Status cultures, biographical cycles and generational changes in literary tastes. An analysis of a database covering all users of the Saint Petersburg public library system in 2014

Authors

• Mihail Sokolov
• Nadežda Sokolova
• Maria Safonova
• Elisa Ahonpää
• Ekaterina Belikova
• Iuliia Guseva
• Anneli Hanhisalo
• Miroslav Girshfeld
• Ulla Kannisto
• Elisa Minkkinen
• Heini Pietilä
• Lauri Puranen
• Yevheniia Riabova
• Anastasia Talchinskaya

Keywords:

lukumieltymykset, lukeminen, big data

Abstract

The Saint Petersburg public library system accumulates information on the attributes of library users (gender, age, education, occupation) as well as on the books they borrow. In this paper, we analyse profiles of all readers who borrowed books by the 200 most popular fiction authors in 2014 (overall borrowed 293,319 times by 84,003 unique readers). The data offers partial support to Bourdieu’s homology thesis: a system of tastes exists which is strongly correlated with the level of formal education attained and character of a person’s employment (manual/non-manual). However, the available evidence does not rule out the possibility that higher-status culture is omnivorous. The effects of status culture cross-cuts the effects of generational changes in tastes (sci-fi and fantasy succeeded detectives and mystery stories as the most popular genres) and interacts with gender effects (a male-female polarisation of tastes is evident in the low-brow, but not in the high-brow, part of the status spectrum). Due to the unusually rich data taken at the level of individual authors, we can observe the shortcomings of conventional genre classification as a tool for measuring ‘brow-level’: subgenres, rather than genres, polarise audiences.