Measuring the Style of Italian Literary Criticism: A Comparison between Professional and Non-professional Book Reviews

The paper presents the results of a series of computational analyses applied to professional and nonprofessional book reviews in the Italian language. A corpus of texts from the aNobii platform and from La Domenica del Sole 24 Ore is processed with a stylometric approach (Cosine Delta distance), confirming how 50 most frequent words are more effective in distinguishing the two sources than the usage of a specialized lexicon of literary criticism. Deeper linguistic investigations verify which words are the most important in determining the distinction and how their usage differ in the two content platforms. A closer analysis through word co-occurrence and keyword in context closes the paper, highlighting the more evaluative and subjective language used in non-professional book reviews.