Abstract
Online book discussion is a popular activity on weblogs, specialized book discussion sites, booksellers’ sites and elsewhere. These discussions are important for research into literary reception and should be made and kept accessible for researchers. This article asks what an archive of online book discussion should and could look like, and how we could describe such an archive in terms of some of the central concepts of textual scholarship: work, document, text, transcription and variant. What could an approach along the lines of textual scholarship mean for such a collection? If such a collection holds many pieces of information that would not usually be considered text (such as demographic information about contributors), could we still call such a collection an edition, and could we call editing the activity of preparing such a collection?The article introduces some of the relevant (Dutch-language) sites, and summarizes their properties (among others: they are dynamic and vulnerable, they contain structured data and are very large) from the perspective of creating a research collection. It discusses the interpretation of some essential terms of textual studies in this context, and briefly lists a number of components that a digital edition of these sites might or should contain. It argues that such a collection is the result of scholarly work and should not be considered as 'just' a web archive.
Highlights
Online book discussion is a popular activity on many social media sites: on weblogs, in Facebook groups, in forums, on specialized book discussion sites such as Goodreads and, P
Online book discussion is a popular activity on weblogs, specialized book discussion sites, booksellers’ sites and elsewhere
What could an approach along the lines of textual scholarship mean for such a collection? If such a collection holds many pieces of information that would not usually be considered text, could we still call such a collection an edition, and could we call editing the activity of preparing such a collection?The article introduces some of the relevant (Dutch-language) sites, and summarizes their properties from the perspective of creating a research collection
Summary
Online book discussion is a popular activity on many social media sites: on weblogs, in Facebook groups, in forums, on specialized book discussion sites such as Goodreads and,. The discussion is based on experiences gained in the creation of an archive of Dutch online book discussions (Boot 2017), a collection that holds 870,000 items of book response downloaded from a number of different sites into a single database. I will give an interpretation of some essential terms of textual studies in this context, and I will briefly list a number of components that a digital edition of these sites might or should contain. This will prepare us for a discussion of the wider issues raised above
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have