The end of deep reading is a commonplace in public debates, whenever societies talk about youth, books, and the digital age. In contrast to this, we show for the first time and in detail, how intensively young readers write and comment literary texts at an unprecedented scale. We present several analyses of how fiction is transmitted through the social reading platform Wattpad, one of the largest platforms for user-generated stories, including novels, fanfiction, humour, classics, and poetry. By mixed quantitative and qualitative methods and scalable reading we scrutinise texts and comments on Wattpad, what themes are preferred in 13 languages, what role does genre play for readers behaviour, and what kind of emotional engagement is prevalent when young readers share stories. Our results point out the rise of a global reading culture in youth reading besides national preferences for certain topics and genres, patterns of reading engagement, aesthetic values and social interaction. When reading Teen Fiction social-bonding (affective interaction) is prevalent, when reading Classics social-cognitive interaction (collective intelligence) is prevalent. An educational outcome suggests that readers who engage in Teen Fiction learn to read Classics and to judge books not only in direct emotional response to character's behaviour, but focusing more on contextualised interpretation of the text.

Prominent among the social developments that the web 2.0 has facilitated is digital social reading (DSR): on many platforms there are functionalities for creating book reviews, 'inline' commenting on book texts, online story writing (often in the form of fanfiction), informal book discussions, book vlogs, and more. In this article we argue that DSR offers unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, the impact of reading and literary communication. We also claim that in this context computational tools are especially relevant, making DSR a field particularly suitable for the application of Digital Humanities methods. We draw up an initial categorization of research aspects of DSR and briefly examine literature for each category. We distinguish between studies on DSR that use it as a lens to study wider processes of literary exchange as opposed to studies for which the DSR culture is a phenomenon interesting in its own right. Via seven examples of DSR research we discuss the chosen approaches and their connection to research questions in literary studies.

During World War I (WWI), between 1916 and 1917, Robert Musil was the chief editor of the Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung in Bozen. This activity probably also involved authorship of articles and has posed a philological problem to scholars, who have not been able to attribute with certainty a range of relatively short texts to Musil. With this article, we present a new approach that combines philological research with stylometric methods. Exploration of WWI archives and digitization of historical documents were paired with application of authorship attribution techniques, following extensive evaluation. To build the training set, we adapted the ‘impostors method’ by grouping three ‘distractor authors’ (similar to Musil in terms of style) and three actual candidates for authorship. In the test set, we developed two designs for tackling the issue of text length: a combinatory design, where longer chunks were composed by the juxtaposition of short texts; a simplified design, where the texts for attribution were merged with already attributed texts. Results of our experiment suggest that Musil attribution may be disproved with a high level of confidence for ten texts that were more probably written by a less well-known author, Albert Ritter. We carried out a keyness analysis on the specific words preferred or avoided by the two authors, which not only corroborated the results of the quantitative analysis but also findings from Musil philology. Our study showcases the potentialities of using mixed methods in stylometry.