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The authors’ goal is to investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres, which enables acquiring insights into communication strategies adopted by readers to share their reading experiences.

The authors propose a corpus-based study focused on the analysis of A Good Review, a novel corpus of online book reviews written in Italian, posted on Amazon and Goodreads, and covering six literary fiction genres. The authors rely on stylometric analysis to explore the linguistic properties and lexicon of reviews and the authors conducted automatic classification experiments using multiple approaches and feature configurations to predict either the review's platform or the literary genre.

The analysis of user-generated reviews demonstrates that language is a quite variable dimension across reading platforms, but not as much across book genres. The classification experiments revealed that features modelling the syntactic structure of the sentence are reliable proxies for discerning Amazon and Goodreads reviews, whereas lexical information showed a higher predictive role for automatically discriminating the genre.

The high availability of cultural products makes information services necessary to help users navigate these resources and acquire information from unstructured data. This study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics of user-generated book reviews, which can support the development of linguistically-informed recommendation services. Additionally, the authors release a novel corpus of online book reviews meant to support the reproducibility and advancements of the research.

This paper is an encounter between an artist creating characters for video games and an academic studying how people and things are being financialized. Exchanging about the appearance of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies – technologies associated with Web3 in the video game industry, the academic, and the artist reflect on the place of playfulness, creation, and finance in our society. They observe that most North American and European players resisted NFTs and cryptocurrencies, while more Asian-Pacific ones embraced the latter. They conclude that those reactions were explained by the fact that gamers perceived cryptocurrencies and NFTs as institutional objects associated with a financial logic, whose presence threatened the gaming logic. As pragmatic friends, they nevertheless issued an NFT with this paper, a “Crow Queen.” Time will tell if the Web3 society will praise this new form of digital joint academic/art production.

Children's film and fiction often portray a witch as either an evil hag or an incompetent older woman yet when the male witch is within the narrative, he is named Sorcerer or Wizard, suggesting therefore that (unlike the hag) age and gender is not a factor when performing witchcraft. Moreover, the male witch identity is introduced from the position of empowerment and competency rather than prejudice. Witch identities are gendered, and the male witch is underappreciated and overlooked by the historical identity of the female witch.

This chapter analyses how the male witch is presented in selected children's film and fiction through the frameworks of Hegemonic, Hybrid, and Mosaic Masculinity. Hegemonic Masculinity demonstrates the toxic performance of the male witch, indicating to readers and audiences that to be male and a witch, a heterosexual man must be cruel and manipulative. Hybrid Masculinities relate to some patriarchal behaviours such as violent outbursts, that also blend with more empathetic and emotional behaviours. Mosaic Masculinity presents the male witch in a way that is fluid and disrupts the binary of Hegemonic and Hybrid Masculinity.

This chapter acknowledges the absence of presence of the male witch and encourages a more authentic representation of the male witch that is akin to those who practice witchcraft. There are non-toxic examples of masculinity that challenge the potential for stereotyping, hence there is a need for a better representation of what it means to be a witch within popular culture.

The purpose of this study is to examine how young people imagine civic futures through speculative fiction writing about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The authors argue that young people’s speculative fiction writing about AI not only helps make visible the ways they imagine the impacts of emerging technologies and the modes of collective action available for leveraging, resisting or countering them but also the frictions and fissures between the two.

This practitioner research study used data from student artifacts (speculative fiction stories, prewriting and relevant unit work) as well as classroom fieldnotes. The authors used inductive coding to identify emergent patterns in the ways young people wrote about AI and civics, as well as deductive coding using digital civic ecologies framework.

The findings of this study spotlight both the breadth of intractable civic concerns that young people associate with AI, as well as the limitations of the civic frameworks for imagining political interventions to these challenges. Importantly, they also indicate that the process of speculative writing itself can help reconcile this disjuncture by opening space to dwell in, rather than resolve, the tensions between “the speculative” and the “civic.”

Teachers might use speculative fiction writing and the digital civic ecologies framework to support students in critically examining possible AI futures and effective civic actions within them.

Speculative fiction writing offers an avenue for students to analyze the growing civic concerns posed by emerging platform technologies like AI.

