What are you reading: A big data analysis of online literary content

Abstract

The combination of Internet and literature gives rise to the online literature, which is sharply distinct from traditional literature. Online literary content has become an important and active Internet resource and has now been formalized into a large and rapidly growing industry. Despite the great success of online literature platforms, little is known about the structure of literary content and patterns and characteristics in the creation and consumption of online literary content. In this paper, we conducted a deep analysis of online literary content on leading online literature platforms based on the real big data. From the crawled data, we obtained a set of interesting results, which describes the content-related and writing-related characteristics of online literature content. Our analysis results will shed light on the current status of online literary content and reveal some interesting research topics.