On 30 September 2021, The Open University’s funded period on the project READ-IT comes to an end. While the project team Dr. Shafquat Towheed (UK Lead), Dr. Alessio Antonini, Dr. Francesca Benatti, and Dr. Maya Parmar move to new projects, the project resources remain free and available for public use. The website will also remain…

We are delighted to announce that registration is now open for The Open University History of Books and Reading (HOBAR) online conference, ‘Bookshelves in the Age of the COVID-19 Pandemic’, 3-4 November 2020, which is supported by The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). The conference will be held online via…

READ-IT UK team lead Dr Shafquat Towheed and his Open University colleague Dr Edmund King are co-running the annual History of Books and Reading seminar series at the Institute of English Studies, London. The 2020 series is on the theme of ‘Reading and Wellbeing’ and brings together speakers from a range of disciplines, including history,…

Members of the READ-IT team from The Open University will be presenting the READ-IT project, running an annotation workshop, and encouraging public contribution via our QR enabled postcards as part of ‘The Reader in the Book: Books, Reading and Libraries in Fiction’ conference at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London, 19-20…

READ-IT Project PI-5 Prof Guillaume Gravier (CNRS-IRISA, Rennes) and team members Dr Alessio Antonini (The Open University), Dr Francesca Benatti (The Open University) and Dr François Vignale (Le Mans Université) have co-authored a new peer-reviewed workshop article, “Modelling Changes in Diaries, Correspondence and Authors’ Libraries to support research on reading: the READ-IT approach”.  The workshop…

An important new article on questionnaires and interviews as sources of evidence in the history of reading, co-written by READ-IT UK PI, Dr Shafquat Towheed and his colleagues Dr Edmund King and Dr Maya Parmar (all at The Open University, UK) has just been published in the journal Participations (16.1, May 2019). You can read the…

Professor Bronwen Thomas (Bournemouth University) will be giving a seminar paper, ‘#ireadeverywhere: Performing Readerliness Online’ on 18 March 2019 (5.30pm) at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. Professor Thomas is an internationally recognised expert on screen reading and you can find out more about the research projects she has run,  including Reading on…

READ-IT WP4 researcher and COST E-READ (Action 1404) member Dr Anezka Kuzmicova (Stockholm University) gave a seminar paper, ‘It depends: everyday practices of print vs. digital reading’ on 4 February 2019 (5.30pm) at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. READ-IT researcher Dr Francesca Benatti with her colleague Dr Edmund King are currently co-running…

READ-IT researcher Dr Francesca Benatti with her colleague Dr Edmund King are co-running a seminar series on ‘Digital Books, Digital Readers’ in 2019. The first seminar is on 28 January 2019 (5.30pm) and the speaker is Dr Christopher Ohge (IES, University of London) who will be speaking on ‘Digital Marginalia’. The seminar series is run jointly…