As part of my audience response research, I study Kindle Popular Highlights to understand how readers engage with contemporary genre fiction. These highlights—aggregated by Amazon from Kindle users—offer a glimpse into moments that move readers, not just individually but collectively. In this way, they serve as a form of digital marginalia, offering insight into the social dimensions of reading.
Recent studies show that digital reading does not fundamentally differ from print in terms of comprehension or affect. Just as importantly, e-reading invites new forms of interaction. As readers highlight, annotate, and tag, they’re not only engaging with the text but also shaping memory, emotion, and attention. Whether marking a favorite sentence, capturing a mood, or tracking their reading, these digital annotations reflect intention and introspection—actions that impact the reading experience and often become part of a shared social practice, particularly on platforms like Goodreads.
Drawing on my research into reader engagement and genre studies, I examine Kindle Popular Highlights as a form of collective reader response, focusing first on a distinctive subgenre of detective fiction that features neurodivergent—often autistic-coded—protagonists with exceptional cognitive abilities. What’s striking across this body of work is that readers are not primarily drawn to plot twists or clues. Instead, they highlight passages depicting character’s non-normative cognitive experiences, such as vivid memory, sensory intensities, emotional detachment, or internal compartmentalization. This suggests that readers are drawn more strongly to depictions of neuro-behavioral differences than simply the process of solving mysteries. This analysis is part of a larger digital humanities project—and a forthcoming manuscript. I am now expanding this work to a dataset of over 300+ e-books, with a comparative focus on the Romance and Mystery genres. The goal is to explore how genre shapes what readers consider meaningful and emotionally resonant. Ultimately, these collective digital traces illuminate shared engagement and meaning-making patterns, offering new insights into readers’ emotional and cognitive interactions with fiction.
Soohyun Cho, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor, Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts & Humanities
Affiliated Faculty, Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition Lab
Affiliated Faculty, Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement