Abstract
In an attempt to replicate the results of a previous study on absorption in English-language online book reviews across language areas, this paper presents the development of an annotated metadata corpus of German-language book reviews from the website Goodreads and German-language annotation guidelines to tag online book reviews for mentions of story world absorption during reading. Both the dataset and the annotation tool are stored on Open Science Framework. The corpus does not include the full review texts, due to copyright and privacy law restrictions. It does include the segments of each review that have been annotated, the annotation category, the title and author of the book that is reviewed, the star rating, the genre of the book reviewed, the length of the review in characters and tokens, and the on- and offset of the annotation. The accompanying annotation guidelines describe, in German, the tag set that was used to annotate this corpus, which was first translated from the English annotation guidelines and then adapted to accommodate certain idiosyncrasies of the German language in general, as well as specific expressions used in our corpus. We also added examples for each of the annotation categories from our corpus to illustrate what absorption looks like when described by readers in German.