Your Name and Title: Michelle Chen, Lecturer

Library, School, or Organization Name: School of Library and Information Science, San Jose State University

Co-Presenter Name(s): N/A

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: United States (San Jose, CA)

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Target Audience(s): Librarians, information professionals and library educators 

Short Session Description (one line): Trend Spotting through Word Clouds: The Effects of Online Book Club Discussions on Book Sales

Full Session Description (as long as you would like): In this session, we will discuss the power of online word of mouth from book lovers through an investigation of the effects of online book club discussions on book sales. In particular, we will conduct a trend spotting analysis on online book club discussions through word cloud visualizations. The word clouds created from online book club discussions are used to identify the opinions, sentiments, and interests expressed by online book club participants at a given point of time. We will then examine the relationship between the evolutions of word clouds and book popularity trends (e.g., Amazon book sales). The key research questions include: 1) Is there a relationship between online book club discussions and the actual book market? And if yes, 2) What are the underlying factors that make the positive or negative influence?