Category: Posts and Updates

Summary

The past decades are characterised by the rise of social media. People can now share their opinion on a plethora of platforms that each have their own focus, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. These platforms are accessible to all (with the exception of some age restrictions or censure), and have enabled people to form connections across the globe. This way, social media platforms have led to both a democratisation and globalisation of the public sphere. The knowledge of professional “pundits” is rivalled and challenged by technological developments and the reliance on “the wisdom of the crowds” or, in these digital times, the wisdom of “the cloud”. This dissertation examines and compares a decade worth of the literary criticism of both professional and online critics through the prism of four literary awards from two language communities. For each language community, we looked at one academy-driven and one more audience-geared prize. Each of these awards has a different architecture and offers varying levels of transparency and audience participation. We focus on the discourse and “talk of literature” surrounding the German-language Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis, which serve as the central corpus, and Georg-Büchner-Preis, as well as the English-language Not The Booker Prize and Man Booker Prize. On the one hand, this dissertation analyses the evaluative discourse of the prizes’ official jury. On the other hand, it delves into the discussion of the prizes on two social media platforms, namely Twitter and Instagram. Consequently, we present a qualitative and quantitative research into the perceptions of readers by means of a digitally empowered method of literary sociology. Using an innovative digital method facilitates the processing of vast amounts of social media contributions and jury reports. In doing so, the focus lies 1) on the relation between professional and online critics, 2) on which literary criteria are used to discern “good” from “bad” literature, 3) on the evolution of literary criticism over time, and 4) on the influences that shape the literary criticism, such as the employed medium or platform, the architecture of the prize and the cultural context. This will also enable us to identify the differences between the discussion of academic prizes, on the one hand, and of literary prizes that draw on audience participation, on the other hand, as well as to look at the overarching opposition between the literary discourse of the “professional” and the “other”.

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.

 

(272 words, references excluded)

 

Works cited:

Allington, D. ‘“Power to the reader” or “degradation of literary taste”? Professional critics and Amazon customers as reviewers of The Inheritance of Loss’, in: Language and Literature, 25 (3), 2016, 254–278.

Baßler, M. ‘Der Neue Midcult. Vom Wandel populärer Leseschaften als Herausforderung der Kritik’, in: POP 10 (1), 2021, 132-149.

Baßler, M., & Drügh, H. J. Gegenwartsästhetik. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2021.

Bogaert, X. ‘ICH WÜRDE AM LIEBSTEN MIT DER JURY DISKUTIEREN! #TDDL’. Der Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis: ein Vergleich zwischen der Jury- und Laienkritik auf Twitter. University of Ghent, 2017. [Master’s Dissertation]

Bousquet, L. ‘Readers’ Participation, Hierarchy and Authority: Creation Value on Social Reading Platforms’. Universiteit van Münster: SHARP Conference, 2021.

Chong, P. K. Inside the Critics’ Circle. Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

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.

Dekker, E. & de Jong, M. ‘What Do Book Awards Signal? An Analysis of Book Awards in Three Countries’, in: Empirical Studies of the Arts 36 (1), 2018, 3–21.

Dorleijn, G.J., De Geest, D. & Rymenants, K. Kritiek in crisistijd: Literaire kritiek in Nederland en Vlaanderen tijdens de jaren dertig. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2009.

Franzen, Johannes. ‘Everyone’s a Critic: Rezensieren in Zeiten Des Ästhetischen Plebiszit’. Unterstellte Leseschaften: Tagung, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, 29. Bis 30. September 2020, June 2021. duepublico2.uni-due.de, https://doi.org/10.37189/duepublico/74186.

Gerk, A., ‘Sigrid Löffler über Amateure vs. Profis: Machen Blogger die Literaturkritik kaputt?’, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 16.07.2020 [Februari 2022], https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/sigrid-loeffler-ueber-amateure-vs-profis-machen-blogger-die-100.html.

Graf, G. ‘Social Reading und Literaturkritik’, in: Stefan Krankenhagen, S. & Roselt, J. (red.) De-/Professionalisierung in den Künsten und Medien. Berlijn: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2018, 57–74.

Graf, G., et al. ‘Rez@ Kultur. Digitalisierung von Rezensionsprozessen in Literatur und Bildender Kunst als Bestandteil Kultureller Bildungsprozesse’, in: Jörissen, B., Kröner, S. & Unterberg, L. (red.) Forschung zur Digitalisierung in der Kulturellen Bildung. München: kopaed, 2019, 185-199.

Herrmann, B. & Messerli, T. ‘Metaphors we read by: Finding metaphorical conceptualizations of reading in web 2.0 book reviews’. Universiteit van Ottawa: International Conference DH2020, 2020.

