We’re a little late telling you about the party, but there’s some benefit in being casually late, right? For those who haven’t yet found it, you need to visit The Golden Notebook Project. Here’s an excerpt from the description from Bob Stein, the director of The Institute for the Future of the Book:
On November 10th, The Institute for the Future of the Book kicks off an experiment in close reading. Seven women will read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and carry on a conversation in the margins. Thanks to the efforts of Chris Meade, the director of if:book London, the Arts Council England enthusiastically and generously agreed to fund the project. Chris was also the link to Doris Lessing who through her publisher HarperCollins signed on with the rights to putting the entire text of the novel online.
That’s right–the whole novel is online in a terrific readable format, including comments in the margins from each of the 7 ‘official’ readers. There’s a forum and blog for other readers to participate–and a quick visit will show you that things are well underway.
As an experiment in close-reading, the whole project seems a terrific use of current technology; and while admittedly experimenting in the project description, this experiment carries the weight of huge potential. Spend time some time looking at the TGNP site, and you begin to think about what it would be like to participate in a class this way–where students kept reading notes and discussed as they read the text, all online. You begin to think that reading, so solitary an act, could become something perfectly communal–something public by nature instead of private. And the part of this project that is most interesting–does the reading experience change if reading becomes a public act?