---
# System prepended metadata

title: Book Review Articles

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# Book Review Articles


## Gender

**Gender and sentiment, critics and authors: a dataset of Norwegian book reviews**
https://aclanthology.org/2020.gebnlp-1.11.pdf

Abstract:
"Gender bias in models and datasets is widely studied in NLP. The focus has usually been on analysing how females and males express themselves, or how females and males are described. However, a less studied aspect is the combination of these two perspectives, how female and male describe the same or opposite gender. In this paper, we present a new gender annotated sentiment dataset of critics reviewing the works of female and male authors. We investigate if this newly annotated dataset contains differences in how the works of male and female authors are critiqued, in particular in terms of positive and negative sentiment. We also explore the differences in how this is done by male and female critics. We show that there are differences in how critics assess the works of authors of the same or opposite gender. For example, male critics rate crime novels written by females, and romantic and sentimental works written by males, more negatively."

**Corpus**
1. NoReC corpus: book reviews written by professional Norwegian critics
    - analysis on a subset of 4313 reviews
    - grading scale from 1 to 6
2. Non-professional reviews, the Bokelskere corpus
- 8142 feale and 12729 male reviews from bokalskere.no
- 
- Investigating gender bias in the _text bodies_ of the reviews 
    - how male and female authors are described

**Methods**
- logistic regression classifier (with the top 200 most informative words for each gender as features)
- sentiment classification: taking reviews with rating 1,2,3 and 5, 6 (to have clearly positive and negative reviews)
    - running two kinds of classification models on two subsets: one reviewing male authors and one reviewing female authors, trained on data
        - where the reviews are split to pos/neg reviews _per author_, 
        - and another where the split is based on _the critic_.

**Findings**
- There are differences in how female and male book authors are positively or negatively described.
    - *For example, male critics deem female crime novels and male romantic and sentimental books as negative. This shows that book reviews contain the social hierarchies that tend to focus on emotional traits to describe females as in Menegatti and Rubini (2017).*


**Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads**
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0961000617709061
Abstract:
"There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes
are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether
readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal
book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It
uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong
gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance
more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by
their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which
male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers
valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by
women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large-scale evidence
about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online."

* studying genre and gender biases in GoodReads reviews, methods similar to ours
* research questions:
    * RQ1: In which genres do female reviewers give higher ratings than male reviewers and vice versa?
    * RQ2:  In which genres are reviewer ratings biased towards books authored by the same gender?
    * RQ3: In which genres are female reviewers more liked than male reviewers and vice versa?
    * RQ4: In which genres are reviews of books authored by the same gender as the reviewer more popular?
    * RQ5: Are there differences in the types of things that male and female reviewers write about male and female authored books in specific genres?
* findings
    * there are genre differences in which genre fe/males rate more highly
    * reviewer-author gender homophily
    * "reviewer same gender preferences exist within genres,extend beyond professional reviewers to amateur reviewers and are not universal across all genres." 
        * (NB => we can compare professional (newpapers) VS amateur reviews (blogs etc.) with our dataset!)
        * reasons behind this unknown
            * "authors of the same gender may show more detailed knowledge of, or display more interest in, topics of common interest with the reader"
            *  "within the reader’s worldview"
    *  male-authored reviewes received more likes


**The Barometer of Literary Taste: Gender and Book Reviews**
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-49142-0_3

Abstract:
"This chapter scrutinises the influence of book reviews, book reviewers and literary editors on the reputations of authors, through an analysis of the reviews in Australian Book Review, The Age and The Australian from 1965 to 2015. This chapter builds upon the work of Melinda Harvey and Julieanne Lamond (Australian Humanities Review 60:84–107, 2016), Stella Count and the VIDA Count, as well as activist research by the Women in Publishing collective (Cooter et al. in Reviewing the Reviews: A Woman’s Place on the Book Page. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1987) and Dale Spender (1987) that revealed a gender gap in the space given to women’s writing among the major reviewing publications. The results of this analysis illuminate entrenched reviewing practices, especially where male reviewers are concerned, that contribute to the continued existence of this gap. But it is not only reviewing practice that ensures this gap between men and women persists, but also editorial practices, the constant threat to the number of pages dedicated to book reviewing in the newspapers and the broader perceptions around women, writing, literary value and authority."

- general:
    - pointing out that reviews aare important in the sense of how texts are understood and engaged with.
    - dual framing function: simultenously promote a new title and author, and indentify the text and author as worthy of discussion.
        - one of the early points of canon formation
    - argues that there exists a group of "must review" authors
        - [Can we identify wuch a group from our data? Is this group gender-biased?]
    - the number of space allocated to book reviews in newspapers and magazines (in Australia) is declining
- on gender:
    - women are (still) underrepresented in book reviews.


**“These Critics (Still) Don’t Write Enough about Women Artists”: Gender Inequality in the Newspaper Coverage of Arts and Culture in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955-2005**

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0891243216643320

Abstract: 
This article addresses the extent and ways in which gender inequality in the newspaper coverage of arts and culture has changed in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955-2005. Through a quantitative content analysis, we mapped all articles that appeared in two elite newspapers in each country in four sample years 1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005 (n = 15,379). First, despite increasing women’s employment in arts and culture and a quantitative feminization of journalism, elite newspaper coverage of women in arts and culture has hardly changed, making up about 20-25 percent consistently over the last 50 years. Second, our results show surprisingly few cross-national differences in the amount of the newspaper coverage devoted to women in arts and culture. Third, although women are underrepresented in the coverage of all artistic genres, there is some evidence of horizontal sex segregation—particularly in architecture (stereotypical masculine) and modern dance and fashion (stereotypical feminine)—as well as vertical sex segregation—in that attention to women has increased in “highbrow” genres that have declined in status. Finally, as the status of an actor type increases from laymen to artistic directors, the proportion of women decreases in newspaper attention to arts and culture.