Herrmann, B. & Messerli, T. ‘Where’s Your Attention? An Empirical Assessment of Web 2.0 Users’ Literary Values’. Universiteit van Bielefeld: International DH Conference 2019, 2019.

Herrmann, B. & Messerli, T. ‘hungere schon nach dem nächsten Band. Eine Untersuchung von Metaphern für Leseerfahrungen in Web 2.0 Literaturrezensionen‘. Universiteit van Paderborn: 7. Jahrestagung ‚Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum‘ (DhD), 2020.

Herrmann, B., et al. ‘Cultures of E/Valuation on the Social Web. A Very Short Introduction to the Special Issue’, in: Journal of Cultural Analytics, 7 (2), 2022, 1–3.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York university press, 2006.

Kai, W., Xiaojuan, L. & Yutong, H. ‘Exploring Goodreads reviews for book impact assessment’, in: Journal of Informetrics 13 (3), 2019, pp. 874-886.

Kellermann, H. & Mehling, G. ‘Laienrezensionen auf amazon.de im Spannungsfeld zwischen Alltagskommunikation und professioneller Literaturkritik’, in: Bartl, A. & Behmer, M. (red.) Die Rezension. Aktuelle Tendenzen der Literaturkritik. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neuman, 2017, 173-202.

Kellermann, H. & Rehfeldt, M. ‘Wie bewerten Laienrezensenten? Ausgewählte Ergebnisse einer inhaltsanalytischen Studie, in: Neuhaus, S. & Schaffers, U. (red.) Was wir lesen sollen: Kanon und literarische Wertung am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016, 229-238.

Kempke, K., Vöcklinghaus, L. & Zeh, M. Institutsprosa: Literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf akademischen Schreibschulen. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2019.

Kousha, K., Thelwall, M. & Abdoli, M. ‘Goodreads Reviews to Assess the Wider Impacts of Books’, in: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68 (8), 2017, 2004-2016.

Kraxenberger, M. & Lauer, L. ‘Wreading on Online Literature Platforms’, in: Written Communication, 39 (3), 2022, 462–496.

Lauer, G. Lesen im digitalen Zeitalter. Darmstadt : wbg Academic, 2020.

Löffler, S. ‘Danke, kein Bedarf? Wie die totgesagte Literaturkritik ihr Ableben überleben kann’, in:  Stimmen der Zeit 235 (12), 2017, 805–814.

Messerli, T., et al. ‘How Lovely Is Your Book? A Computational Study of Literary Evaluation on a German Social Reading Platform’. Universiteit van Basel: Digital Practices. Reading, Writing and Evaluation on the Web2020 Conference, 2020.

Petzold, K. ‘Critical Princess. Formen diskursiver und performativer Geschlechtlichkeit in deutschsprachigen Buch-Blogs’, in: Pohl, P.C. & Schuchter, V. (red.) Das Geschlecht der Kritik: Studien zur Gegenwartsliteratur. München : edition text + kritik, 2021, 159–176.

Petzold, K. ‚Buch-BloggerInnen. Kritische Rezeptionsprozesse in digitalen LeserInnengemeinschaften‘, in: Moser, D. & Dürr, C. (red.) Über Bücher reden: Literaturrezeption in Lesegemeinschaften. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2021, 199-216.

Pianzola, F., et al. ‘Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins’, in: PloS one 15 (1), 2020, 1–46.

Rebora, S., et al. ‘Digital Humanities and Digital Social Reading’, in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 36 (2), 2021, ii230–ii250.

Schneider, U. ‘Bücher zeigen und Leseatmosphären inszenieren. vom Habitus enthusiastischer Leserinnen und Leser’, in: Martus, S. & Spoerhase, C. (red.) Gelesene Literatur: Populäre Lektüre im Zeichen des Medienwandels. München: edition text + kritik, 2018, 123-123.

Thelwall, M. & Kousha, K. ‘Goodreads: A Social Network Site for Book Readers’, in: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68 (4), 2017, 972–983.

[1] Translation: “visible emancipation of the audience, which emerges with increasing volume on social media, on blogs and in the comment sections of newspapers”

“So much for literary democracy”: Journalistic Capital and the The Influence and Reception of Scandal Surrounding Literary Prizes on Social Media

Literary prizes, increasingly topic of research (e.g Moser 2004, English 2009, Leinen 2010, Ducas 2013, Röhricht 2016, Sapiro 2016, Auguscik 2017, Childress et al. 2017, Kennedy-Karpat and Sandberg 2017, Rahmann 2017, Mosely 2019), function as traditional literary gatekeepers and are responsible for the institutionalised consecration of literary texts. Contemplating Bourdieu’s field of cultural production (1983) literary prizes are frequently discussed in terms of economic and symbolic capital, but they can also bestow visibility. James English thus proposes journalistic capital, which may accelerate the accumulation of symbolic capital (2002, p. 115) and represents “the marketability of the award and its winners” (Squires 2013, p. 293).

