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., Lusetti, M., Lendvai, P., & Rebora, S. (2024). Validation of the Story World Absorption Scale through Annotation of Online Book Reviews. Journal of Cultural Analytics, 9(1).

| Open Access Article | DOI |

Kuijpers, M. M., Lendvai, P., Lusetti, M., Rebora, S., Ruh, L., Tadres, J., Ternes, T., & Vogelsanger, J. (2023). Absorption in Online Reviews of Books: Presenting the English-Language AbsORB Metadata Corpus and Annotation Guidelines. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 9(13), pp. 1–7. 

| Open Access Article | DOI |

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 |

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.

| Open Access Article |

Where to find the tools developed in this project:

This project was funded by: