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.
In this project we developed and approach for annotating online book reviews using the Story World Absorption Scale (SWAS, Kuijpers et al., 2014) - a self-report instrument developed in the field of empirical literary studies - as the foundation for a tag set that targets mentions of absorption during reading by reviewers.
On this page you can find the annotation guidelines we developed; the pre-print version of the paper that describes the annotation process that led to the development of these guidelines; a manually annotated and curated corpus of English language book reviews, that includes example sentences from some of the reviews; and the pre-print version of a paper that introduces these two tools: the guidelines and the corpus.
Part of the reason for conducting this annotation work was to validate the SWAS, and a reconceptualization of Story World Absorption is discussed in the paper "Annotating for Story World Absorption in online book reviews".