Scandal is hardly unusual (English 2002, p. 113), though valuable, established and prestigious prizes (e.g. Booker Prize) are generally able to weather public opinion. But what challenge does bad publicity pose for a prize which relies almost exclusively on journalistic capital? As a case study, I shall examine the 2012 edition of the Not The Booker Prize (NTBP), when the behaviour and back-room negotiations of a contender scandalised organisers and audience alike. The NTBP was created by left-wing The Guardian in 2009 as a democratic literary counter-prize. Officially, winners receive nothing but a “Guardian”-mug. Although relatively low in both symbolic and economic capital, because the newspaper is able to use its own platform, the prize generates a lot of media attention and therefore predominantly awards journalistic capital. Besides nominating and voting in the newspaper’s comment section, the audience also discusses the prize on Twitter. Within this context, I aim to study the figure of the layperson critic as an additional literary gatekeeper on social media platforms. For this, I will analyse the tweets created in the immediate wake of the scandal to gain insight into the content of the user-generated literary criticism.

 

Bibliography:

Auguscik, Anna. Prizing Debate: The Fourth Decade of the Booker Prize and the Contemporary Novel in the UK. Transcript, 2017.

Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed’. Poetics, vol. 12, no. 4, 1983, pp. 311–56.

Childress, Clayton, et al. “Publishers, Authors, and Texts: The Process of Cultural Consecration in Prize Evaluation.” Poetics, vol. 60, Feb. 2017, pp. 48–61.

Ducas, Sylvie. La littérature à quel(s) prix? Histoire des prix littéraires. La Découverte, 2013.

English, James F. “Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art.” New Literary History, vol. 33, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 109–135.

English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Kennedy-Karpat, Colleen, and Eric Sandberg. Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2017.

Leinen, Angela. Wie man den Bachmannpreis gewinnt. Gebrauchsanweisung zum Lesen und Schreiben. Heyne, 2010.

Moseley, Merritt. ‘How the Booker Prize Won the Prize’. American, British and Canadian Studies, vol. 33, Dec. 2019, pp. 206–21.

Moser, Doris. Der Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis. Börse, Show, Event. Böhlau Verlag, 2004.

Pickford, Susan. “The Booker Prize and the Prix Goncourt. A Case Study of Award-Winning Novels in Translation.” Book History, vol. 14, 2011, pp. 221–240.

Rahmann, Kathrin. Von der Wirkung zur Wertung. Formal-ästhetische Werte in den Diskussionen des Ingeborg-Bachmann-Wettbewerbs 1999-2009. 2017. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, PhD dissertation.

Röhricht, Karin. Wettlesen um den Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis. Korpusanalyse der Anthologie Klagenfurter Texte (1977-2011). Studienverlag, 2016.

Sapiro, Gisèle. “The Metamorphosis of Modes of Consecration in the Literary Field: Academies, Literary Prizes, Festivals.” Poetics, vol. 59, Dec. 2016, pp. 5–19.

Squires, Claire. ‘Literary Prizes and Awards’. A Companion to Creative Writing, edited by Graeme Harper, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2013, pp. 291–303.

Large Language Models in the Humanities: magic shortcut or just beating about the bots? #nocode #alldata

Following up on our earlier contributions on doing Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment Quadruple Extraction, in this talk, we aim to weigh some of the tried and trusted methods of doing NLP against the new kid on the block, namely LLM (Large Language Models) trained for various purposes and languages. Few-shot and zero-shot approaches may seem adventurous, and they indeed may not live up to the state-of-the-art achieved with regard to our specific use-case, i.e. aspect-based sentiment analyses (ABSA) in specific domains such as laptops and restaurants. But what if e.g. your target vocabulary is out of domain (OOD) by principle? What if your data is largely unstructured full-text? Compared to the time-consuming task of generating annotations, using GPT-3 turns out to yield surprisingly good results for a variety of tasks like NER and ABSA. We will show how to “escape” the chatbox and feed data in bulk to the model. We aim to discuss whether this is a viable solution, especially for the aspiring DH researcher with limited programming skills, limited GPU access, and/or without persistent support from teams dedicated to humanities-style qualitative research questions. We will present some of the tasks that have become possible over the course of conducting our study of multilingual sentiment in a specific multimodal setting, such as: automatic transcription of oral sources, alignment of oral and written data, speaker diarization, automatic generation of training data with annotations, etc. We will illustrate the major advantages of API-based solutions for classification, such as the small amount of training data needed to fine-tune the model, and the ease of access. All in all, this type of modular pipeline is a less prohibitive pathway for aspiring researchers, compared to setting up a demanding and complicated environment that is typically required in traditional NLP methods. In addition, allowing people to “chat with your data” will inevitably become a new way of disseminating research results in a non-directive way, also in domains where access to the actual artefacts might be marred by copyright. This workshop is not about presenting results or final conclusions, but aims to provide an opportunity to discuss what some consider to be a watershed moment, while others remain sceptical.

