I, Lore De Greve, was very proud to present my research at the prestigious, international MLA 2024 Convention in Philadelphia, where I participated in a panel on “Studying Bookish Social Media Communities”. The panel was organised and moderated by Rachel Wilson (U of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and Angelina Eimannsberger (U of Pennsylvania ). The other co-panelists were Danyse Golick (U of Toronto) and Cassandra Hradil (U of Pennsylvania).
Social media is transforming how books are sold, read, and discussed, as well as the way they travel across languages. Bridging fields like media studies, digital humanities, and the sociology of literature, panelists explore these transformations and the methods that can be used to study them, accounting for large-scale changes to literary discourse as well as impacts on individual readers.
https://mla.confex.com/mla/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/17545
My contribution: “Far from the Bookish Crowd: Using Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis to Analyse the “Layperson” Literary Criticism Surrounding Literary Prizes on Social Media”
Lore De Greve
Due to the rise of social media, the authority and knowledge of a limited group of professional literary critics has been supplemented by the opinion of the crowds. This digitalization has led to a democratization of the public sphere, home to Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture (2006). This has led to the emergence of “community-driven” literary criticism. According to Johannes Franzen, there is a “sichtbare Emanzipation des Publikums, das auf Sozialen Medien, auf Blogs und in den Kommentarspalten von Zeitungen mit großer Lautstärke in Erscheinung tritt“ (Franzen, p. 4).[1] On the one hand, this development has been interpreted by some professional critics as a threat to their authority (Dorleijn et al. 2009, Löffler 2017, Schneider 2018, Kempke et al. 2019, Chong 2020, Gerk 2020, Baßler 2021, Baßler & Drügh 2021). On the other hand, online literary criticism is praised for representing “non-elite reception” (Allington 2016, p. 258) and recent research focuses on peer-to-peer recommendation platforms and the content of online criticism (Kellermann & Rehfeldt 2016, Bogaert 2017, Kellermann & Mehling 2017, Kousha et al. 2017, Thelwall & Kousha 2017, Dekker & de Jong 2018, Graf 2018, Graf et al. 2019, Herrmann & Messerli 2019, Kai et al. 2019, Herrmann & Messerli 2020a, Herrmann & Messerli 2020b, Lauer 2020, Messerli et al. 2020, Pianzola et al. 2020, Bousquet 2021, Petzold 2021a, Petzold 2021b, Rebora et al. 2021, Herrmann et al. 2022, Kraxenberger & Lauer 2022).
In this presentation, I will focus on the literary discourse by reader-reviewers on three social media platforms, namely Twitter, Instagram and Goodreads. Due to their distinct limitations and expectations concerning the length, type and subject which shape the content of the contributions, these three social media platforms have a distinct way of communicating (De Greve & Martens). I argue that these expectations and limitations will shape the literary criticism. To examine the differences between platforms, I will therefore study this phenomenon through the prism of literary prizes and compare the reception of literary prizes and, by extension, the nominated literary works on the three social media platforms. In order to study the evolution and transformation of this layperson literary criticism over the years, I propose the use of an Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) and semi-supervised learning system trained on manually annotated data.
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Works cited:
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De Greve, Lore, and Gunther Martens. ‘Judging a Book by Its Criticism : A Digital Analysis of the Professional and Community Driven Literary Criticism of the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis’. DIGITAL HUMANITIES BENELUX JOURNAL, vol. 4, 2022, pp. 79–105.
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[1] Translation: “visible emancipation of the audience, which emerges with increasing volume on social media, on blogs and in the comment sections of newspapers”