Digital humanities and digital social reading

Abstract

Prominent among the social developments that the web 2.0 has facilitated is digital social reading (DSR): on many platforms there are functionalities for creating book reviews, 'inline' commenting on book texts, online story writing (often in the form of fanfiction), informal book discussions, book vlogs, and more. In this article we argue that DSR offers unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, the impact of reading and literary communication. We also claim that in this context computational tools are especially relevant, making DSR a field particularly suitable for the application of Digital Humanities methods. We draw up an initial categorization of research aspects of DSR and briefly examine literature for each category. We distinguish between studies on DSR that use it as a lens to study wider processes of literary exchange as opposed to studies for which the DSR culture is a phenomenon interesting in its own right. Via seven examples of DSR research we discuss the chosen approaches and their connection to research questions in literary studies.

Modelling social readers: novel tools for addressing reception from online book reviews

“…Sophisticated analyses of theme, or the deep anchoring of a literary work in a detailed intellectual, social and historical context, may at times elude the thousands of reviewers contributing individual reviews to these social reading sites. Yet, despite these failings, the reviews still capture the meaningful thoughts of thousands of readers, each with their own diverse motivations for reading and reviewing, and are thus reflective of these readers’ literary engagement [ 1 , 4 , 9 ]. Although they are usually unknown to each other, the readers of a particular work of fiction implicitly create an imagined community that shares, at least for some time, an interest in that work [ 5 ].…”

“…Social reading platforms offer an opportunity to explore these aspects of reader response and narrative structure outside of the laboratory or classroom setting [ 1 , 2 , 4 , 32 – 34 ]. Work on these platforms has focused on an ethnography of online reading [ 35 ], considerations of reader review sentiment [ 36 ], how gender and intimacy are intertwined in reviews [ 37 ] and broader linguistic characteristics of the reviews [ 38 ].…”

“…Taken as a whole, these lines of inquiry allow one to explore how non-specialist readers experience a piece of the literature. Indeed, exploring the responses of thousands of readers to the same work of fiction may come close to a natural experiment addressing the reader response problem, where the readers themselves choose what they share about their response to the work [ 1 ]. In so doing, the readers may also be providing insight into the formation of interpretive communities [ 3 ], while simultaneously offering clues as to what they value in works of fiction, how they understand the complexities of characters, and how they remember and retell the events and the sequence of those events that they feel are most important to include in their review.…”

“…Online reader comments about works of literary fiction offer an intriguing window onto how people read. Although previously ignored in the realm of computational literary studies, recent studies have shown the value of these resources in understanding reader reception [ 1 – 3 ]. These comments can provide useful insight into how readers imagine the main storylines of a novel, how they understand the fictional struggles of characters and how they develop varying impressions of the work.…”

“…The advent of social reading sites on the Internet that allow individual readers to join in wide-ranging discussions of individual works of fiction through reader-generated reviews and comment threads on those reviews has enabled a revisiting of fundamental questions of how people respond to literary fiction [ 1 , 4 , 7 , 8 ]. Perhaps best known among these sites in the USA is Goodreads that, along with sites like it, represents an online attempt to reproduce the face-to-face space of book clubs and library groups, where there is no ‘right’ answer to reading the work (as there might be, at least implicitly, in a classroom), nor any hierarchy of critical insight (as there might be in a forum where professional reviewers or literary critics might dominate the conversation) [ 7 , 9 ].…”