The Golden Notebook(s)

My friends over at the Institute for the Future of the Book yesterday announced a new project, in which they’re working with the British Arts Council and Harper Collins to publish an electronic, CommentPress-like edition of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, hoping to produce a conversation in the margins both among a small number of centrally invested readers and among a broader reading public.

They’re asking for input into how such an experiment might be conducted, and in particular, into who those core readers might be. If you have thoughts, pop by and leave them in the comments. I’m quite excited about this, not least because I’m hoping to use the text and its mechanisms as part of my Literary Interpretation class in the fall. This experiment presents a compelling possibility for thinking about the new modes of reading and interacting with texts in digital spaces, as well as a means of reflecting on the transformations in notebooks and their authors…