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Qidian-Webnovel Corpus: A Dataset of Chinese Web Novels with Multilingual Reader Response Cover

Qidian-Webnovel Corpus: A Dataset of Chinese Web Novels with Multilingual Reader Response

By: Ze Yu,  Federico Pianzola and  Emin Tatar  
Open Access
|Dec 2025

Abstract

This dataset comprises reader comments and metadata from 110 Chinese web novels and their English translations, collected from Qidian.com and Webnovel.com. It includes 2,791,837 Chinese comments (Qidian) and 237,958 English comments (Webnovel), user profiles, and story metadata (Timestamp 2024-09-01). Comments and replies have location information that is linked to each paragraph of the novel (e.g. paragraph-level comments). Webnovel additionally provides book-level and chapter-level comments. This dataset can support research in computational humanities, cross-cultural reader response studies, digital social reading and translation impact assessments, e.g. the comparative analysis of cross-cultural reader engagement on digital reading platforms.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.368 | Journal eISSN: 2059-481X
Language: English
Submitted on: Aug 4, 2025
Accepted on: Oct 23, 2025
Published on: Dec 12, 2025
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2025 Ze Yu, Federico Pianzola, Emin Tatar, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.