Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins

Abstract

The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character's behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text.

Readers' engagement through digital social reading on Twitter: the TwLetteratura case study

“…or discussing it with others, like it frequently happens with other kinds of DSR (Blyth, 2014;Pianzola et al, 2020;Sun and Gao, 2017;Thoms and Poole, 2018). Moreover, the fact that the majority of the original content generated is an interpretation of the text or a generalization based on it, seems to reflect the style and goals of teaching literature in Italian secondary school and, specifically, the novel "The Late Mattia Pascal".…”

“…Blyth (2014) also showed that annotations are used to reflect upon cultural differences, to connect reading to personal experience, and to co-construct meaning, with respect to both foreign words and literary features. Something similar also occurs beyond classroom activities: Pianzola, Rebora, and Lauer (2020) found analogous patterns of interactions in Wattpad users, who use comments in the margins of texts both to have conversations elicited by the story and to leverage peer learning when faced with more complex texts.…”

Mapping the entertainment ecosystem of Wattpad: Platforms, publishing and adaptation

“…Dedicated book-based social media platforms like Goodreads and other review sites offer new spaces for the consecration of literature outside of established circles (Murray, 2018; Nakamura, 2013). Dedicated creative writing and reading platforms host authors writing in a variety of genres and categories including novels, fan fiction, humour, classics, comics and poetry, and arguably enhance a global youth reading culture (Pianzola et al, 2020; Ramdarshan Bold, 2016; Rebora and Pianzola, 2018). These platforms include sites like Wattpad, Inkitt, Radish, SwoonReads, Tapas, Archive of Our Own and, once upon a time, LiveJournal.…”

“…Readers who also comment are thus relatively active users on Wattpad. Readerly engagement varies across categories with teen fiction gaining significantly more interaction and sustained engagement by readers than Classics on Wattpad (Pianzola et al, 2020; Rebora and Pianzola, 2018). This preference by readers has an impact on the categories and genres of content that moves beyond the platform.…”

Fiction Publishing Patterns in the “Wattpad” Online Community

“…Isu yang kemudian menarik yaitu beberapa penulis populer di Wattpad merasa tidak cukup puas dengan karya cyber-nya dan ingin melanjutkan karyanya ke dalam bentuk sastra cetak (Mawardi 2018). Selain itu Wattpad juga berbagai menjadi aplikasi "crowdsourcing" yang digunakan oleh penerbit dan penulis untuk mengumpulkan ide dan inovasi baru (Mustafa & Adnan, 2017;Pianzola, Rebora, & Lauer, 2020). Wattpad juga menjadi sebuah platform yang sangat populer memunculkan generasi penulis baru dan inovatif dalam dunia penerbitan (Bold, 2016).…”