In case you wondered …

… Who Cares about Literary Prizes? | Public Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There are many ways for books to matter, measures that might compete or overlap. To capture this complexity, we developed a model (based on J. D.’s research on the literary canon) that allows us to track the reception of any given book across communities. A book that is dismissed by critics, loved by the airport set, and ultimately overlooked by university English departments should, according to our model, show up near other, similar books. That’s because each of these different reading communities generates its own data footprint—in the form of reviews, scholarly citations, and college syllabi—and each tells a different story about a book’s relative popularity and/or prestige.