What is it about?
The chapter uses Internet data-mining to test the hypothesis that Aleksis Kivi's great 1870 Finnish novel Seitsemän veljestä (translated into English as Seven Brothers [1929, 1991] and The Brothers Seven [2017]), while it has been translated 59 times into 34 different languages, has NOT entered World Literature (though I believe it should have).
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Why is it important?
Claims about World LIterature are notoriously nebulous: I think Kivi's novel SHOULD BE World Literature, so it is. This chapter is my first major adoption of Digital Humanities techniques to gain, through data-mining, some numerical figures that may give our decision-making some points of reference: how many Wikipedia languages; how many times have translations been adapted by artists who cannot read the text in the original; how many critical works have been published by scholars who do not originate from the original text's source culture, etc.
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This page is a summary of: Metrics of World Literature, January 2017, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004340268_003.
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