Digital Humanities 2023 Reception History in Many Dimensions: New Research on Book Reviews Lavin, Matthew lavinm@denison.edu Denison University, United States of America Walsh, Melanie melwalsh@uw.edu University of Washington, United States of America Antoniak, Maria antoniakmaria@gmail.com Cornell University, United States of America Hu, Yuerong yuerong2@illinois.edu University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States of America Underwood, Ted tunder@illinois.edu University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States of America Bishop, David davidrb3@illinois.edu University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States of America Senatorova, Liza es28@illinois.edu University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States of America Shang, Wenyi wenyis3@illinois.edu University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States of America Overview The meaning of a literary work is not located only between its covers. Scholars from Janice Radway to Yung-Hsing Wu ack- nowledge that readers reshape meaning as texts circulate through different social contexts. However, most digital humanities work has focused on literary texts as independent objects, leaving other aspects of literary history mostly unmapped. We don’t yet have databases of reception history to match our extensive corpora of literary texts, nor are there equivalent collaborative networks in place to support such infrastructures. The organizers of this panel have been working to address this gap by establishing a community of scholars with a commitment to reception history and constructing digital archives that record the responses of journalistic reviewers and so-called “everyday readers” from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. This panel gathers scholars from a wide range of disciplines, united by interest in book reviews and online reading communities. All four papers aim to show how evidence about readers’ responses to texts can show multiple perspectives of literary history, with a focus on 20th century and later contexts. This collection of papers will therefore engage with both digital humanities and reception studies, which includes but is not limited to reader response theory and histories of reading and reception. In “Modeling ‘worth by association’ in U.S. book reviews, 1905-1925,” Matthew Lavin explores the multi-dimensional de- scriptive space reviewers create in categorizing books. He analy- zes a sample of book reviews published in the United States pe- riodicals between 1905 and 1925, to consider how categorization schemas have changed over time. Three groups of features emerge as particularly important—characterizing genre, medium, and aes- thetic judgment. Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak argue that the recent ex- pansion of digital humanities research to online reading commu- nities has created new opportunities and necessities for collabo- ration with research traditions in information science, such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported co- operative work (CSCW). They will present key findings from their own interdisciplinary research—such as new ways of understan- ding genre based on user-driven, free-form tagging systems—and demonstrate how a synthesis of information science and digital humanities perspectives can enhance our understanding of online reading communities and other online cultural phenomena. Their paper is titled “Readers as Online Communities: Synthesizing Per- spectives From Information Science and the Digital Humanities.” Existing computational readership studies mostly focus on An- glophone books and their online reviews in English. This not only limits the range of books studied; it blinds us to cross-cultural dif- ferences in readers’ responses even to those books. To address this blind spot, Yuerong Hu collects book reputation and popularity data from two largely distinct online reader communities (by pri- mary language and geological location of the users) and analyzes their similarities and divergence. Her submission is titled “Cross- Cultural Comparisons of the Popular and Classic Books Curated by users on Goodreads vs. Douban.” In “Was the avant-garde really ahead of its time?” Yuerong Hu, David Bishop, Liza Senatorova, Wenyi Shang, and Ted Under- wood ask how the distribution of attention in book reviews is re- lated to actual patterns of change in literary history. Do widely-re- viewed (or positively-reviewed) books predict the future of their genre? If so, which dimensions of reception are most predictive, and which kinds of periodicals have been most prescient in their reviewing choices? Individual Abstracts Modeling "Worth by Association" in U.S. Book Reviews, 1905-1925 Matthew Lavin This presentation builds on and responds to previous cultural analytics work on book reviews to further our collective under- standing of how people, institutions, and other non-human actors 1