Document Type : Original Article
Author
Assistant Professor, English Language and Literature Department, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Hakim Sabzevari University, Sabzevar, Iran.
10.22091/slic.2026.15357.1028
Abstract
Every era entails various sorts of moods, tastes, and judgments which shape the values of its cultural production. This study examines the evolving landscape of literary evaluation in digital contexts, where algorithmic culture, platformization, and computational methods increasingly shape reading and interpretation. It aims to investigate how literary value is currently produced, circulated, and institutionalized. Drawing on research in social reading, platform studies, and computational literary analysis, the study adopts a critical infrastructural hermeneutics framework to link literary interpretation with political economy, data governance, and reception analytics. Findings indicate that literary value no longer emerges solely from traditional sites of judgment—such as reviewers, prize committees, or curricula—but through a relay structure of classification systems, recommendation engines, interface hierarchies, and monetization logics that continuously shape visibility and legitimacy. Participatory digital reading cultures expand expressive publics while intensifying data extraction and opacity, and computational literary methods provide insight at scale but risk reproducing historical exclusions if corpora, metadata, and evaluative frames are unexamined. The study concludes by proposing a practical research agenda emphasizing accountability, multilingual comparatism, and mixed-scale interpretation. Ultimately, the relevance of literary and cultural studies depends on its capacity to interpret both texts and the infrastructures that sort, surface, and monetize them.
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