I'd just come across the term for this sort of phrase recycling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone
A *snowclone* is a type of cliché <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clich%C3%A9>
 and phrasal template <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_template>
originally
defined as "a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn,
quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open
array of different variants".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone>assuming, that in this case,
wikipedia is authoritative.

It looks like this sort of thing could fall under natural language
processing work, which is something I wish I had the programming chops to
get into.
This looks like an interesting project in a related vein:
http://metaoptimize.com/blog/2010/11/05/nlp-challenge-find-semantically-related-terms-over-a-large-vocabulary-1m/

Thanks for sharing the interesting project Eric,
I think I've read perhaps 10% and have heard of nearly all of them. (Some
others are languishing unread on my shelf and others I've avoided given
their reputations for extraordinary density: Hegel, Kant, etc.)

It's interesting City of God topped the list, It seems one of the least
likely to attract readers outside those studying the same subject. I suspect
you're a lot more likely to read Don Quixote casually and for pleasure than
you are the City of God and thus have familiarity with it and answer about
it on the survey. I'm curious, Is this a text you've encountered outside of
a medieval/early christian/theological context? My exposure to it was in an
undergraduate course on Medieval Spirituality. (my professor's advice was to
take the summer and read it, entirely, in Latin and that the text would
reward you for doing so. I have not yet found the time to do this.)

~Andrew Kelly



On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 6:56 AM, Lars Aronsson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On 11/04/2010 04:37 PM, Ken Irwin wrote:
>
>> Can you tell the difference between "no one has read this book" and "this
>> book is not as great"?
>>
>
> Are books that many hate also great? Web pages get
> a high "Page rank" because of many links, independent
> of whether those links are "likes" or "ridicules".
>
> Talking of citation analysis, has anybody developed an
> algorithm for recognizing literary references in plain
> text? If I write "to code or not to code", that is
> clearly a reference (a link) to Hamlet's monologue,
> and should contribute to its Page rank, don't you think?
>
>
> --
>  Lars Aronsson ([log in to unmask])
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>



-- 
~Andrew M. Kelly
MLIS Degree Candidate, Simmons GSLIS 2011
Evening Library Assistant, Bay State College
twitter: @a_m_kelly