Beth Driscoll

Sentiment analysis and the literary festival audience

Literary festivals create and celebrate cultural communities that rely, in part, on emotional engagement from audiences. Emotion can be expressed in textual forms, including on social media and in surveys, and these responses illuminate the ways in which attendees attach to and participate in the festivals cultural community. This article uses sentiment analysis and close reading in a case study investigating 20,189 tweets and 921 survey responses from the 2013 Melbourne Writers Festival. I find that 38% of these responses express positive emotion while 20% express negative emotion, and that the expressed emotion tends to be moderate (somewhat positive or negative) rather than strong. This analysis is complemented by close reading of the most strongly emotive tweets and survey responses, which suggests that they relate to the audiences sense of connection with presenters. These new approaches to studying audience engagement show the significance of emotion for the contemporary literary festival and its link to perceived intimacy between writers and readers.

Local places and cultural distinction: The booktown model:

The international development of booktowns during the late 20th and early 21st centuries has facilitated the accumulation of cultural capital for small towns by mobilizing the prestige of books as cultural objects. This article investigates the booktown phenomenon through a case study of Clunes, a village in regional Australia that has been designated as a booktown since 2007. The Bourdieusian approach of the article investigates cultural intermediaries and audiences at booktown, drawing on interviews and analysis of annual reports. These suggest two key findings. First, while Clunes Booktown participates in a range of regional, national and international networks, these work to focus attention strongly at the local level of the village. Second, the booktown designation relies upon and sometimes shores up the association of books with cultural distinction. Findings also suggest that the peripheral setting of Clunes may offset some of the exclusivity of book culture, as the attractions of the village and its non-book-related activities enable different forms of participation and potentially open up literary culture to a broader public.

Readers of Popular Fiction and Emotion Online

One of the striking features of popular fiction is that at least part of its readership can be identified as fans: deeply knowledgeable and passionately engaged with a book, author or genre, and active participants in the non-academic reception of these cultural products. In his book Popular Fiction: Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, Ken Gelder writes that popular fiction ‘often enjoys a particular kind of reader loyalty, one that can build itself around not just a writer and his or her body of work (which certainly happens) but the entire genre and the culture that imbues it. In other words, popular fiction has fans’ (2004, p. 81). Fan studies have historically recognized ‘textual productivity’ (Fiske 1992)—the creation of zines, newsletters, websites and so on—as a hallmark of engagement; more recently, the opportunities for such activity have been multiplied by the interactive digital spaces of Web 2.0 (Booth 2010; Hills 2013; Jenkins et al. 2013). Review sections on Goodreads and Amazon, book clubs on Twitter, networks of book blogs and comment threads on news articles all provide spaces where readers can write responses to popular fiction. This chapter begins with the position that a reader who creates a textual response to a book, author or genre is a fan, while remaining interested in the way in which different kinds of textual responses can reflect varying levels of investment.

Using Harry Potter to teach literacy: different approaches

The ubiquity of the Harry Potter phenomenon offers an opportunity to examine the different ways educators use popular books to teach reading. This study analyses a number of journal articles that address the Harry Potter novels as tools for the classroom. These articles show a great diversity of approaches. Government testing of discrete, assessable skills can dominate contemporary discussions of literacy, and the Harry Potter books are sometimes used to address these targets. Other educators use Harry Potter to teach children about multimedia technologies. Most often, educators who embrace the Harry Potter novels affirm the value of reading for pleasure. This view often also promotes reading as a route to the critical literacy goal of social inclusion and the psychological development of the child. Taken together, these uses of Harry Potter present a confused picture, with no clear agreement on what good reading is or how it should be taught.

Faraway, So Close: Seeing the Intimacy in Goodreads Reviews

Book reviews written by readers and published on digital sites such as Goodreads are a new force in contemporary book culture. This article uses feminist standpoint theory to investigate the language used in Goodreads reviews to better understand how these reviewers articulate intimate reading experiences. A total of 692 reviews of seven bestselling fiction and nonfiction books are analyzed by two methods. The first, thematic content analysis, involves close reading of the reviews. The second, sentiment analysis, is an automated “distant reading” process. These methods prompt us, as researchers, to reflect on the way they foster or inhibit a sense of proximity to readers, even as they reveal predominant features of Goodreads reviews. Together, the methods reveal that 86.1% of Goodreads reviews describe a reading experience, and 68% specifically mention an emotional reaction to the book, with the emotion most intense in reviews of fiction. Reviews also create social connections by mentioning other readers, authors, characters, and people from the reviewer’s life. Through their emotional language and sociality, Goodreads reviews present distinctive, intimate reading practices, constituting a new cultural phenomenon, and a unique opportunity for investigation.

