"Like a Real Friendship": Translation, Coherence, and Convergence of Information Values in LibraryThing and Goodreads

This paper presents findings on the roles that two digital libraries and virtual book club communities, LibraryThing and Goodreads, play in the existing and emergent communities of their users. Informed by social informatics and sociotechnical theory and research, it improves our understanding of the phenomenon of information value and how shared information values are translated, cohered, and converged as users interact. LibraryThing and Goodreads play significant roles, but perfect coherence and convergence is not necessary in most cases; understanding differences and being willing to negotiate and translate around them allowed for continued use of the sites and for continued community existence and emergence. Translation was a significant factor in allowing common ground and social ties to be established, leading to greater information and knowledge sharing. Similar to maintaining “a real friendship,” these processes are often invisible work, but serve as significant factors in the sociotechnical infrastructure of LibraryThing and Goodreads.ye

Information informing design: Information Science research with implications for the design of digital information environments

This debut curated ‘virtual special issue’ of JASIST is on the theme of ‘information informing design.’ It comprises several excellent scholarly research articles previously published in JASIST with important implications for the design of digital information environments. It covers articles that motivate the need for Information Science research to inform design and those that have empirically examined information-related concepts such as information behavior, practices, interaction and experience and, based on their findings, proposed recommendations or posed questions for design. This article argues that as JASIST exists at the intersection between information, systems and users, it is natural to want to understand how people engage with information to inform design and, by doing so, Information Science research can build bridges between Information Science and computing disciplines and make contributions that transcend its discipline boundaries. It argues that Information Science research not only has the potential, but also the duty to inform the design of future digital information environments

Bookish Identities: How the Online Reading Community Empowers the Self

The pervasiveness and increasing usage of digital technologies and information communication technologies (ICTs) influences not only how we view the world around us, but how we view ourselves. We are plugged in to an incessant stream of information and networked to other informational entities – or inforgs (Floridi, 2010) – and in order to find our place in the vast landscape of the Web, we bring to it elements of our identities and settle amongst others whom we share, or want to share, traits with. In pockets across various social media platforms, the online reading community occupies a space where readers produce, disseminate, discuss, evaluate, and organise information, and are empowered to be in control of information regarding their identities and their shared – and at times conflicting – interests. This essay will examine how these modern forms of publishing and subsequent information behaviour provide ways to explore and express identity. Firstly, this essay will briefly examine how reading and social media as a broad concept connects to questions of identity; then it will consider three topics where the online reading community empowers the self: collaborative production, information source evaluation, and knowledge organisation

Especificidades lingüísticas de las reseñas de lectores: literatura, discurso y emoción en los comentarios de Goodreads

Internet has transformed literary criticism. The books reviews written by professionals and published in the cultural press have been supplemented by a new, more complex, system of criticism. As an empirical study on literary reception, this research addresses one of the spaces in which new reading practices are being practiced: the Goodreads website and, in particular, the reviews from readers. Using a corpus that combines reviews on Goodreads and reviews in tradicional cultural press, this research analyze the ways in which the emotions provoked by reading are discursivized. This will allow us to find discursive differences between the linguistic resources that readers employ in their reviews, on the one hand, and the ones that are used in book reviews, on the other. Specifically, we will examine (i) how emotional information is conveyed (through psychological sentences), (ii) the relationship between reader and autor/work, and (iii) the intimate reading experience.Internet ha transformado el panorama general de las reseñas literarias. Las reseñas escritas por profesionales y publicadas en la prensa cultural han sido complementadas por un sistema de crítica nuevo, más complejo. A modo de estudio empírico sobre la recepción literaria, este trabajo aborda una de las instancias en que se está ejerciendo una práctica lectora que complementa y amplía el reseñismo de corte tradicional: la plataforma online Goodreads y, en particular, los comentarios de los lectores. A partir de un corpus de comentarios en Goodreads y de reseñas en prensa cultural, analizamos los modos en que se discursivizan las emociones que suscita la lectura. Eso permitirá establecer diferencias discursivas en los recursos que ponen en marcha los comentarios literarios de los lectores, de un lado, y la reseñas tradicionales, del otro. En concreto, examinamos el modo como se formulan (i) las informaciones de tipo emocional (mediante predicados psicológicos), (ii) la relación entre lector y autor/obra, y (iii) la experiencia íntima de lectura

Translating national identity: the translation and reception of Catalan literature into English

This thesis examines reader responses to Catalan identity through the reception of two Catalan novels in translation: Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal and For a Sack of Bones by Lluís- Anton Baulenas. Drawing on theories from Descriptive Translation Studies and cultural and sociological approaches to translation, it examines how representations of Catalan culture and identity are subject to influence from different agents at each stage of the translation and reception process. The thesis explores three areas: the role of translation within Catalan culture in the promotion of Catalan identity; the way in which this role is relevant to the translation process itself within the target culture; and finally whether the objectives of this role are achieved within the target market. This study offers a new approach to the study of the reader within Translation Studies, using blogs, online reviews and reading groups in order to gain access to real reader responses to translated literature and offers a methodology by which the study of the representation of culture through translation may be explored. The results of this study have relevance not only to translation research and practice, but also to translation policy, particularly for minority cultures

Partners in Practice: Contemporary Irish Literature, World Literature and Digital Humanities

