This is the Shared Reading in the Age of Digitalization research team. Some of us have been working together since 2018 and others have joined later. We have meetings at least once a month in which we mostly discuss the different ways people express themselves about reading in a variety of languages, from Dutch, to English, to German, to Italian, to Swiss-German.

Johanna, Massimo and Lina have worked together with Moniek on annotating online book reviews in both English and German. This work laid the foundation of the cross-cultural comparative study focused on two face-to-face Shared Reading groups in the UK and Switzerland, that Antonia and Tina are working on for their PhDs under Moniek's supervision. Lina joined us again during this phase, together with Grace and Cristina to help out with preparing the transcripts of the recorded Shared Reading sessions. Meanwhile, Pema and Moniek are working together on an interview study about Digital Social Reading which is currently ongoing.

I am an assistant professor working in the field of empirical literary studies and currently leading the SHARD project. My main tasks are to supervise the team, develop experimental designs, collect and analyze data from shared reading groups to book review websites. My research interests are narrative absorption, digital social reading practices, shared reading and its effects on well-being and reading habits. I am also the general editor of the journal Scientific Study of Literature. 

My most absorbing reads of the past years are Piranesi by Suzanne Clark and the Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin.

Contact: moniek.kuijpers@clutterunibas.ch

I am a doctoral researcher in English Linguistics, part of the SHARD team and have a background in Interpersonal Pragmatics / Sociolinguistics. My research interests are Shared Reading, social dynamics, relational work, self-compassion, and mental health.

My most absorbing read: Tschick by Wolfgang Herrndorf 

Contact: antonia.vogler@clutterunibas.ch

I am a doctoral researcher in the SHARD-project, before that I received a BA in Philosophy and Digital Philology and a MA in Digital Humanities. My research interests revolve around the impact of narrative design on readers, and the methods and different types of data used to study this. In my dissertation project, I will focus on the role of the text in Shared Reading, using both qualitative and computational methods of analysis.

My first absorbing read was Tintenherz by Cornelia Funke and my most absorbing reads after that were Zeno Cosini by Italo Svevo and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.

Contact: tina.ternes@clutterunibas.ch

I am a research associate at the Digital Humanities Lab, and part of the SHARD team. My academic background is in Comparative Linguistics, Religious Studies, and Digital Humanities – where I found my research interest in Digital Social Reading (DSR). In the project, I work with Moniek on researching DSR practices of young adults by conducting a Q methodology study.

My first absorbing reads were anything I could get my hands on in the local library and the bookcase at home filled with dictionaries and encyclopedias. Recently, I’ve been reading Webtoons and manga regularly.

Contact: pema.frick@clutterunibas.ch

I am a computational linguist with a background in Machine Translation. My main responsibilities in the SHARD project are data collection and analysis; corpus creation, annotation and maintenance; and various NLP tasks such as text classification with machine learning.

My literary journey as a reader started when I was a teenager with Franz Kafka and the Russian classics. Now that my hair begins to show strands of gray, I am developing a passion for Young Adult fiction (Veronica Roth, Leigh Bardugo, Suzanne Collins).

The most absorbing book I have read is "Il deserto dei Tartari" ("The Tartar Steppe") by Dino Buzzati.

Contact: massimo.lusetti@clutterunibas.ch

I received my BA in English and Computational Linguistics and my MA in Medieval Studies and English from the University of Zurich, where I'm currently working on my PhD on Survival and Obsolescence in the Middle English lexicon.

My main tasks in the SHARD project (and its predecessor Mining Goodreads) were developing the new and improved tagset, using it to tag an English and a German corpus of book reviews from Goodreads, and translating our tagset and guidelines from English to German.

My most absorbing reads in the last few years: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, and Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang.

Contact: johanna.vogelsanger@clutteres.uzh.ch