Novel Perceptions: towards an inclusive canon

阅读很重要。我们必须能够阅读各种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一种观念，即我们必须阅读和享受高雅文学和“正典”。文学奖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值得这样的文学奖或在文学经典中占有一席之地。直到最近，文化社会学家才确信，赋予一本书文学价值与书的质量无关。价值是基于社会学过程，如奖项和学术关注的标题或作者。在数字时代，这一切都改变了。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，并将计算测量与读者的意见结合起来。他们能够表明，文学价值在很大程度上与小说的语言特征（词语，句子等的使用）相关，而且还受到小说的感知类型和作者的感知性别的影响-仅举两个例子。学者们发现了读者的无意识偏见：例如，女性小说的文学性一直低于男性小说。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人们对这些不平等的认识，并进一步激发了阅读模式和文学经典观点的变化。小说感知（NOPE）试图在英国复制荷兰的研究。我们将挑选400部近期小说，做一个大调查，征求读者的意见。我们将利用计算文学研究的方法，如文体测量学来分析小说。我们将运用文化社会学的定量分析方法，分析英国读者对这些小说的看法。我们将联合收割机结合这两种方法来探索相关性，使英国阅读公众中的任何无意识偏见变得可见。我们将通过额外的调查来扩展荷兰项目，其中我们将分析读者对经典和历史与更新的非经典文本的偏好;读者消费的小说数量;他们完成和没有完成的小说。我们要求人们重读他们过去读过的小说，以了解记忆是如何运作的。该项目的目的是进行分析，但其结果将很自然地导致提高认识和挑战既定的阅读习惯。反过来，这也将有助于我们推动更加多元、包容的阅读“节食”。为了实现这些目标，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，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性和多样性的阅读文化，扫盲，图书馆的使用，并庆祝英语小说300年，同时引发关于多元化，社会包容的二十一世纪世纪经典的讨论。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得到奖励，他们会收到他们（可能）喜欢但不太知名的非经典小说的推荐。通过这些调查，我们将吸引参与者参加我们的其他调查。BBC项目的知名度对于我们收集尽可能多的读者意见以供我们收集数据至关重要。所有调查都已编制完成。我们的赠款申请要求提供资金来分析结果，传播我们的发现，并撰写我们的结果。

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.