User-Generated World Literatures: a Comparison between Two Social Networks of Readers

Widely employed digital archives of literary works are not necessarily neutral sources of knowledge, but rather literature ecosystems where the relevance of authors and works are shaped by communities of users. This could affect the visibility of authors belonging to historically marginalized groups of people, as it has been demonstrated by previous works on the under-representation of non-Western writers. In this work, we present an exploratory analysis on how divergent representations of works written by African and Asian writers emerge from different platforms. More specifically, we compare the reviews gathered from an Italian and an international social networks of readers, in order to highlight how authors from these continents are perceived by two different communities of users.