This dissertation examines the opportunities and implications afforded Irish literary studies by developments in the newly emergent disciplines of world literature and the digital humanities. Employing the world literature theories of Wai Chee Dimock, David Damrosch, Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova in the critical analysis of works of contemporary Irish literature and Irish literary criticism produced in the period 1998-2010, it investigates how these theoretical approaches can generate new perspectives on Irish literature and argues that the real “problem” of world literature as it relates to Irish literary studies lies in establishing an interpretive method which enables considerations of the national within a global framework. This problem serves as the entry point to the engagement with the digital humanities presented throughout the dissertation. Situated within debates surrounding modes of “close” and “distant reading” (Moretti 2000) as they are played out in both the fields of world literature and digital literary studies, this work proposes an alternative digital humanities approach to the study of world literature to the modes of “distant reading” endorsed by literary critic, Franco Moretti and digital humanists such as Alan Liu (Liu 2012). Through a series of interdisciplinary case studies combining national and international, close and distant and old and new modes of literary scholarship, it argues that, rather than being opposed to a nationally-orientated form of literary criticism, the digital humanities have the tools and the methodologies necessary to bring Irish literary scholarship into a productive dialogue with perspectives from elsewhere and thus, to engender a form of Irish literary scholarship that transcends while not denying the significance of the nation state. By illustrating the manner in which the digital humanities can be employed to enhance and extend traditional approaches in Irish literary studies, this project demonstrates that Irish studies and the digital humanities can be “practicing partners” in a way that serves to advance work in both the fields of world literature and digital literary studies

The E-Writing Experiences of Literary Authors

The e-writing experience is new and not yet fully understood and there is a story to be told about the enigmatic term e-writing and its impact on authors in the e-paradigm. In this study I collected understandings of e-writing by exploring the experiences of literary authors through qualitative case studies. I set out to find answers amidst two interconnected plots of inquiry. The first plot examined e language, in particular the term e-writing, and asked how authors understand the term e-writing and how their experiences contributed to that meaning. The second storyline asked how the digital revolution and resulting e-culture changed their work, writing practices, and conception of themselves as authors. Eight authors participated in this study. The first author was interviewed in a pilot study and seven authors participated in the subsequent main study. Data was collected using semi- structured interviews that were recorded and transcribed, lists compiled of the authors’ works that included information about publication methods, and screenshots of the authors’ online presence such as social media participation and personal websites. Data was analyzed simultaneously with collection and the result is a narrative text describing the e-writing experiences of literary authors. Unraveling the enigma of e-writing was a task complicated by its own conclusions. The findings of this study emerged as the story progressed and climaxed in the understanding that e-writing as a term is not used or understood by authors beyond the general context they derived from the prefix e. Therefore, the e-writing experiences of literary authors can be more accurately described as a writing experience influenced by or situated in e-culture. These experiences revealed current authorship as being in an era of transition, where new media, new relationships between readers and authors, and new forays into virtual community are changing the work of authors, but also where residual print culture has a stronghold on our understandings and practices

Translating and literary agenting Anna Holmwood’s Legends of the Condor Heroes

The role of literary agents in translation is intriguing yet under-researched. The mechanism of literary agenting vis-à-vis the initiation, production, and promotion of translated literature is under-explored. How literary agenting affects translation epistemologically, aesthetically, and technically remains uncharted territory. This dissertation attempts to fill the gap by investigating how Anna Holmwood, a translator-cum-literary agent, conceives and conducts the English translation of Shediao Yingxiong Zhuan (“射雕英雄傳”), a wuxia (武俠) magnum opus by Jin Yong (金庸). It first employs an NVivo-based theme analysis to unearth how the translation has been received and perceived by general readers. Next, it develops the notion of professional habitus based on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Capitalizing on first-hand materials such as email exchanges, speech transcriptions, interview records, agent reports, and unpublished essays, it then examines how Holmwood’s professional habitus as a literary agent empowers her to act as the initiator (as demonstrated in translation selection, contract-signing, and pitching), coordinator (as demonstrated in designating co-translators, and establishing and strengthening connections between various actors), and promoter (as demonstrated in coining the tagline “A Chinese Lord of the Rings”) of the translation project, and recounts the process in which this translation comes into being. Next, it conducts a textual analysis of the first two volumes of the translated book with various corpus tools (AntConc, L2SCA, MAT, etc.), showing how Holmwood’s literary agent identity shapes her approach to wuxia translation, and demonstrating her “fingerprints” on the “tone”, “pitch”, and “pace” of the translated texts. It is revealed that Holmwood’s translation is distinct from previous translations of Jin Yong’s novels on multiple linguistic levels, and that her translation style is imprinted on the translation by Gigi Chang, the co-translator. Finally, Holmwood has appropriated such cinematic techniques as undercranking, fast cutting, zoom in shot, and extreme long shot in her translation, making it reminiscent of Tsui Hark’s wuxia films. Thanks largely to her literary agenting experience, Holmwood produces a reader-oriented translation that is readable, dynamic, and fast-paced, and projects Jin Yong wuxia as entertaining, individualistic, apolitical, multicultural, and cosmopolitan. This mixed-method study not only refreshes our understanding of literary agenting of translation, but also contributes to the research methodology of translation reception and translation style