Complexities associated with user-generated book reviews in digital libraries: Temporal, cultural, and political case studies

Yuerong Hu, Zoe LeBlanc, Jana Diesner, Ted Underwood, Glen Layne-Worthey, J. Stephen Downie

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

While digital libraries (DL) have made large-scale collections of digitized books increasingly available to researchers [31, 67], there remains a dearth of similar data provisions or infrastructure for computational studies of the consumption and reception of books. In the last two decades, user-generated book reviews on social media have opened up unprecedented research possibilities for humanities and social sciences (HSS) scholars who are interested in book reception. However, limitations and gaps have emerged from existing DH research which utilize social media data for answering HSS questions. To shed light on the under-investigated features of user-generated book reviews and the challenges they might pose to scholarly research, we conducted three exemplar cases studies: (1) a longitudinal analysis for profiling the temporal changes of ratings and popularity of 552 books across ten years; (2) a cross-cultural comparison of book ratings of the same 538 books across two platforms; and, (3) a classification experiment on 20,000 sponsored and non-sponsored books reviews. Correspondingly, our research reveals the real-world complexities and under-investigated features of user-generated book reviews in three dimensions: The transience of book ratings and popularity (temporal dimension), the cross-cultural differences in reading interests and book reception (cultural dimension), and the user power dynamics behind the publicly accessible reviews ("political" dimension). Our case studies also demonstrate the challenges posed by user-generated book reviews' real-world complexities to their scholarly usage and propose solutions to these challenges. We conclude that DL stakeholders and scholars working with user-generated book reviews should look.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationJCDL 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2022
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781450393454
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 20 2022
Event22nd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2022 - Virtual, Online, Germany
Duration: Jun 20 2022Jun 24 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
ISSN (Print)1552-5996

Conference

Conference22nd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2022
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityVirtual, Online
Period6/20/226/24/22

Keywords

  • Cultural analytics
  • Digital humanities
  • Digital libraries
  • Social media
  • User-generated content
  • Web archives

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Engineering(all)

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