Digital social reading: Investigating absorption in online book reviews
Social media platforms like Goodreads are online environments where millions of people come to share their love for the written word. Members come together to discuss what they read, what they classify as good or bad literature, and they recommend books to one another or even try their hand at writing fan fiction.
This project focuses on the growing phenomenon of digital social reading. Goodreads holds a wealth of qualitative data about reading experience, text evaluation, and social interactions about reading. By analyzing reader reviews on Goodreads using textual entailment and text reuse detection (methods from computational linguistics) and comparing them to statements on the Story World Absorption Scale (SWAS; Kuijpers, Hakemulder, Tan & Doicaru, 2014), we investigate: (1) the potential of converting Goodreads into an extensive qualitative corpus for the computational analyses of reader responses; (2) the validation of the SWAS through comparison with reviews on Goodreads; and (3) the comparison of readers’ absorption across different genres. It is important to study these online social reading phenomena, as they are becoming exceedingly popular and provide new ways for people of all ages to acquire storytelling and literacy skills (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2014).
Related papers
Kuijpers, M. M. (2022). Bodily involvement in readers’ online book reviews: Applying Text World Theory to examine absorption in unprompted reader response. Journal of Literary Semantics, 51(2), 111, 129.
| Open Access Article | DOI | Project |
Rebora, S., Boot, P., Pianzola, F., Gasser, B., Herrmann, J. B., Kraxenberger, M., Kuijpers, M. M., Lauer, G., Lendvai, P., Messerli, T. C., & Sorrentino, P. (2021). Digital humanities and digital social reading. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 36 (2), p. ii230-ii250.
| Open Access Article | DOI |
Rebora, S., Kuijpers, M. M., & Lendvai, P. (2020). Mining Goodreads. A Digital Humanities Project for the Study of Reading Absorption. In Sharing the Experience: Workflows for the Digital Humanities. Proceedings of the DARIAH-CH Workshop 2019. Neuchâtel: DARIAH-CAMPUS.
Lendvai, P., Darányi, S., Geng, C., Kuijpers, M. M., Lopez de Lacalle, O., Mensonides, J.-C., Rebora, S., & Reichel, U. (2020). Detection of Reading Absorption in User-Generated Book Reviews: Resources Creation and Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 4835–4841. Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association.
Lendvai, P., Rebora, S., & Kuijpers, M. M. (2019). Identification of reading absorption in user-generated book reviews. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2019), Germany (pp. 271–272).
Where to find the tools developed in this project:
Curated metadata corpus (English)
Annotation guidelines (English)
This project was funded by: