The READ-IT project team are delighted to announce the launch of the Dutch version of our chatbot. The chatbot asks you a series of five different prompt questions, to encourage you to share your thoughts and responses about your reading habits, tastes and preferences. It is available via a web browser, as well as the…

The Reader in the Book: Books, Reading and Libraries in Fiction, a conference hosted by the Institute of English Studies, will take place on 18, 19, 25 and 26 March 2021. It is not hard to find fiction within fiction. Don Quixote modelled himself on chivalric romances, and became in turn a model for other…

The UK team members Francesca Benatti and Alessio Antonini are organizing the workshop “Transmedia Beyond Definitions” to bootstrap a cross-disciplinary discussion on the emerging practices of cross-media reading and authoring. The CfP is open for a number of contributions ranging from research papers, vision papers to flash talks. The submission deadline is February 5th 2021,…

The UK Reading Experience Database (UK-RED) is a pioneering project collecting reading experiences, for over 20 years. On 4 January 2021, the UK team of READ-IT released a new version of the UK-RED data including a documented ontology and mappings with the READ-IT Reading Experience Ontology and Crowdsourcing Experience Ontology and the CIDOC-CRM implementation of…

The READ-IT team were pleased to host the event ‘Reading in the Pandemic’, on 18 November, for the Being Human Festival. We enjoyed a great turnout for the online event, which took the form of three distinct parts. The recordings for each part are now available to view on the SAS Youtube channel, simply click…

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…

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…

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’…