Mining Goodreads for User (Reader) Feedback

Emily Garrett, Matt Baker, and Suzy Mills

Customer and user feedback is essential for businesses and organizations to thrive, including those within the publishing industry. The growth of the internet and social media outlets has enabled average readers to give their opinions on books and other printed material more than ever before. Sites enable readers to give quantitative feedback, such as star ratings or thumbs up, as well as qualitative feedback in the form of reviews. Researchers have concluded that quantitative metrics from social outlets should be considered by booksellers, libraries, publishers, and authors alike (Kousha, 2017). Further, a study found that qualitative book reviews affect purchasing decisions on BarnesAndNoble.com and Amazon.com and that “consumers actually read and respond to written reviews, not merely the average star ranking summary statistic provided” (Chevalier, 2006). Consumers thus appear to use not only the quantitative metrics to guide purchasing decisions but also the substantive commentary that reviewers supply. Consequently, an in-depth look at what the average reader is saying about a book or genre could have lasting impacts on what authors, editors, publishers, and librarians consider when they are developing content and collections to further the profitability of their companies and organizations. However, no thorough research has been conducted on the qualitative feedback that customers are providing in their reviews. Thus, this study analyzes qualitative reader feedback on self-help books to assess what is most important to readers of these books. This study analyzes a mix of high- and low-rated Goodreads reviews for self-help books. After content analyzing a sample of readers’ reviews, we report relationships between the qualitative contents of the reviews and the quantitative high and low ratings of the books. Results can inform authors, editors, and publishers regarding what customers value in self-help books and can inform future research about feedback on other genres.

Making Social Listening Rhetorical: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Audience Measurement & Data Analysis

Katlynne Davis

Social listening has emerged as an important concept guiding professional communicators’ analyses of audience social media data. McKee and Porter (2017) connect social listening to Ratcliffe’s discussion of rhetorical listening, writing that social listening is an “active, engaged, and attentive effort to understand what others are saying, with an overall attitude of respect, and with an openness to change” (p. 120). Yet professional social media communicators consistently emphasize social listening’s connections to data analytics, and in turn, the interpretive practices that inform data analysis. Social listening involves “the process of collecting data from social platforms” as well as looking “beyond the numbers” to take action and respond to audience data (Boyd, 2017; Newberry, 2018).

However, despite social listening’s inherent connections to data analysis, the rhetorical practices that inform social media data interpretation remain unclear. In this presentation, I draw connections to literature from media studies and information and technology studies to argue that social listening is fundamentally rhetorical in that it is guided by interpretive practices rather than solely by objective data -- professional communicators construct their audiences through interpretation of social media data. I urge technical and professional communication (TPC) scholars and practitioners to further explore the internal strategies that inform social media data analyses in order to emphasize ethical and less reductive conceptions of audience.

As a field, TPC is well-positioned to examine the rhetorical processes that professional communicators engage in via social listening data analyses. Yet most of this research is focused on how organizations present themselves to external audiences through employee social media use, through crafting a corporate ethos, and through interactions with customers on social media (Weber, 2014; Shin, Pang, & Kim, 2015; Berry 2018). Though this research is undoubtedly valuable for understanding professional social media communication, it neglects the internal interpretive practices professional communicators engage in prior to circulating external social media messages, including data analysis. Frith (2016) argues that discourses involving data emphasize the perceived objectivity of data analysis, obscuring the roles that interpretation and communication play (p. 169; 174). Technical communicators, Frith claims, are not only well-prepared to inquire into positivist assumptions about data, they should do so in order to underscore the importance of technical communication to data work.

Research from other disciplines is necessary in helping to articulate the rhetorical work of social media data interpretation that is often left invisible. In particular, I explore the work of Herbst (1993) on the history of opinion polling to highlight how institutional forces that have historically governed audience measurement privilege concerns for efficiency and power. Additionally, I draw from media scholars (Miller, 1994; Barnes & Thompson, 1994) who analyze the role of audience measurement in constructing audience. Recent work from information and technology scholars also foregrounds the epistemological claims of objectivity associated with data analytics (Beer, 2018; Portmess & Tower, 2015; Van Dijck, 2013). Together, these interdisciplinary perspectives can assist TPC scholars and practitioners by making the rhetorical nature of social media data analysis visible, and by opening up spaces for ethical social listening applications.

Distasteful Images: Food Porn and the Visual Construction of Desire

Melanie McNaughton

The “pornification” of everyday life has nearly become a cliche. Public discourses attach “porn” to a range of descriptors for visual engagement with daily life. One of the most popular in this current trend is food porn. Instagram, the digital hub of visual life, features nearly 200 million images tagged as food porn. In this presentation of work-in-progress, I explore the label of pornography as it is applied to food photography, paying particular attention to the food photography of Martha Stewart. Stewart pioneered the modern day trend of photographing food as still life in her 1984 book Entertaining. The trouble with naming a practice as pornographic, is that the term brings a great deal of cultural baggage.

Pornography is not meant to be challenging, forceful, or a way to encounter the other. Pornography is a means to an end: not entry into relationship, but opportunity for egocentric pleasure. In the words of James Deen, perhaps the most well-known porn star today (see profiles by ABC’s ”Nightline,” GQ, and Rolling Stone): “Porn has the singular purpose to sexually arouse, and once that’s achieved the product is discarded. Porn is like Coca-Cola: when it’s finished, you go out and buy another one” (Arena Homme +, A/W 2012-2013, p.111). As pornography, food photographs function not as aesthetic tributes to quality of life or visual engagement, but as dirty images designed for serial obsolescence.