebec writers try to impersonate a bestseller using our…
I recently did a podcast with the BookNet group in Canada that focuses on the intersection of technology and books. They were interested in our research focusing on prizewinning and bestselling novels. My main emphasis in the discussion was to focus on the way computers can be useful for different…
Here is a humble 1-page guideline that we produced after studying a sample of 10 years worth of the bestselling novels according to the NY Times Bestseller list. It was used as part of the Devoir Challenge in which some local Montreal writers were asked to try to…
When the books editor of Le Devoir, Catherine Lalonde, called to ask if my lab would supply a data-driven guide on how to write like a bestseller, I enthusiastically said yes. But I expected everyone else would say no. Surely writers will be allergic to data.…
I have a new piece out that is appearing in The New Republic. In a number of recent book reviews, literary critics and novelists arrive at the consensus that to be a great writer, one must avoid being “sentimental.” One famous novelist describes it as a “cardinal sin” of writing.…
This post is the first in a series by this year’s .txtLAB interns. It is authored by Eva Portelance. Building Corpuses The first step in our search for answers required that we build solid corpuses for comparison. The PW corpus was selected from five main…