The ChildPoeDE Corpus: 1082 German Children’s Poems for Computational and Experimental Studies on Poetry Reception

We introduce childPoeDE: the first corpus of German poetry for children comprising poems which are still read today and cover a wide range of topics and authors. ChildPoeDE contains poem texts and both poem-level and token-level metadata. Poem-level metadata includes information about the anthologies and authors, quantitative text features, rhyme and lexical richness. Token-level metadata covers word length, position and frequency, parts-of-speech, onomatopoeia and sonority. This corpus can be used for computational text analysis, but also as a source for stimulus material in experimental studies. The corpus metadata is freely accessible via Zenodo. The poem texts are protected by copyright

Leafing Through the Body. Bodily Involvement in Literary Reading.

In reading literary texts we use our feelings and our pre-knowledge of the world around us to comprehend what we read. Our feelings as well as our pre-knowledge of the world are tied to our body in the sense that by virtue of us having a body we understand what it is to experience certain feelings and through having a body we become aware of the world around us. The body thus plays an important role in the reading experience, since feelings and pre-knowledge are of the utmost importance if we want to involve ourselves in a literary text and try to make sense of it for ourselves. At the same time, through ‘involving’ ourselves, or absorbing ourselves in a literary text our awareness of our body can become diminished. Because of this ambiguity concerning the body’s role in the literary reading experience an empirical study has been carried out to find out more about it. In addition a literature study on the topics of embodied cognition, literary feelings and absorption has also been done, since these are the topics that underlie the main question of this thesis: ‘do the embodiment and the level of absorption of the reader play a role in the reading of literary texts and if so, in what respect?’ Since the empirical study proved that people high in absorption experience more bodily feelings, seemed to be more invested in story-content related aspects of the literary text and were more sensitive to characters and their emotions in the story-world, the outcome of the empirical study was connected to theories on mirror neurons. Our mirror neuron system helps us understand what other people think and feel by copying the neural processes involved in the actions that they perform. In addition empathy as a form of reader-involvement was, together with the broader concept of ‘theory of mind’, linked to these mirror neuron theories to develop a new framework of bodily involvement in literary reading, or at least a beginning towards such a framework, in which our mirror neurons help us understand what we read in literary texts not by mirroring what we read, but rather by simulating what we read. The body’s role becomes more clear through this framework, since our mirror neuron systems typically function in relation to our and other’s bodies, because they are fired when performing or watching somebody perform a certain action.

Bibliotherapy in the age of digitization

This contribution reviews both theoretical and empirical research on the effects of absorbed reading and bibliotherapy on subjective psychological well-being, paying special attention to the possible influence of digitization on this relationship. Reading on tablets, for example, could prove counter-productive for obtaining a state of absorption and thus modern-day tablet-readers may miss out on potential health benefits that absorbed reading of literature might provide. On the other hand, the connection that tablets provide to online reader communities and thus online bibliotherapeutic resources, might prove even more beneficial than obtaining a state of absorption during reading

Digital humanities and digital social reading

Rebora S, Boot P, Pianzola F, et al. Digital humanities and digital social reading. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 2021;36(Supplement_2):ii230-ii250.Prominent among the social developments that the web 2.0 has facilitated is digital social reading (DSR): on many platforms there are functionalities for creating book reviews, ‘inline’ commenting on book texts, online story writing (often in the form of fanfiction), informal book discussions, book vlogs, and more. In this article, we argue that DSR offers unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, the impact of reading and literary communication. We also claim that in this context computational tools are especially relevant, making DSR a field particularly suitable for the application of Digital Humanities methods. We draw up an initial categorization of research aspects of DSR and briefly examine literature for each category. We distinguish between studies on DSR that use it as a lens to study wider processes of literary exchange as opposed to studies for which the DSR culture is a phenomenon interesting in its own right. Via seven examples of DSR research, we discuss the chosen approaches and their connection to research questions in literary studies