Subject: FW: READING EXPERIENCE DATABASE
Here's the intro to RED.
By the way,
is the disciplinary object as posited
here expressly chorAgraphic?
Jim McFadden
PTc
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To: Multiple recipients of list SHARP-L
From: SHARP-L Society for the History of Authorship,
Reading & Publishing on Thu, Jul 21, 1994 5:29 AM
Subject: READING EXPERIENCE DATABASE
A number of people have been asking for additional information about the
Reading Experience Database (RED). In response I photocopied a rather frivolous
article that I wrote for _The Author_ (the journal of the Society of Authors
in the UK) and made that available at the recent SHARP conference in
Washington. For those of you interested in RED but who did not get to
Washington I include a copy below. The only correction I would make is
that we now intend to launch RED in October/November this year.
(If you don't want to slog through the whole thing the scope of the
project and contact names are given in the second half of the article.)
Simon Eliot
The Reading Experience Database; or, what are we to do
about the history of reading?
Simon Eliot
Open University
When I was fourteen, ardent, scraggy and pustular, I fell
in love with a librarian. She was three or four years
older than I was and quite unapproachable behind the
banks of cards at the issue counter. Until that time I
had visited our local public library every week or so in
search of books on my current consuming passion which
happened to be medieval arms and armour. As soon as I had
been struck by that dart which no plate armour could
deflect, I realised that I would have to change my
ostensible reading matter if I were to impress her. I
began lurking by the shelves of sixteenth and seventeenth
century poetry. I specialised in the obscurest of the
Metaphysicals. I would hold the book open and up higher
than normal so that, while apparently reading, I could
follow her progress as she re-shelved the returns by
looking along the gutter of the book as though through
the sights of a rifle. When she came within range I would
suddenly look up with a pained but thoughtful expression
as though I had just been struck by an unbearably
poignant and apt conceit that bore all too close a
resemblance to my own predicament.
When it was time for the Library to close, when all the
pensioners who had nowhere else to go and who warmed
their socks by stuffing them between the fins of the
radiators had been turned out, I would collect the oddest
volumes of Kant and Hume and take them for date-stamping
to her in the hope that she would see more than the issue
page, that she would see how profound I was, how the
Metaphysicals were only the light stuff to while away a
couple of odd hours before I got down to wrestling with
Kant, and no doubt throwing him too.
I'd be back two or three days later with my volumes of
Kant and Hume, but would not return them unless she were
on the desk, for I wanted her to understand that I had
read them all; that, in my nights rendered restless by
love, I had struggled with and triumphed over those great
Enlightenment thinkers.
In truth, of course, those volumes had rested in a neat
pile by my bedside unwrestled with, unread, unopened
while I slumbered in unanguished and untroubled repose.
I recount this pathetic piece of my early adolescent
history not because I am under any delusions about its
uniqueness, rather the contrary, because I am convinced
that, although its details may be different, the pattern
of behaviour, particularly the way in which I used books,
is not. From finely-bound folios residing in the purpose-
built libraries of eighteenth-century gentlemen who only
used those libraries to fall asleep in, through the pages
of Codex Sinaiticus being used to light fires in the
Convent of St Catherine, to Bertie Wooster buying
Spindrift because Lady Florence catches him idly leafing
through it in a book shop, we are endlessly reminded that
there are myriad reasons to buy, borrow and own books,
none of which have anything to do with an intention to
read them. Nor should we imagine that the intention to
read saves a book from the ignominious fate of so many of
its fellows: Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time
must be inching towards the Guinness Book of Records
accolade as the least read bestseller in the history of
hype.
This leads us to the first and greatest caveat in the
history of reading: to own, buy, borrow or steal a book
is no proof of wishing to read it, let alone proof of
having read it.
There are tedious people who quote in a semi-
knowledgeable way from books they have not read: `She
just growed and growed like Topsy' they say without the
faintest idea of who Topsy was or from what book she
came; Mr Micawber is quoted freely by those who have
never turned a page of David Copperfield; there are those
who will talk about some impending disaster concentrating
the mind without having read Johnson's defensive comment
on his work for the Reverend William Dodd. I could go on.
The second caveat is that quoting, or misquoting, a text
is no proof of having read it.
Almost by definition, anyone recording the reading of a
book is an exceptional person recording an exceptional
event. Certainly in the period in which I am most
interested (the nineteenth century) the book was not the
predominant form of text and, more than likely, was not
therefore the thing most commonly or widely read. By
1907, as the first Census of Production makes clear,
books in terms of net value were worth some 14 % of the
total value of print production (and that included
manuscript books and ledgers). The two areas of largest
value were, in ascending order, jobbing printing and
periodical printing. It is likely that the most common
reading matter, by the nineteenth century at latest,
would be the advertising poster, all the tickets,
handbills and forms generated by an urban society, and
the daily or weekly paper. Most of this reading was, of
course, never recorder or commented upon for it was too
much a part of the fabric of everyday life to be noticed.
