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Tags, Borders, and Catalogs: Social Re-Working of Genre on LibraryThing

Published:22 April 2021Publication History
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Abstract

Through a computational reading of the online book reviewing community LibraryThing, we examine the dynamics of a collaborative tagging system and learn how its users refine and redefine literary genres. LibraryThing tags are overlapping and multi-dimensional, created in a shared space by thousands of users, including readers, bookstore owners, and librarians. A common understanding of genre is that it relates to the content of books, but this resource allows us to view genre as an intersection of user communities and reader values and interests. We explore different methods of computational genre measurement within the open space of user-created tags. We measure overlap between books, tags, and users, and we also measure the homogeneity of communities associated with genre tags and correlate this homogeneity with reviewing behavior.Finally, by analyzing the text of reviews, we identify the thematic signatures of genres on LibraryThing, revealing similarities and differences between them. These measurements are intended to elucidate the genre conceptions of the users, not, as in prior work, to normalize the tags or enforce a hierarchy. We find that LibraryThing users make sense of genre through a variety of values and expectations, many of which fall outside common definitions and understandings of genre.

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        cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
        Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 5, Issue CSCW1
        CSCW
        April 2021
        5016 pages
        EISSN:2573-0142
        DOI:10.1145/3460939
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        Copyright © 2021 ACM

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        • Published: 22 April 2021
        Published in pacmhci Volume 5, Issue CSCW1

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