The publishing ecosystems of contemporary australian genre fiction

Abstract The cultural and commercial operations of the publishing industry have been dramatically reshaped by digital technologies, yet little is known about how these effects are differentiated across sectors of the industry. This article analyses data about the production of Australian-authored fantasy, romance and crime fiction titles to explore the specific publishing ecosystems of different genres and the roles played by multinational, small press and self-publishing in each. First, we show that there has been across-the-board growth in each genre and for each type of publisher. Second, we argue that multinational publishing activity in these genres has been characterized by broad stability, punctuated by experimentation with genre-specific imprints for romance and fantasy titles. Third, we find that small presses make diverse contributions to genre ecosystems, able to both activate prestige and experiment with formats. Finally, we note the immense growth in self-publishing, particularly in romance, and argue that self-publishing now operates in tandem with traditional publishing to create hybridized publishing ecosystems - with greater potential to transform the traditional publishing model than e-books.

Middlebrow and Nobrow

Chapter 4, Beth Driscoll’s “Middlebrow and Nobrow: Tracing Patterns Across Culture” sets the stage for the analysis of nobrow by way of its kissing cousin—middlebrow. Where middlebrow operates in a cultural space between the elites and the masses, nobrow is a different kind of animal altogether. How different? We take a behind-the-scenes look at literary prizes on the way to a couple of murder investigations, a love-struck geneticist, and a backyard barbeque gone horribly wrong—all in the name of illuminating the junction where the elites and the masses intersect, as they do more often than many highbrows care to admit.

Publishing in Australia: National interests in a transnational age

This article introduces a collection of essays arising from the Small Press Network’s Independent Publishing Conference, an event that brings together publishing professionals from Australia and academics working in the nascent discipline of publishing studies. These essays address the role of small publishers within the globalized publishing industry. Australian small presses enjoy considerable success both culturally and financially, but also encounter structural disadvantages – such as geographical distance and competition from corporations based in larger nations – that are not necessarily dismantled by the digitization of book culture. Yet, as some of the essays highlight, independent Australian publishers have embraced the new digital, global context to overcome their limitations of size and reach, particularly in the area of marketing, interactive relationships, and design. Other essays suggest the resistance small publishers can present to new global orders, whether it be the stalwart resistance of little magazines to a homogeneous public discourse or the work of publishers who provide a platform for voices that are otherwise marginalized or silenced. The collection reveals an independent Australian publishing sector that is nimble, experimental, community minded, and merits the close attention of both scholars and the broader publishing industry.

Book Clubs, Oprah, Women and the Middlebrow

The book club is a paradigmatic instance of the new literary middlebrow, and a popular target of disdain across twenty-first century culture. A biting example of critique comes in an early scene of Desperate Housewives, a camp blockbuster TV comedy that won multiple awards and gathered a global audience of millions. Centred on the turbulent lives of four residents of Wisteria Lane and archly narrated by their dead neighbour, Mary Alice, the show juxtaposed dark melodrama with a glossy facade. Marc Cherry’s script gleefully inhabited suburban cliches from competitive lawn growing to spying from behind curtains, and in one brief scene in Season 1, he skewers the book club. This scene open with a close-up of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary on a dark wooden table, next to a platter of biscuits and a glass of red wine. Mary Alice’s voiceover announces, ‘When I was alive, my friends and I came together once a month for the meeting of the Wisteria Lane Book Club’, and the camera pans to an interior shot of five women: three seated around a dining table, one perched on a window sill, and one pushing a pram around the room. The room is warmly lit by lamps and decorated with heavy curtains, oil paintings and large floral arrangements.

Harry Potter and the Middlebrow Pedagogies of Teachers and Reviewers

Pottermania consumed the world at the turn of the twenty-first century. J. K. Rowling’s series of seven books about the young wizard Harry Potter, which began in 1996 with the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was one of the fastest and highest selling series in global publishing history. The launch of each new novel was a major worldwide event, counted down by the media and celebrated with midnight parties at bookshops. The novels spawned a series of eight movie adaptations, the last of which was released in 2011, as well as Harry Potter websites, videogames, Lego sets, action figures, Coca Cola cans and an amusement park. Harry Potter’s success led to widespread piracy in China, a landmark copyright case in the United States, and a sub-plot in the Hollywood movie The Devil Wears Prada. Pottermania was the first major collaboration between the world of publishing and the networked systems of twenty-first century globalized capitalism. The question for this chapter is how Pottermania intersects with the new literary middlebrow.