Novel Perceptions: towards an inclusive canon

阅读很重要。我们必须能够阅读各种各样的文本来管理我们的生活方式。从很小的时候起，我们就被灌输了这样的观念：我们必须阅读并享受高雅的文学作品和“经典”。文学奖项及其获奖者受到媒体的广泛关注。然而，文学学者很难解释什么样的书应该获得这样的文学奖或在文学经典中占有一席之地。直到最近，文化社会学家还认为，赋予一本书文学价值与书的质量无关。价值的归属是基于社会学过程的，比如一个标题或作者的奖项和学术关注。在数字时代，这种情况发生了变化。在高度跨学科和创新的荷兰计算人文项目“文学质量之谜”（2012-2019）中，学者们选择了400部当代小说，并将计算测量与大型调查中收集的读者意见结合起来。他们能够证明，文学价值在很大程度上与小说的语言特征（词汇、句子的使用等）有关，但也受到小说体裁和作者性别的影响——仅举两件事。学者们发现了读者无意识的偏见：例如，女性小说一直被认为不如男性写的文学小说文学。他们认为这些偏见反映了荷兰社会的不平等，并发现报告他们的研究有助于提高对这些不平等的认识，并进一步激发了阅读模式和对文学经典的看法的变化。“新颖的认知”（Novel Perceptions）试图在英国复制荷兰的研究。我们将选择最近出版的400部小说，进行大规模调查，征求读者的意见。我们将利用计算机文学研究的方法，如文体学来分析小说。运用文化社会学的定量分析，我们将分析英国读者对这些小说的看法。我们将结合这两种方法来探索相关性，使英国阅读公众中任何无意识的偏见可见。我们将通过额外的调查来扩展荷兰项目，我们将分析读者对经典和历史的偏好，而不是更新的，非册封文本；阅读量：读者阅读小说的数量；小说他们读完了，却没有。我们让人们重读他们过去读过的小说，以了解记忆是如何运作的。该项目的目的是分析，但结果将很自然地导致提高意识和挑战既定的阅读习惯。反过来，这将有助于我们促进更多样化、更包容的阅读“饮食”。为了达到这些目标，我们需要尽可能多的参与者参与我们的调查。我们很高兴BBC参与项目“塑造我们世界的小说”（NOSOW，参见https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2019/the-novels-that-shaped-our-world）为我们的研究提供了一个平台。该项目旨在促进包容和多样化的阅读文化、读写能力、图书馆使用，并庆祝英语小说300周年，同时引发关于多样化、社会包容性的21世纪经典的讨论。从2020年1月起，将通过一系列活动激发公众阅读和思考这些小说。参与这项调查的人会收到一些非经典小说的推荐，这些小说他们（可能）会喜欢，但知名度不高。通过这些调查，我们将为我们的其他调查吸引参与者。BBC项目的可见性对于我们收集尽可能多的读者意见对于我们的数据收集至关重要。所有的调查都已经编制好了。我们的拨款申请要求为分析结果、传播我们的发现和记录我们的结果提供资金。

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.