## On book reviewing, book blogs, impact

**Book blogs as tastemakers**
https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/224024/DriscollBookBlogsasTastemakers.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Abstract:
"Amidst the abundant opportunities for book chat provided by digital media platforms, the book blog is distinctive; less obviously corporatised than Amazon, Facebook or Twitter, longer in format, and focused around the tastes of an individual and the community of like-
minded readers they attract (Rak 2005, Steiner 2010). Book blogs model how to read, as well as what to read. In this article, I consider book blogs as shared expressions of readers’ aesthetic conduct, which may encompass a variety of tastes. I map two contrasting networks of blogs: highbrow literary blogs, and romance fiction blogs. Both networks demonstrate connections to the publishing industry, while also maintaining an autonomy based on readers offering authentic opinions as a service to other readers. Analysis of book blogs shows that while new media does enable mass participation of readers in book culture, this participation can be stratified into taste-based groups, which are themselves further stratified by a hierarchy in which bloggers accumulate a specific kind of ‘readerly capital’ evident in their influence on other readers. Book blogs, like other forms of participation in literary culture, work within genres and taste cultures to create a diversified cultural space."

- extensive background of book blogging
- blogs: 
    - digital expression of 'participatory culture'
    - building 'readerly capital'
    - today many book blogs are affiliated with publishers, libraries etc. [does this affect the review? positive bies]
        - part of the industry
        - semi-professional
    - sites of personal cultural expression
    - network, communities (hierarchical)
    - literary discourse + literary sociability
- blog clusters: the new literary middlebrow, highbrow blogs, romance fiction (in this article)
    - ==> different taste, different audience
    - [Thus, our dataset with gender could be used as a proxy for what male and female like to read?]

**Playing Nice, Being Mean, and the Space in Between: Book Critics and the Difficulties of Writing Bad Reviews**
https://www.academia.edu/12252034/Playing_Nice_Being_Mean_and_the_Space_in_Between_Book_Critics_and_the_Difficulties_of_Writing_Bad_Reviews?from=cover_page
- a qualitative analysis/essay, interviews of book critics, discussing why critics write as they write
    - "shows how critics’ reported experiences of pleasure or anxiety, competition and stewardship, empathy alongside self-preservation are related to the valence of their valuations: the degree to which their assessments are positive or negative"

**The power of book reviews: a simple and transparent enhancement approach for book citation indexes**
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11192-013-1176-4.pdf
- some background/discussion about the importance of book reviews reflecting the impact of the work, though the article is about academic reviews.

**The Review and the Reviewer**
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315778389-7/review-reviewer-claire-squires 

Abstract: 
‘The Review and the Reviewer’ addresses the role of both the review and the reviewer within the wider framework of the circulation of books, assessing their roles and relationships to publishers, authors, and (prospective) readers. The chapter does so both within the context of an historical overview, but also concentrates upon the review and the reviewers in the twenty-first century, including in the now thoroughly digital period. In so doing, it examines key themes and aspects of the historical development of reviewing, its role in the circulation and reception of books in a variety of market sectors, and in gatekeeping and constructing cultural value. It also considers the economics of reviewing, the review as form, and its role in the marketing and publicity of books. In addition, the chapter addresses the sometimes problematic positioning of reviewing with regard to a range of identities (both of the reviewer and the reviewed). The chapter concludes with an examination of the changes being brought to reviewing by digital technologies in their enabling of widespread, ‘amateur’ reviewing across a range of platforms, and their concomitant role in building communities around reading practices, and in creating data for algorithmically led marketing processes. The chapter’s focus is predominantly upon the reviewing environment in the UK, though it brings in examples from across the Anglophone world.

## concepts

**Digital humanities and digital social reading**
https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab020
Abstract:
"Prominent among the social developments that the web 2.0 has facilitated is digital social reading (DSR): on many platforms there are functionalities for creating book reviews, ‘inline’ commenting on book texts, online story writing (often in the form of fanfiction), informal book discussions, book vlogs, and more. In this article, we argue that DSR offers unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, the impact of reading and literary communication. We also claim that in this context computational tools are especially relevant, making DSR a field particularly suitable for the application of Digital Humanities methods. We draw up an initial categorization of research aspects of DSR and briefly examine literature for each category. We distinguish between studies on DSR that use it as a lens to study wider processes of literary exchange as opposed to studies for which the DSR culture is a phenomenon interesting in its own right. Via seven examples of DSR research, we discuss the chosen approaches and their connection to research questions in literary studies."

* introducing the term "digital social reading" (DSR) and discussing its connection to literary and readership studies
* proposes a DSR research taxonomy
* reviewing research in the field (if we need references or background theory)
* RQ idea, case stury 3.6: what kind of linguistic features describe different reviewers (bloggers VS newspapers, for example)

## Methods

**REVRANK: A Fully Unsupervised Algorithm for Selecting the Most Helpful Book Reviews**
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/13945
Potentially useful methods for creating a review model?

## Questions
- based on this dataset, is the book review industry/practice in decline (time period)?
- trends in literature (keywords)?
    - or rather trends in reading?
    -  who reviews what?
- influential reviewers?
- how long after publication are works reviewed?


