Long before reading became the quiet solitary experience we now know, words were read aloud. And before they were scribed onto pages, stories were passed through word-of-mouth. With BookTok and BookTube, reading has made a comeback as a buzzing social activity, claiming space on our tweets and feeds. This has helped create a vast community of readers online. How has social media affect how we read? Is what we are reading shaped by invisible forces of the algorithm? In this session, join Dr Federico Pianzola and Associate Professor Simone Murray as they discuss the phenomena of social reading today to help you become a discerning reader.
About the Speakers
Simone Murray is Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Monash University, Melbourne and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is author of four books: Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (Pluto Press, 2004); The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (Routledge US, 2012); The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018); and Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture: Books as Media (Routledge UK (2021). She is currently finalizing a new monograph, Literary Media Studies: The Digital Future of English.
Federico Pianzola is Assistant Professor of Computational Humanities at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), where he coordinates the Master’s in Digital Humanities. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project GOLEM (Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models) and previously completed a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship at the University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy) and Sogang University (South Korea) working on the impact of digital and social media on reading. He has an international PhD in Italian Literature awarded in 2014 by the University of Florence in co-tutelle with the University of Cambridge. He is also member of the scientific advisory board of OPERAS (the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities in the European Research Area); and member of the governing board of IGEL (the International Society of the Empirical Study of Literature). His research concerns how people talk about books online and he uses computational, qualitative, and quantitative methods to study how people read, and his book Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the 21stCentury will be published by MIT Press in Fall 2024.
Jemimah Wei (moderator) is the author of THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER, forthcoming 2025 from Doubleday Books. Born and raised in Singapore, she is currently based in the Bay Area, where she is a 2022-4 Stegner Fellow. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Singapore’s National Arts Council, and Writers in Paradise, she has been named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers, recognised by the Best of the Net Anthologies, and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and is published in Guernica, Narrative, and Nimrod, amongst others. A host for various broadcast and digital channels, she has written and produced short films and travel guides for Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon.
About Reading in the Age of Distraction
Reading in the Age of Distraction (RAD) is a series of conversations featuring acclaimed local and international thinkers on the science of reading, and reading well in the digital age. In this edition of RAD, we dissect the latest digital trends that shape how we read such as audiobooks, BookTok and AI. To sign up for the other RAD sessions, click here!
