The Canon of Dutch Literature According to Google
Literary history is no longer written in books alone. As literary reception thrives in blogs, Wikipedia entries, Amazon reviews, and Goodreads pro les, the Web has become a key platform for the exchange of information on literature. Al- though conventional printed media in the eld—academic monographs, literary supplements, and magazines—may still claim the highest authority, online me- dia presumably provide the rst (and possibly the only) source for many readers casually interested in literary history. Wikipedia o ers quick and free answers to readers’ questions and the range of topics described in its entries dramatically exceeds the volume any printed encyclopedia could possibly cover. While an important share of this expanding knowledge base about literature is produced bottom-up (user based and crowd-sourced), search engines such as Google have become brokers in this online economy of knowledge, organizing information on the Web for its users. Similar to the printed literary histories, search engines prioritize certain information sources over others when ranking and sorting Web pages; as such, their search algorithms create hierarchies of books, authors, and periods.