• Theodore Kouassi Kouassi

  Author

In digital humanities, computational methods are gaining more significance and in digital humanities, researchers increasingly use computational methods to analyze vast amounts of literature alongside qualitative analysis. to analyze vast amounts of literature in addition to qualitative analysis. This research aims to create a computational model to assess the BV of modern English literature based on the Goodreads Books Dataset. The suggested framework differs from a typical literary analysis that makes use of full text by applying bibliographic metadata such as language code, year published, publisher, average writing rating, number of ratings, and number of text reviews as proxy indicators of the visibility of the literature in the publications and readers' engagement with them. The framework involves steps of data preprocessing, feature extraction, bibliographic analysis based on metadata, and computation of a Bibliographic Visibility Index (BVI) by weighted aggregation of four normalized indicators: Language Distribution, Publication Trend, publisher Distribution, and Reader Engagement. Duplicate and incomplete records were filtered out, and only books published since 2000 were selected. The normalized scores of 0.84, 0.79, 0.73, and 0.88, respectively, yielded an overall BVI of 0.82. A sensitivity analysis was performed, which indicated that the proposed framework is robust with regard to the indicator weights, as changes of ±10% only affected the BVI by 0.80-0.83. The results show good visibility of the publications in the public, with a fairly small audience of readers and participants in the publications, which is an indication of the fact that the publishing market is concentrated. While the framework does not directly assess cultural themes in literary texts, it offers a scalable, reproducible, and computationally efficient approach to the analysis of literary texts via metadata, enabling quantitative digital humanities research and large-scale studies of contemporary English literary culture.

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