Online reader reviews and manual annotation: Story World Absorption
This blogpost was written by the moderators of the lectures by Moniek Kuijpers about Online Book Reviews and Manual Annotation in the Digital Social Reading course.
Authors: Antonia Vogler and Ma. Lovena Moneva
Have you ever noticed how time flew fast when reading a book? Have you ever experienced being totally lost in the story, as if you are right there with the characters in their world? You felt for the characters. You suffered with them. Maybe you even had a good cry or a good laugh and your heart pounded. If you did, then youâve experienced absorption, and there is a way to measure this using the Story World Absorption Scale or SWAS (Kuijpers et al., 2014). This scale measures the following components:
1. Attention â it is when the readers can lose awareness of themselves, their surroundings and the elapse of time, and they experience deep concentration while reading
2. Mental Imagery â it is when readers can visualize the story world: settings, characters, and situations in their minds
3. Transportation â it is when readers feel that they entered the story world and lost contact with the actual world
4. Emotional Engagement â it is when readers feel the charactersâ emotions
Prof. Moniek Kuijpers, together with her team used the items and concepts from the SWAS, in the Mining Goodreads project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Rebora et al., 2020). In this project, they developed a computational approach to measure reading absorption. The researchers used English reviews from a popular social catalogue of books, Goodreads. On Goodreads, platform users can share reviews on the books that they have read. They gathered reader reviews from different book genres and annotated these, using the semantic annotation platform INCEption (Klie et al., 2018). This tool has been developed at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt (Klie et al., 2018).
To give a better feel of how the annotation process worlds, Prof. Kuijpers gave her students from the Digital Shared Reading course the opportunity to explore the SWAS by following the guidelines developed by her together with Massimo Lusetti, Lina Ruh, Jonathan Tadres, Johanna Vogelsanger, Simone Rebora and Piroska Lendvai (2023). Coming as no surprise, the students coded the reviews differently. After experiencing the process, the students wondered how the researchers' handled disagreement on the annotations. Prof. Kuijpers explained that it was a long iterative process involving group discussions to establish process standards. They discovered that some items had to be modified from and added to the original tool to effectively capture the reviewsâ essence. There is so much potential in using this tool and this method for a variety of reviews. With the availability of data online, it is just a matter of building a good corpus of reviews that can be analyzed. These are important considerations for future research endeavors using similar tools and research methods. Youâll never know, you might find something interesting if you decide to dedicate your research to this matter.
In week 7, we discussed a different, but related study: Using a Cognitive Stylistics approach, Nuttall & Harrison (2020) focus on embodied metaphors in Goodreads reviews of the bestseller Twilight. Their approach to focus on bodily metaphors to find out more about reading experiences is suitable, since they âare often successful [âŚ] because they exploit this mechanism of brain and bodily attunement â(Cuccio, 2015, p. 104). In other words, by studying bodily metaphors, insights into the mind-body connection in reader experiences (for example absorption) are revealed. It does not come as a surprise, for example, that âbooks are excrementâ metaphors were only found in 1-star reviews (Nuttal & Harrison, 2020). The bodily metaphors that the authors found describe bodily control vs. addiction, travelling and eating â to name a few (Nuttal & Harrison, 2020).
Contrasting weeks 2 and 7 of our seminar has demonstrated that there are various methods to measure reading experiences. The methodology can be either qualitative or quantitative, and researchers may come from diverging theoretical backgrounds. Additionally, it became evident that digital platforms offer a wealth of new and useful information about reading experiences. It is important to consider the context of the platform though, including community norms and social dynamics in discussions: â[T]he extent to which such responses offer access to the online reading experiences of readers is mediated by the other communicative functions at work in these contexts, which may include a desire for social affirmation (or the opposite â a desire to provoke conflict) and the construction of identity within a social hierarchyâ (Nuttall & Harrison, 2020, p. 4). Nuttal and Harrison (2020, p. 19) give an example given for when reviewers are seeking for social affirmation: By using terms that are only known to the Goodreads/ Twilight community, they indicate belonging and expertise (Nuttal & Harrison, 2020, p. 19). So when reviewers are âpositioning themselves as a âTwihaterââ, they simultaneously construct their identity of an in-group member (Nuttal & Harrison, 2020, p. 21).
References
Cuccio, V. (2015). Embodied simulation and metaphors: On the role of the body in the interpretation of bodily-based metaphors. Embodied Simulation and Metaphors: On the Role of the Body in the Interpretation of Bodily-Based Metaphors, 99â113.
Klie, J.-C., Bugert, M., Boullosa, B., Eckart de Castilho, R., & Gurevych, I. (2018). The INCEpTION Platform: Machine-Assisted and Knowledge-Oriented Interactive Annotation. In Proceedings of System Demonstrations of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistic. COLING 2018, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
Kuijpers, M., Hakemulder, F., Tan, E. S., & Doicaru, M. M. (2014). Exploring absorbing reading experiences: Developing and validating a self-report scale to measure story world absorption. In Scientific Study of Literature (Vol. 4, Issue 1, pp. 89â122). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.4.1.05kui
Kuijpers, M., Rebora, S., Lendvai, P., Lusetti, M., Ruh, L., Vogelsanger, J., & Tadres, J. (2023). Absorption in Online Book Reviews English Annotation Guidelines. https://osf.io/4h2tw/
Nuttal, L., & Harrison, C. (2020). Wolfing down the Twilight series: Metaphors for reading in online reviews. In Contemporary Media Stylistics. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Rebora, S., Kuijpers, M., & Lendvai, P. (2020, June). Mining Goodreads. A Digital Humanities Project for the Study of Reading Absorption. Sharing the Experience: Workflows for the Digital Humanities. Proceedings of the DARIAH-CH Workshop 2019 (Neuchâtel). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3897251
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