Dept. of ACS,. University of Birmingham
Edgbaston Park Road
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK
comments: Hi Smailholm Women's Reading Group,
We are a small not-for-profit Project at the University of Birmingham that
researches reading culture:
Beyond the Book: Mass Reading Events and Contemporary Cultures of Reading
in the UK, USA and Canada is a three-year interdisciplinary research
project funded primarily by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC).
Our main objectives are to determine why and how people come together to
share reading through a comparative study of selected mass reading events
such as Canada Reads, Richard and Judy's Book Club, and One Book, One
Community programmes, including, but not limited to, One Book, One
Chicago and Liverpool Reads.
In January we will be beginning our fieldwork on Richard & Judy's winter
read in the UK. A large part of our research is done through online
questionnaires, and we have found that the best way to get readers to fill
out our questionnaire is placing links on reading and Book group related
websites. We were wondering if you might be able to help us by placing a
link to our website on your website? Please let me know if you would be
able help us with this, we would be most grateful for any assistance you
could offer.
We hope that the results of our research will be useful to readers,
reading groups, librarians and practitioners in reader development, and
will be publishing our findings regularly through our website. I have
included some further information on the project below, or you could check
out our website at:
Beyond the Book Project
Please send me an email if you think you can help us out.
Kind regards,
Anna Burrells (Burrealz@adf.bham.ac.uk)
Project Administrator - Beyond the Book Project
The mass reading event is a new, proliferating literary phenomenon. Events
typically focus on a work of literary fiction and employ the mass media as
a means of promoting participation in the themed activities and
discussions that take place around the selected book. Beyond the Book
uses research methodologies drawn from both the humanities and social
sciences to investigate whether mass reading events attract new readers
and marginalized communities. We also wish to determine whether this
contemporary version of shared reading fosters new reading practices and
even whether it is capable of initiating social change.
Our research will result in a trans-national analysis of contemporary
shared