Tabletop ‘pen and paper’ role-play games (TTRPGs) can function as spaces of creative experimentation with gender identity through shared storytelling. The last decade has seen an explosion of Actual Play (AP) shows that broadcast recorded gameplay of TTRPGs to online audiences. Neverafter is the 15th season of well-known AP show Dimension 20 and is a horror-themed re-imagining of classic fairy tales through the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. Four of the six player characters are male, based individually on the fairy tales of Pinocchio, Puss in Boots, the Frog Prince, and a (gender-swapped) Mother Goose, adventuring together in a story-world called ‘The Neverafter’. Not only are these versions of the fairy tale characters shaped by the players' own explorations of identity, but as an AP show, this is also layered with the expectations produced by the show's wide fan base. Their diverse gender explorations and their subversion of fairy tale conventions are enabled by the fluency of the players and audience in freely flowing between the framing perspectives of player and character. This chapter will focus on non-binary player Ally Beardsley's creation and performance of Mother Timothy Goose as a gay, elderly, human man as a particularly meaningful case study. This analysis considers how heroic masculinity is reconceptualised in Neverafter through the horror-themed embodiment of fairy tale men in the context of contemporary gender issues.

The goal of the study is to underline “Cinematic Architecture” as another source of architectural thinking and research. This study is also a response to the shortage in empirical research on architecture in the cinema. Moreover, the study introduces the architectural components that qualify the cinematic spaces to be influential cinematic experience. This is in addition to investigating the impact of these components on the viewers' cognitive and emotional experience of films.

In the reported study, an empirical experiment examined scenes from three different movies as experienced by a selected group of audience of movies fans (architects and laypersons). The audience was asked to report feelings the audience had about each scene using a questionnaire that was designed for this purpose, and the audience was asked to write down the aspects that affected the audience's emotions. The experiment evaluated selected emotional states and could specify the architectural features and/or objects that significantly contributed in inducing these emotions.

This study's findings concluded that emotions, which exist in the positive margin of the emotions “circumplex model,” were influenced by architectural components that were different from those that influenced emotions which lie in the negative margin of the model.

As for filmmakers, the study contributes in developing filmmakers' knowledge about the role of architecture in scenic creation and thus how that knowledge enhances filmmakers' film narrative and the narrative's spatial imagery. As for academia, this study contributes in developing the knowledge about film cognition as related to architectural semiotics. In the context of behavioral approach to architectural design, a behavior setting which is the basic element in environmental design can be dramatized by applying a cinematic narrative to a human activity system within a milieu of architectural design elements.

This study is important for architects, as the study provides architects with an alternative tool for fictional experience and for testing architectural ideas through cinematic architecture. This study also helps in developing new venues for the practice of architecture into the world of fiction. This study also contributes in developing the trend that architectural design thinking can learn from cinematic thinking and practice.

This study introduces an empirical approach to evaluate architectural entities as part of cinematic experience. This study also comes as a response to the shortage in empirical research on architecture in the cinema.

Counter-hedonic entertainment, characterized by evoking negative emotions in consumers, has emerged as one of the most popular and profitable forms of entertainment in Western countries. However, this entertainment type is not as popular in China as in Western countries. This study examines whether the free trial of counter-hedonic entertainment can promote the consumption of such entertainment and explores the moderating effect of contextual factors on this relationship.

This study investigates the promotional effectiveness of the free trial strategy on counter-hedonic entertainment through a quasi-experiment involving the broadcasting of a large-scale free counter-hedonic program. This study has analyzed the counter-hedonic consumption data from 31 major cities in China and employed econometric modeling to test the hypotheses.

Results show that the free trial of counter-hedonic entertainment can promote the sales of entertainment with similar categories. The follow-up moderation analyses show that the positive effect is amplified on days with less sunlight and for consumers with abundant (vs scarce) financial resources, thereby providing evidence to support the underlying drivers of the positive effect – the need for arousal and confidence frame. Meanwhile, the free trial of counter-hedonic entertainment also has a long-term effect after airing.

Based on existing research on consumers’ counter-hedonic consumption motivation, this study confirms the effectiveness and boundary conditions of the free trial strategy in promoting counter-hedonic entertainment consumption for the first time. The results also offer actionable insights for counter-hedonic entertainment marketers and practitioners.