The Open University were pleased to host the most recent consortium meeting on the 20-21 October 2020. On 20 October, we focussed on individual reports from all colleagues on different work packages, presentation and discussion around technical developments, annotation campaigns, and public engagement. On 21 October, we had an exciting research day, where members of the consortium and…

We are delighted to announce that registration is now open for The Open University History of Books and Reading (HOBAR) online conference, ‘Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic’, 3-4 November 2020, which is supported by The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). The conference will be held online via…

The READ-IT team are pleased to host the event Reading in the Pandemic (18 November, 5-6pm, online) for the Being Human Festival. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything. Confined to our homes, many of us have turned to books and reading for reassurance, contemplation or escape. At this free, online and interactive event you will…

READ-IT UK team lead Dr Shafquat Towheed and his Open University colleague Dr Edmund King are co-running the annual History of Books and Reading seminar series at the Institute of English Studies, London. The 2020 series is on the theme of ‘Reading and Wellbeing’ and brings together speakers from a range of disciplines, including history,…

Members of the READ-IT team from The Open University will be presenting the READ-IT project, running an annotation workshop, and encouraging public contribution via our QR enabled postcards as part of ‘The Reader in the Book: Books, Reading and Libraries in Fiction’ conference at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London, 19-20…

Want to learn more about how to identify the evidences of reading in printed texts? Want to contribute your own thoughts and experiences of reading to our new European research project, READ-IT? If the answer is yes, or you are just curious to find out more, join us for this free READ-IT public engagement workshop…

  Edinburgh is famous across the world for being a city of writers. Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark, Ian Rankin and J.K. Rowling to name just a few, all lived and wrote here. But Edinburgh is also a city of readers. Join Dr Shafquat Towheed and Dr Sally Blackburn-Daniels from The Open…

READ-IT project UK PI Dr Shafquat Towheed will be running an interactive digital showcase about the READ-IT project at the annual conference of SHARP (The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), which will take place in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, from 15-19 July 2019. The digital showcase is scheduled for session 4.7 on…

READ-IT UK project team members Dr Shafquat Towheed, Dr Alessio Antonini, Dr Francesca Benatti and Dr Henry Stead will be working with Open University colleagues in Classical Studies and Digital Humanities to run a collaborative workshop, ‘Reading the Classical Past: A Collaborative Workshop’, at The Open University Future Learn office in London (1-11 Hawley Crescent,…

An important new article on questionnaires and interviews as sources of evidence in the history of reading, co-written by READ-IT UK PI, Dr Shafquat Towheed and his colleagues Dr Edmund King and Dr Maya Parmar (all at The Open University, UK) has just been published in the journal Participations (16.1, May 2019). You can read the…