AHRC Reading Digital Fiction project up and running

Alice Bell and I have been awarded about £243k by the AHRC for a 29-month empirical project looking at Reading Digital Fiction. The project has two core aims. Primarily, as keen readers of digital fiction, we want to introduce more readers to digital fiction. To achieve that aim, we are organising various public events including workshops, exhibitions, and writing competitions to introduce people to this exciting new form of literature. Secondly, as cognitive stylisticians, we are interested in how readers process particular linguistic and multimodal features within digital fiction. We are therefore running several reader-response studies, collecting data from readers in order to understand how digital literary reading works cognitively.

We've now got a website and regularly tweet @ReadDigFic, @AstridEnsslin and @AliceBellTweets #elit. I presented our first poster, on how to test our theories on textual 'you' in digital fiction with actual readers, at Bangor University yesterday. Here it is:

Jen and I will give this poster as a full 20-min presentation at Nottingham University's forthcoming 'The Reader in Stylistics' conference on 24th June.