Description
Who is writing about defectors? The majority of authors for english written publications are defectors themselves. Readers search for first hand testimonies of what is happening inside the country, despite a large number of reports made by journalist and professional writers, stories directly written by defectors have the highest scores and the better reviews. As we will see in the next question, books written by defectors have a strong emotional weight. If we compare this result with the Chinese dataset we immediately see how defectors stories are still marginal compared to reports about society and culture. South Korean journalists are an emerging category of authors in China, this could be linked to a cultural distance, but also to a some form of censorship that do not allow, in this cultural field, to have products that talk directly about defectors experience.
Protocol
After collecting books rating and authors informations, we started a comparison between those two variables. We ordered books following the rating, we selected the most rated books (from 100 ratings) and we manually researched for authors background: identity, country of origin, country of residence and profession.
Data
Timestamp: 11/2016 - 11/2017
Data source: Goodreads, Books
Download data (84KB)
Two datasets, one for China and one for english written publications, collecting different tones per each word.