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

TLDR: The authors examined the dynamics of a collaborative tagging system and learned how its users refine and redefine literary genres through a computational reading of the online book reviewing community LibraryThing and found that users make sense of genre through a variety of values and expectations, many of which fall outside common definitions and understandings of genre.

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.