This panel will provide a forum in which to reflect and discuss the intersection of literature, Digital Humanities, and online platforms. Digital Humanities has become central to Literary Studies by reshaping how texts are analyzed, circulated, and understood. It challenges long-standing assumptions about the canon by expanding access to marginalized texts and foregrounding the role of digital platforms and infrastructures in shaping literary value and readership. In doing so, it shifts attention from isolated texts to broader ecosystems of production and circulation, redefining concepts such as authorship, authority, and readership in an era of algorithmic and participatory cultures. This panel engages what Simone Murray terms the digital literary sphere: an expanded environment where literature is produced, circulated, and evaluated across online platforms. The following presentations examine how these environments reconfigure literary authority, reshape readership, and generate new tensions between cultural value, the market, and public participation. To promote discussion, we have selected three panelists who will be limited to 18-minute papers.

In “The Debut Novel in the Digital Field: Reception, Metrics, and the Circulation of Literary Value,” Elena Sénéchal-Becker examines the debut novel as a high-stakes cultural event, focusing on the gap between the expectations generated by the contemporary publishing industry and the realities of its reception. Using the 2024 debut novel The Afterpains as a case study, the paper combines qualitative industry research with platform-based metrics to analyze how debut novels circulate online. It compares Goodreads engagement data for twenty-five recent debut titles published by Penguin Random House with twenty-five titles by previously published authors, using ratings and review counts as proxies for reader engagement. The resulting dataset reveals a clear pattern: debut novels cluster at the lowest levels of online interaction, while established authors receive significantly greater attention. The study situates these findings within a broader historical framework, tracing the modern debut phenomenon to the publicity campaign surrounding On the Road (1957), which helped institutionalize the expectation that first novels should become breakout successes. By integrating industry analysis with platform data, Sénéchal-Becker argues that digital reception metrics expose a structural mismatch between promotional investment in debut authors and the realities of their circulation in online reading communities.

In dialogue with the previous presentation, Kathi Inman Berens, in “Ebook Superabundance and Gen Z’s Preference for Human-Authenticated Books,” examines the rapid expansion of contemporary book production and its implications for authorship and readership in the digital marketplace. Drawing on data from Bowker, which reports that the number of books published in the United States with ISBNs rose by 32.5% in 2025 to more than four million, the presentation situates this growth within the proliferation of AI-assisted and AI-generated ebooks on Kindle Direct Publishing, owned by Amazon. In this saturated environment, human authors face significant market dilution. The talk then turns to original longitudinal survey data (2020, 2022, 2025), conducted with Rachel Noorda, to analyze Generation Z reading habits. The findings reveal a notable increase in the proportion of Gen Z individuals who identify as readers. Print emerges as their preferred format, and even self-identified non-readers report higher-than-average reading levels. At the same time, reliance on librarian recommendations more than doubled, from 15% in 2022 to 36% in 2025. Berens argues that the proliferation of AI-generated content correlates with growing skepticism toward textual authenticity, prompting Gen Z readers to seek experiences that foreground human authorship as a source of value.

The formal part of the session concludes with “The Digital Afterlives of Latin American Literature: Popularity and Consumption in Wikipedia,” presented by Daniel Carrillo-Jara. This paper offers a data-driven analysis of the global circulation of Latin American literature, shifting attention from individual authors to broader patterns of reception and visibility in digital environments. It examines the “digital afterlives” of Latin American authors and texts, tracing how they persist, mutate, and acquire new relevance online. To account for these processes of circulation, transmission, and reception, the study analyzes Wikipedia across multiple language editions, where entries document authors and literary works from the region. Combining literary studies, Digital Humanities, and data science, the paper examines metrics such as page views, contributors, editions, and editing frequencies. It first analyzes the reception of major authors across linguistic communities, then turns to both canonical and non-canonical works. Carrillo-Jara argues that Latin American literature adapts, or is adapted, to new regimes of visibility in digital spaces; that linguistic communities reshape readership while reconfiguring literary authority and cultural value; and that these communities display distinct cultural preferences that privilege particular authors and works within the broader literary field.