Dr. Sarah Copland, a 2025 Chancellor’s Research Chair, uses Goodreads and Amazon book reviews to understand the bigger picture of how narratives might change us and the world around us. 

Dr. Copland, who views books as conversations between authors and readers, is a narrative theorist. 

“I’ve long known that stories move me emotionally – that they challenge me ethically and cognitively,” she told Kelsie Johnson, host of the Office of Research Services’ Research Recast(ed) podcast, on a recent episode. “But getting involved in narrative theory was a way to formalize what I already felt instinctively about reading.” 

Narrative theory, Copland explains, is concerned with how and why stories are constructed the way they are, and how and why we respond to them the way that we do. 

“They persuade us, they move us, they inform us about things,” she says. 

And as a narrative theorist, she’s not just interested in the opinions of expert readers, who are the focus of so much literary theory and criticism. 

It makes sense, then, that she would move into the realm of regular readers. Where better to find them, in our digital world, than in online reviews from sites as common and easy to access as Goodreads and Amazon?

With the help of student researchers, the team is looking for commonalities among reviews, particularly those pertaining to controversial works. 

“We always go in with no agenda. We’re just looking for patterns in the way that readers are responding to this particular text…often asking ‘what does the average person reading this book at home think?’” 

Those patterns, she explains, can tie what's going on within the texts to the broader media reception of them. The former is what she calls the text’s internal ethics. 

“Whenever people talk about the ethics of storytelling, they often talk about who is telling the story and whether that is appropriate – whether they have the right to tell a story about this material,” she says.

Text-internal ethics, she explains, looks at the way the characters interact with each other, the way that the narrator relates to the characters and tells us this story, the way the author depicts the narrator and the characters and then, ultimately, the positions the reader is invited into in relation to all these other positions.

One pattern she found was in the reviews for the novel Blonde Roots, which presents the slave trade in a world where “whyte Europans” are enslaved by “blak Aphrikans.” (These spellings are part of the author’s deliberately indirect reference to our world.)

“We found evidence that readers believe the narrative altered their beliefs about the transatlantic slave trade. And they recognized that it has a legacy that continues even to this day – in the form of structural racism.” 

This, she says, is belief modification. And it’s something you can learn more about by listening to the full podcast episode. 

MacEwan’s “Research Recast(ed)” is a knowledge mobilization podcast created by the Office of Research Services and the Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications.