Novel Perceptions: towards an inclusive canon

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Reading is important. We have to be able to read all kinds of texts to manage our way through life. From an early age we all are also instilled with the idea that we have to read and enjoy high brow literature and 'the canon'. Literary prizes and their winners receive much media attention. However, literary scholars are hard-pressed to explain what kind of books deserve such a literary prize or a place in the literary canon. Until recently, cultural sociologists were convinced that attributing literary value to a book has nothing to do with the quality of the book. Value is attributed based on sociological processes, such as prizes and academic attention for a title or an author. In the digital age, this changed. In the highly interdisciplinary and innovative Dutch Computational Humanities project The Riddle of Literary Quality (2012-2019), scholars selected 400 contemporary novels and combined computational measurements with the opinions of readers gathered in a large survey. They were able to show that literary value for a large part correlates with linguistic features of the novels (use of words, sentences, etc.), but is also influenced by the perceived genre of the novel and the perceived gender of the author - to name but two things. The scholars uncovered unconscious biases in readers: for instance, women's fiction was consistently rated less literary than literary fiction written by men. They see these biases as a reflection of inequalities in Dutch society and found that reporting on their research helped to raise awareness about these inequalities and furthermore inspired changes in reading patterns and in views on the literary canon.Novel Perceptions (NOPE) seeks to replicate the Dutch research in the UK. We will select 400 recent novels and do a large survey asking readers for their opinions. We will make use of methods from computational literary studies such as stylometry to analyse the novels. Using quantitative analysis from cultural sociology, we will analyse the opinions of the UK readers of these novels. And we will combine both methodologies to explore correlations, making visible any unconscious biases in the UK reading public. We will extend the Dutch project with additional surveys in which we will analyse readers' preference of classic and historical versus newer, non-canonised texts; the volume of novels that readers consume; novels they finish and don't. We ask people to reread novels they read in the past to understand how memory operates. The aim of the project is to analyse, but the results will quite naturally lead to raising awareness and to challenging established reading habits. In turn, this will help us promote a more diverse, inclusive reading 'diet'. To reach these aims, we need as many participants for our surveys as possible. We are very happy that the BBC engagement project "Novels That Shaped Our World" (NOSOW, seehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2019/the-novels-that-shaped-our-world) provides a platform for our research. This project aims to stimulate inclusive and diverse reading cultures, literacy, library use and to celebrate 300 years of the English language novel whilst provoking discussions about a diverse, socially-inclusive twenty-first century canon. From January 2020, the public will be stimulated to read and think about these novels through a host of activities. People are rewarded for engaging with this survey by receiving recommendations for non-classic novels that they will (probably) like but are less well-known. Through these surveys we will draw in participants for our other surveys. The visibility of the BBC project will be essential for us to collect as many readers' opinions as possible for our data collection. All surveys have already been developed. Our grant application asks for funding to analyse the results, disseminate our findings, and to write up our results.