Description
We started searching for a large amount of artifacts: movies, songs and books. In a second moment we decided to concentrate on books, as other results were not relevant for our research. Reading a book require time and interest in the topic treated, giving the reader detailed information about one defined theme. We opted for a generic query in order to get more results from the last year.
Defectors and civilian social issues are the most popular topics for english written books, readers seem to enjoy stories about defectors personal life, life condition in North Korea and in prison camps. Those two kind of books can be really specific and detailed, narrating escapes, tortures and other kind of issues.
When we observe the Chinese situation we can see how the situation change: a big part of the books talk about society and culture - they can be recipe books or history books - defectors stories are absolutely marginal, but still we see how civilian social issues detain an important role inside the cultural production.
Protocol
We started our research with a narrowed query “North Korean defectors”, but as we did not retrieved enough results we returned tour first broad query “North Korea”. We discarded time, giving priority to the ranking score. We scraped the results creating a dataset containing ranking, title, link, author, average rating (decided by users), numbers of reviews, year of publication, edition and topic. We considered the first 100 results, manually retrieving the abstract of every book. We cleaned the dataset from non relevant results.
Data
Timestamp: 11/2016 - 11/2017
Data source: Goodreads, Books
Download data (42KB)
Two datasets, one for China and one for english written publications.