Unexpected usage no. 1: The anniversary of Hassan Fathy

Pierre-Carl Langlais has a PhD in information and communication science and is working with OpenEdition Lab on the unexpected reader detector. Studying OpenEdition’s statistics, he discovered several enlightening cases of how content on the platform has been read and reappropriated, which we are sharing here.
If you would like to tell us about other cases, please contact us at lab@openedition.org

Our detector has isolated an initial case of content being used in interesting ways on Revues.org: an anniversary. On 23 March 2017, Google commemorated what would have been the 117th birthday of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. To mark the occasion, the Google logo was replaced by a special illustration (a “doodle”), mainly in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East (http://www.google.com/doodles/hassan-fathys-117th-birthday). In a single day, over 1700 users flocked to an article published in 2009 in the Cahiers de l’histoire: “Hassan Fathy, construire avec ou pour le peuple?” (http://chrhc.revues.org/1907). In the graph below, the consultations are so concentrated on this single day that the reader statistics before and afterwards appear non-existent in comparison.