Social indexing at skoob: the description of the book ‘Sophie’s world’ from tags and reviews

Abstract

Introduction: Skoob is a Brazilian social network based on the exchange of information of books and magazines, which allows the user, or skoobers, to insert of tags for organizing their personal bookshelves, as well as the sharing of public resources description. The analysis of the labeling of literary books is an indicative of the behavior of readers across the social activity index.

Objective: To explore the social indexing done at Skoob, in order to examine the concepts used in tags, comparing them to the concepts present in reviews written by readers.

Metodology: The book selected was ‘Sophie's World: a novel about the history of philosophy’ by Jostein Gaarder. First of all, we raised the discrepancy of the most popular tags assigned to the book. Then, through the content analysis with qualitative approach, we analyzed 30 reviews in order to raise the concepts in critical appreciation from readers. Finally, a comparison was made between the concepts of tags and reviews.

Results: There was a variance between the tags that doesn’t refer to the number (singular or plural). The concepts raised in the reviews were grouped into three categories: a) Subject, b) Textual Genre, and c) Value Judgments. The concepts presented in the tags and the book reviews generally were different.

Conclusion: It was possible, by analysing the reviews, to deep the understanding of some concepts found in the tags. However, among the concepts cited in the reviews only philosophy and mystery were present in the most of the popular tags.