AbsORB Annotation Guidelines and Metadata Corpus - English - January 2024

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 an 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 English-language annotation guidelines we developed for this project, as well as the English-language Metadata corpus of online book reviews. 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 "Validating the Story World Absorption Scale through annotation of online book reviews" in the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Updated versions of the annotation guidelines will be posted on Open Science Framework under this link: https://osf.io/kr4v6/