Online book reviews and fiction reading typologies – Koolen (IGEL 2023)
Channel: IGEL Conference Videos
Date: 2023-09-04

Online book reviews offer a valuable large-scale resource for studying how books affect  readers. We verify whether the findings of empirical typologies of in-depth fiction reading apply to online book reviews. We ask whether the same linguistic characteristics that typify in-depth reading experiences apply to online Dutch book reviews and whether the poetics of reading differ across reviewing platforms and across reviewers. A corpus of 634,607 online Dutch book reviews from seven platforms is probed. Results show reviews across different platforms are similar in their distributions of syntactic features and all types of word groups related to sentiment, cognition, space, time and motion, but textual characteristics of online reviews change in relation to length, corroborating previous findings (Fialho, 2012).