Johann Wolfgang Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther or Else Lasker-Schüler's collection of poems My blue piano? 50 canonical narratives, novels, volumes of poetry and plays in German-language literature from the 18th to the 20th century are the focus of literary reading. Anyone who reads them in the app can use the advantages of digital reading (e.g. search in the full texts and share their own reading tracks with others) and at the same time become part of a research project in action: reading literature collects and visualizes reading data so that we can learn more about our reading habits can. When and how, for how long, how often and why do we read? Do we belong to the full readers, fortune-tellers, title dreamers, sentence collectors or reading trail hunters?
With the reading research app literaturlesen, the reading of literary texts can be examined in a natural environment and over a longer period of time. In the 'real laboratory' of the app, interactions between readers and the text are recorded (such as where we start to read, in which moods we read and when we mark something) and the data is saved anonymously. This creates a large and representative data set on our reading behavior that we can evaluate using statistical analyzes.
In addition to short reading recommendations for each of the 50 texts, readers will find references to the reading traces of authors such as Gottfried Benn, Paul Celan, Hilde Domin, Hermann Hesse, Martin Heidegger, Peter Rühmkorf and W.G. Sebald. The books from their private libraries give insights into their thinking and writing practice and thus into artistic and scientifically productive forms of reading.
reading literature is part of the project “Reading literature digitally. Research in Action ". The app, developed jointly by the German Literature Archive Marbach and the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media Tübingen, enables new perspectives on questions of analogue and digital reading, the aesthetic effect of literature and the promotion of reading.
reading literature is being expanded to include a reading laboratory and the new permanent exhibition in the Modern Literature Museum of the German Literature Archive in Marbach.