Reading Communities

Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present

Welcome to the project website for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project, ‘Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and the Present’, based at The Open University. This public impact and engagement project will help to answer questions about reading habits by investigating readers in the past and demonstrating their relevance to us today. 'Reading Communities' is a follow-on project from the UK Reading Experience Database (RED). RED is an open access database, and the largest resource recording the experiences of readers of its kind anywhere.

Running from December 2015 to November 2016, 'Reading Communities' is a 12 month AHRC project, led by Dr Shafquat Towheed, with Dr Edmund King, and Dr Maya Parmar, who are all based in The Open University’s English Department, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS).

We encourage you to join us at our events, share in the activities and bring with you your favourite books, diaries, and letters.

The project team will stage a series of themed events around the UK. Event activities will include hands-on workshop sessions, round table discussions with members of reading groups, public lectures by acknowledged experts in the history of reading, oral history interviews, and literary readings.

Events will be timed to coincide with reading-related events and anniversaries throughout the year and all events are open to the public and are free to attend.

In April the team visited Belfast, partnering with the OU in Northern Ireland and Verbal Arts. NvTv, a community TV station, visited us during our day of interactive events, producing a film. Their local news programme ‘Focal Point’, broadcast on Friday 15 April at 7.00pm, included a feature on our event:

As part of the project, we have an advisory board which includes some of the world’s leading experts on the history and practice of reading:

Professor Simon Eliot, Professor in the History of the Book, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Professor David Finkelstein, Chair in Continuing Education and Head of the Office of Lifelong Learning, University of Edinburgh.
Dr Danielle Fuller, Reader in Canadian Studies and cultures of reading, University of Birmingham.
Prof W.R. Owens, Emeritus Professor in the School of Culture and Communications, University of Bedfordshire and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The Open University.
Dr Helen Rogers, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Studies, Liverpool John Moores University.

Oral History

Reading Communities will be holding oral history workshop events in Birmingham on 16 August 2016, and in London on 15 & 16 September 2016. The themes of the oral history workshops will be migration and reading (Birmingham), and memories of reading during WW2 (London).

Reading Communities staged a series of public events throughout 2016. The project visited Belfast, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Liverpool and London. All our events were free to attend.

Liverpool, 10-11th March

Held in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Liverpool, the ‘Writing Lives’ collaborative project, and The Athenaeum, the theme of this event was ‘Reading and Self-Improvement’ in the past and the present. Events included a RED workshop on the history of reading in Liverpool, reading circles and discussion groups; public lectures; and viewing of the ‘Knowledge is Power’ exhibition in the Victoria Gallery & Museum. Watch our short film here:

Liverpool: a City of Readers

Belfast, 12th April

Held in partnership with The Open University in Northern Ireland (Belfast) and Verbal Arts Centre, this event took place in the OU Belfast space, as well as at Belfast's oldest library, Linen Hall Library (established 1788). The theme of the day was ‘Is there such a thing as a Northern Irish reader?’. A RED workshop on the theme of Ulster readers in the database was be followed by a volunteer ambassador talk on C. S. Lewis, and an evening public talk and readings. For full details and the programme, watch our short film from Belfast:

Northern Irish readers from the Past

Edinburgh, 7th June

Hosted in partnership with The Writers’ Museum, this event was held at Edinburgh City Art Centre, as well as the Writers' Museum. The theme ‘Edinburgh: a city of reading’ included the following events: a RED workshop; a guided walking tour of the Writers' Museum; and readings of short extracts from the past and the present from Edinburgh readers, both famous and ordinary.

Birmingham, 16th August

This event was be held at the Impact Hub Birmingham, and the day's theme focused on ‘migration and memories of reading’, both in the past, and the present. Shared reading activities and a roundtable discussion ran concurrently with an oral history collection workshop, where members of the public told us about their family histories of reading. We also visited Zellig, to conduct intergenerational reading activities on their reading benches. The event concluded with a public performance by Gauri Raje, of her storytelling piece 'Tales of Exile and Sanctuary'.

London, 15-16th September

This two day event was held at Senate House, and consisted of an academic conference on Thursday 15th September, and a public engagement workshop on Friday 16th September. The overall theme of the event was 'memory, reading, and world war'. A conference on the theme of ‘connecting past and present readers’ took place on Thursday 15th September, with a keynote lecture from distinguished book historian, Professor Simon Eliot. On the second day, we ran a public engagement and oral history workshop, offering talks from the Great Diary Project, 'show and tell' workshops and a showcase of the UK Punjab Heritage Association WWI exhibition.

Edinburgh, 22nd November

As part of the Scottish Book Trust's Book Week Scotland event and participating in the Being Human: A Festival of the Humanities 2016, the Reading Communities team will be holding another 1 day event on the theme of 'Edinburgh: A City of Readers'. We will have 'hands on' facilitated reading group activities, as well public readings from the works of Scottish writers past and present at Blackwell's Book Shop, Edinburgh South Bridge.

Reading Communities collaborates with a range of partners around the UK. We are pleased to be working with the following organisations:

London

The Institute of English Studies (School of Advanced Studies), University of London (host)
Senate House Library
The UK Punjab Heritage Association (UKPHA)
The Ministry of Information Digital project
The Great Diary Project.

The UK Reading Experience Database (RED) is an open access database and research project housed in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at the Open University. It is the largest resource recording the experiences of readers of its kind anywhere. 'Reading Communities' is an AHRC follow-on project from RED.

UK RED has amassed over 34,000 records of reading experiences of British subjects, both at home and abroad, and of visitors to the British Isles, between 1450 and 1945. These include both famous and anonymous readers. It is both an open access resource and open to unsolicited public contributions. Some 100 volunteers have contributed nearly a fifth of all entries. Volunteers have been inspired to contribute entries based on their own personal interests, such as the reading habits of their favourite writer, or the discovery of the reading diaries of an ancestor in their own family papers. They receive guidance and training from RED project members, and often develop considerable expertise in handling and interpreting documentary sources. The database attracts over 1,800 visitors a month from more than 100 countries. These contributions have generated further research questions and a number of new publications.

You can also find a video about the database below: