Books’ Impact in Digital Social Reading: Towards a Conceptual and Methodological Framework

Abstract

The aim of this panel is to debate the challenges and opportunities offered by online reviews for measuring the impact that books can have on readers (Boot and Koolen, 2020). The focus is specifically on culture- and language- specificity, thus we will compare insights from the analysis of Korean, English, Italian, German, and Dutch reviews. Digital social reading platforms – like Goodreads, Lovelybooks, or Naver Books – host millions of reviews and, thus, offer unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, and reader response (Rebora et al., 2021; Walsh and Antoniak, 2021). Computational tools are especially relevant, given the large amount of available data, but finding associations between textual features, cultural conventions (e.g. genre), and cognitive, affective, and aesthetic responses is not a straightforward task (Koolen et al., 2020; Pianzola et al., 2020). By comparing research done with different platforms, datasets, and languages, we aim at improving the methods that we employ, in a dialogue involving both data-driven insight and theoretical reflection on literature and readers. Questions that we will address are: what aspects of a book’s impact on readers can reviews help us to measure? What are the limitations of online book reviews for studying impact? How do we know to what extent these review texts reflect the actual reading experiences? What are unwanted, confounding influences (e.g. reviewers projecting a favourable self-image, socially desired responses, aspects of identity formation, fake reviews). How do online book reviews differ from experimentally controlled gathering of reader responses (lab studies, questionnaires, psychologically validated scales) (Lendvai et al., 2020)? How do platforms for reviewing and social interactions around books influence reviewers and their perceptions? How do reviewers compare to other readers? To answer such questions, we will present four case studies dealing with different languages and cultures, followed by an open discussion of the results and methods, reflecting on their generalizability, efficacy and limitations.