A Study on Turkish Books in Wattpad Platform using Tags and Popularity Rankings

Abstract

Wattpad platform has reached a significant number of users in Turkey as well as in the world. Therefore, books written in Turkish on Wattpad are essential reference sources for researchers to determine the transformation and development of Turkish and popular literature in the digital environment. The tags are keywords assigned by the author and contain valuable information about the general characteristics of a book. The browse categories when sorted by hot listing option, give a popularity ranking of a category at the current time. Tags enable the readers to discover the book more easily and provides the book to be ranked on top of the popularity rankings. In this study, from the tags that are obtained from the top 10 books of popularity rankings of a 13-year-old user profile, it is aimed to analyze the subjects of interest of adolescent readers, their choices and the quality of the Turkish books that appeal to them. The tags are classified and it was determined that the most used tags among the classified groups were related to the genre of the story, the subject of the story, and the K-pop culture, respectively. This shows the effect of K-pop culture in Turkish books on Wattpad. It is also seen that words related to kinship and affinity names, professions and occupational names, media and social media communication tools, mature themes, venues, supernatural, and mythological elements, Watty Awards, gender and age, religions, personal, physical and age characteristics of protagonists, and reign are used as tags.