Current Book Project

Networks of Discovery in the Global Book Industry

The project uses network analysis, GIS mapping, statistics, and text mining techniques to examine the technologies of “discovery” that predetermine which Anglophone postcolonial novels are made available to different markets of readers. These technologies include industry practices for licensing and translation rights, literary prize circuits, and even import tariffs. For this project, I built a comprehensive corpus of 216 Anglophone novels by Zimbabwean and Malaysian authors (2000–2025), developing it from the ground up from bibliographic compilation to OCR processing. Zimbabwe and Malaysia’s many differences and key similarities—such as their status as former British colonies, book industry size, and geographic and cultural proximity to larger book markets like South Africa and Singapore—enable a mapping of their shared global literary supply chain from distinct vantage points within the same system. The computational methods I use scale across levels of analysis to bridge the gap between individual agency and structural constraint. Through this multi-scalar approach, my work makes visible the mechanisms of contemporary book distribution, revealing how infrastructural gatekeeping intersects with colonial legacies to reproduce uneven geographies of literary visibility.