The third caveat is, therefore, is that any reading
documented in an historically recoverable way is, almost
by definition, an exceptional recording of an
uncharacteristic event by an untypical person.
The history of reading is riddled with such enigmas and
uncertainties. Given all these problems, why should we
even attempt it when there are so many other aspects of
book history where the evidence is more solid and the
methodology clearer? The answer is, of course, that we've
no alternative. To write the history of a product without
also writing the history of its consumption is to have a
cart without a horse. The reading of books represents a
very complex feedback loop which partly determines the
way in which the next generation of texts is written,
manufactured, sold, bought, borrowed - and read. However
difficult it is to face, it will be the development in
the history of reading which will make sense of all the
other aspects of the history of the book - or not, if
we don't manage to crack it.
The Reading Experience Database (RED), a project run
jointly by the British Library and the Open University,
is the first systematic, international project to address
these problems head on. RED's chronological scope is
wide, 1450-1914, and its geographical scope reasonably
generous: we are interested in readers born or resident
in the British Isles reading in any language whatsoever.
This means that we shall be interested, for instance, in
what British-born readers read when they were abroad
(what did Milton read, and in what circumstances, when he
was in Italy?). We shall be concerned with what other
nationals read while they were here (what did Erasmus
read when he was in Cambridge?). We shall be recording
what the first generation of British settlers and, later,
Irish emigrants read when they arrived in the New World.
We shall be recording what was read in Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, Welsh, Erse and so on, as well as in English. We
shall be interested in whether reading took place in
company or alone, whether the reading was silent or
aloud; and, if aloud and in company, whether the audience
listened passively or participated by making comments
(when the paterfamilias read the latest instalment of a
Dickens novel to the assembled family, did its members
comment on or discuss the story? Were servants present
and , if so, how did they react?). We will not forget
that many in the past got their experience of texts from
listening rather than reading. We shall be interested in
finding out to which socio-economic group the reader
belonged and the physical circumstances in which the
reading took place and at what time of day it occurred.
We will be keen to find out whether the book (or whatever
form the text took) was owned by the reader, whether
borrowed (from another individual or from a library),
bought or stolen or read in situ (how many of us have
spent some time in a book shop reading what we never
intended to buy?).
Given such a scope, and given that we would like to
record as much information about each reading experience
as possible, designing the record form has been something
of a nightmare. Anyone who has ever tackled such a job
knows what a problem this can be: you need to record as
much information as possible so the particularity of the
experience is caught like a fly in amber; on the other
hand you want to encourage as many people as possible to
fill in as many record forms as practical, and there is
nothing like an over-elaborate form for curbing the
enthusiastic and deterring the averagely-committed. This
process of form-designing continues, but we are edging
towards a compromise that will offer a largish number of
fields but will also suggest a minimum route through the
form that will require only five pieces of information.
This will mean that we shall be able to record anything
from the most vague ('a person [gender unspecified]
reading a novel in the 1820s') to the most precise
('Samuel Pepys alone and silently reading John
Rushworth's Historical Collections (1659) for 'an hour or
two' in his office in Seething Lane, London before supper
on the night of Sunday 6 December 1663')
We do not expect, particularly in the early years of the
project when momentum will still be building up, for
there to a be continuous, even flow of data coming in
from contributors. On the contrary, it is bound to come
in fits and starts. For this reason the RED Steering
Committee is devising a long list of what it calls
'standard works'. These are mostly either studies of
reading that naturally record a large number of examples
of historical reading experience, or diaries, journals,
autobiographies, biographies, etc. which include many
references to the central subject's reading matter. Both
types of work will provide a density of data which will
justify the task of working systematically through them
to extract the reading experiences they record. This task
will be undertaken by members of the Steering Committee
and by what we hope will be a large group of volunteer
enthusiasts. Many of these jobs will allow us to give a
proper academic justification to acts which would
otherwise be pure pleasure: who would object to reading
Pepys's diary or the collected letters of Dickens?
The RED project ends two years of planning in October
1994 with a formal launch. Once it is up and running we
hope to keep contributors and, indeed, all those
interested in the project in touch with how it is
developing by regular reports in all journals that have a
natural interest in the history of text and the ways in
which texts were read in the past.
Who knows, in four or five years time you may be able to
type in the word `Kant' and `1850-1900' and find out who
during that period really read the Critique of Pure
Reason rather than just borrowed it to impress a
potential girlfriend.
___________________________________________________
If you want to volunteer as a contributor, or suggest
additional standard texts, or get a copy of the draft
record form, or simply express an interest in the Reading
Experience Database, please contact one of RED's two
Directors listed below.
Mr Mike Crump, Centre for the Book, The British Library,
Great Russell Street, London, WCIB 3DG. Email:
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Dr Simon Eliot, Faculty of Arts, The Open University, 4
Portwall Lane, Bristol BS1 6ND. Email:
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