Dr Danielle Fuller is part of a successful grant application with the Arts Council on a project ‘Reading Lives: Exploring - Connecting - Sharing’ led by Tim Hodson.
Reading Lives is an app that creates opportunities to explore the role of reading in people’s lives. It also invites users to write and share their own reading stories, making new connections between the experience of reading and the craft of writing. Additionally, the app collects demographic information and data about users' participation in the arts. Reading Lives has been tested at two small special events for readers in Birmingham, organised by Writing West Midlands.
The app is built around short narratives or mini-life stories about reading, gathered from more than 3,000 readers in the UK, USA and Canada - using data from the 'Beyond the Book' project, an investigation led by Danielle.
The project is to take the app to the Birmingham Literature Festival for the next phase of research and development. At the festival, Tim will be on hand to offer support audiences on how to use it independently with their own mobile devices; he also plans to use the technology to create a shared piece of public art: a Reading Lives word cloud, projected on to a wall at the Library of Birmingham.