The READ-IT UK technical team have published an ontology for describing the READ-IT crowdsourcing of reading experiences on GitHub. This new ontology is used to describe the data collected through the READ-IT postcard campaigns, the upcoming READ-IT chatbot for telegram and manuscripts and other sources collected through the contribution platform. The use of the Crowdsourcing Evidences ontology…

We’re pleased to announce the Release of the Experience & Observation (E&O). E&O is an ontology design pattern for describing the research case studies on experience. The E&O addresses the relations between sources of activities (e.g. reading) and the creation of observations of experience (i.e. sources of testimonies of experience), such as diaries, letters, marginalia…

The Open University researchers Alessio Antonini and Francesca Benatti have had a paper accepted to the 13th international conference on interactive digital storytelling, ICDIS 2020, taking place on the 3-5 November, in Bournemouth (UK). The paper is interested in webcomic experience, technology and lifecycle, and non-diegetic interactions occurring all around the production and experience of content….

On 15th July 2020, a paper by Open University researchers Alessio Antonini, Francesca Benatti and Sally Blackburn-Daniels was awarded the Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award at the 31stACM International Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT’20), held virtually at the University of Central Florida. Their paper was entitled On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2and…

The paper ‘Mediation as Calibration: A Framework for Evaluating the Author/Reader Relation’ tackles one the key findings of the modelling of the reading experience: the centrality of media in the author-reader interactions. The paper is the result of an intense collaboration between Alessio Antonini (READ-IT) and Sam Brooker (University of Richmond), and focuses on defining…

READ-IT project members Alessio Antonini and Francesca Benatti, and Sally Blackburn-Daniels of the Holographic Lee project, in collaboration with the Holographic Vernon Lee project, have produced the paper ‘On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2’. Promoted by HOBAR events at Senate House, London, the paper bridges the perspective of scholarly editions and authorial technologies by…

READ-IT are excited to announce that the IRISA team (Rennes, France) participated in the HIPE (Identifying Historical People, Places and other Entities) challenge. HIPE is a named entity processing evaluation campaign on historical newspapers in French, German and English, organised in the context of the impresso project and run as a CLEF 2020 Evaluation Lab. The IRISA team were runners up in ‘Named Entity Recognition and Classification…

Dr Berit Janssen (pictured left) and Mr Jelte van Boheemen (pictured right), both based in the Digital Humanities Lab, Utrecht University, have joined the READ-IT team as developers, working under Netherlands PI for the project, José de Kruif. Berit and Jelte replace Alex Hebing, who is leaving for a new post elsewhere. We would like…

What have we been reading during the current COVID-19 pandemic? How has the quarantine changed the way we read? And how have books (and reading) become even more important to us at this time? READ-IT UK PI Dr Shafquat Towheed together with his Open University colleague Dr Edmund King have started a ‘Reading and Wellbeing’…

Dr Maya Parmar (The Open University) has returned from maternity leave to resume her work supporting dissemination for public engagement and impact on the READ-IT project. She will be working part-time (1 day per week until 31.05.2020; 1.5 days per week from 01.06.2020). Dr Parmar has widespread experience of supporting public engagement in previous projects…