In the last decades, researchers have found declines in both reading skills and well-being of young adults. Often, these declines have been blamed on the rise of digitalization in our society, without enough evidence to support such claims. In this project, we will empirically investigate what it means to read in the digital age and how engaging in social activities surrounding the act of reading can affect well-being.

This project will investigate Shared Reading – reading and discussing literary texts together – in different contexts. It will compare face-to-face shared reading groups to Shared Reading practices that take place online on websites such as Goodreads in both German and English. The research focuses on the underlying mechanisms of Shared Reading. What is it in Shared Reading that leads to positive effects? Is it a sense of absorption during reading that distracts from worries or perhaps it is the sense of belonging to a community?

During the project we will develop corpora, tools and instruments that can be used by other researchers in the fields of empirical literary studies and digital humanities, which we will make openly available on Open Science Framework. The findings of this project will be directly beneficial for the shared reading programs that our collaborators Sharing Stories Verein in Basel and The Reader in Liverpool offer and together we will write up a report on Shared Reading in the digital age and its effects on reading promotion and well-being targeted at European policy makers in education and welfare.