For more information on the symposium and the participants, please consult the symposium website.

Abstract: “Scandal sells books”: An Analysis of the Reception and Perception of Scandals Surrounding Literary Prizes on Social Media

Due to their role as traditional gatekeepers in the field of literary criticism, literary prizes are responsible for the institutionalised consecration of literary texts. They are increasingly topic of research (e.g Moser 2004, English 2005, Leinen 2010, Ducas 2013, Röhricht 2016, Sapiro 2016, Auguscik 2017, Childress et al. 2017, Kennedy-Karpat and Sandberg 2017, Rahmann 2017). The general discourse surrounding prizes, however, tends to be negative (cf. English 2005, p. 187) and they are frequently subject of scandals. Nevertheless, scandal is “the instrument par excellence of symbolic action” (Bourdieu p. 84) and English argues that “scandal […] is constitutive of prizes” (English 2002, p. 113). Scandal is consequently inherent to literary prizes.

In this presentation, I shall examine two scandals surrounding the Booker Prize and the Not the Booker Prize, respectively. The Booker Prize is no stranger to scandal, in fact its success relies on it (English 2002, p. 113) and Drabble states that the prize “has failed in its task of stimulating public interest” if it is not subjected to “bitter controversy and scandal” (p. 250). The case study in question is the 2013 scandal concerning the expanded nomination criteria, which allow any novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland to qualify. Although its counter-prize is hardly as well-known and despite its goal to challenge the Booker Prize’s obscure nomination and judging practices, the Not the Booker has also known controversy. I shall take a closer look at the 2012 edition and the scandal pertaining to Ewan Morrison’s leaked e-mail, in which he lied about the competition and criticized the voting system, his refusal to withdraw, as well as the reactions of the organisers. Within this context, I thus aim to study the emerging and evolving figure of the layperson critic as an additional literary gatekeeper on social media platforms. For this, I will analyse the tweets that were created in the immediate wake of these scandals in order to gain insight into the content of the user-generated literary criticism created by new layperson gatekeepers regarding traditional gatekeepers.

Bibliography:

Auguscik, Anna. Prizing Debate: The Fourth Decade of the Booker Prize and the Contemporary Novel in the UK. Transcript, 2017.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Hans Haacke. Free Exchange. Polity Press, 1995.

Childress, Clayton, et al. “Publishers, Authors, and Texts: The Process of Cultural Consecration in Prize Evaluation.” Poetics, vol. 60, Feb. 2017, pp. 48–61.

Drabble, Margaret. “Pleasure and Prestige. A Writer Reflects on the Prize System.” British Book News, April 1989, pp. 250-251.

Ducas, Sylvie. La littérature à quel(s) prix? Histoire des prix littéraires. La Découverte, 2013.

English, James F. “Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art.” New Literary History, vol. 33, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 109–135.

English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Kennedy-Karpat, Colleen, and Eric Sandberg. Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2017.

Leinen, Angela. Wie man den Bachmannpreis gewinnt. Gebrauchsanweisung zum Lesen und Schreiben. Heyne, 2010.

Moser, Doris. Der Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis. Börse, Show, Event. Böhlau Verlag, 2004.

Pickford, Susan. “The Booker Prize and the Prix Goncourt. A Case Study of Award-Winning Novels in Translation.” Book History, vol. 14, 2011, pp. 221–240.

Rahmann, Kathrin. Von der Wirkung zur Wertung. Formal-ästhetische Werte in den Diskussionen des Ingeborg-Bachmann-Wettbewerbs 1999-2009. 2017. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, PhD dissertation.

Röhricht, Karin. Wettlesen um den Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis. Korpusanalyse der Anthologie Klagenfurter Texte (1977-2011). Studienverlag, 2016.

Sapiro, Gisèle. “The Metamorphosis of Modes of Consecration in the Literary Field: Academies, Literary Prizes, Festivals.” Poetics, vol. 59, Dec. 2016, pp. 5–19.