Operationalizing Canonicity

On Monday, April 17, two collaborators from the ENS in Paris, Jean Barré and Thierry Poibeau, presented on their project called 'Operationalizing Canonicity'.

This presentation summarized their work on the notion of canonicity in the French context. They proposed an operationalization of the French literary canon through its contemporary reception, focusing particularly on the role of the school institution in the making of the canon. Their statistical modeling based on textual elements achieves predictive results with an accuracy from 70% to 74%. They assume that this linguistic norm is the result of biased latent selection mechanisms that are producing literary "immortality".