From Review to Genre to Novel and Back. An Attempt to Relate Reader Impact to Phenomena of Novel Text

We are interested in the textual features that correlate with the re- ported impact by readers of novels. We operationalize impact measurement through a rule-based reading impact model and apply it to 634,614 reader reviews mined from seven review platforms. We compute co-occurrences of impact-related terms and their keyness for genres represented in the corpus. The corpus consists of the full text of 18,885 books from which we derived topic models. The topics we find correlate strongly with genre, and we get strong indicators for which key impact terms are connected to which genre. These key impact terms give us a first evidence-based insight into genre-related readers’ motivations.