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History of reading tutorial 1: Finding evidence of reading in the past
How do we know what people read in the past, and how they read it? This free course, History of reading tutorial 1: Finding evidence of reading in the past, is the first in a series of tutorials designed to help users of the UK Reading Experience Database (UK RED) search, browse and use the resource, and explores the types of evidence historians have uncovered about the history of reading. Tutorial 2 (Red_2) and Tutorial 3 (Red_3) look at how this evidence can be used to tell us about the reception of a literary text and to demonstrate the impact of a writers reading on their literary output. UK RED is a resource built and maintained at The Open University.
Please note: this course contains some Flash content that no longer works. We are currently working to update this.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
- demonstrate a basic knowledge of the debates about the evidence of reading, understanding distinctions between 'hard' or quantitative data and 'soft' or qualitative data
- understand an overview of some of the types of evidence scholars have used to construct the UK RED and their relative merits as primary sources
- identify different sources when looking at individual entries in the UK RED
- experiment with applying different methods of analysis to sets of records in the UK RED, including the application of quantitative and qualitative methods.
First Published: 09/08/2012
Updated: 07/03/2019
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Sadly one of the activities can no longer be completed, the filling in of a table, due to the embedded software no longer being supported or inactive, hence one star dropped from my review rating.
However I did a bit of searching and comparison of my own, prompted by the discussion boxes, so I felt this course was worth spending time on and I did get some enjoyment out of it. That's what I read new stuff for, enjoyment. I don't usually read Humanities courses, so this was a refreshing read for me, discovering histories I never knew existed.
If you dip in, you can discover what real readers way back when thought of what they had read. We only have records of thoughts of the poor working class of London because somebody interviewed them and published his results. Samuel Pepys wrote a diary which has passed through the ages and still exists, recording his thoughts. There would probably have been no record of those poor of London unless those interviews had been taken and published, very unlikely they themselves would have written journals or which would have been kept through the ages like Pepys.