Validation of the Story World Absorption Scale through Annotation of Online Book Reviews

In this paper we present our attempt at validating a self-report instrument developed in the field of empirical literary studies to capture absorption experiences, namely the Story World Absorption Scale (SWAS, Kuijpers, et al., 2014). We used the SWAS as the foundation for a tag set, that targets mentions of absorption in online book reviews. Online book reviews posted on social media platforms are a relatively new form of reader testimonials that can be of use to researchers from different disciplines to investigate reading experience and evaluation, as well as social discourse about reading. This paper discusses the annotation tag set, which was developed through an iterative process, presented alongside a series of inter-annotator agreement studies that show the validity of our annotation process. Finally, it will discuss the validation and
reconceptualization of the Story World Absorption construct, where we consider instances of systematic disagreement during annotation and discuss new categories that we added to the tag set that indicate areas where absorption theory may need to be refined.

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 | Open Access Guidelines and Corpus |

Presenting the English-Language AbsORB MetaData Corpus and Annotation Guidelines

This paper presents an annotated metadata corpus of English language book reviews from Goodreads and annotation guidelines developed to tag online book reviews for mentions of story world absorption. The metadata corpus includes the segments of each review that have been annotated, the annotation category, the title and author of the book that is reviewed, the rating, the genre of the book reviewed, the length of the review in characters and tokens, and the on- and offset of the annotation. The corpus and guidelines could be used to further investigate the experience of absorption during reading.

 

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 ArticleDOIOpen Access Guidelines and Corpus