A literature review has been conducted in the first year of the project, which resulted in a conceptual model for attentional modulation in literary reading. This resulted in an article which is currently under review (resubmitted with revisions to Orbis Litterarum, Aug 11, 2022). The model of literary reading takes into account both top down processes (the experienced reader’s knowledge of how the literary text is constructed) and bottom up processes (textual characteristics that trigger close and distracted modes of reading and attention) and will serve as the basis for the experiments in year 3. WP1 has thereby been completed.
A reading survey has been designed and distributed among 830 readers of literature in the Netherlands and other countries, to offer insight in their reading habits of attentional modulation. The results will be published in an article, co-authored (PI is first author) with supervisor Anne Mangen and advisor Frank Hakemulder (accepted with revisions and resubmitted, per Sept 6, 2022, to Scientific Study of Literature). This publication concludes WP2.
The next stage of the project consisted of determining what text types (genre, formal elements, length) are best suited to reading with attentional modulation. To this end, I created a taxonomy of textual characteristics that and devices that prompt deep or close reading (attention grabbers), skimming (internal distractors), and modulation between the two. On top of the deliverables that were promised, I presented the results in an article that I submitted, per June 7, 2022, to Language and Literature. This completes WP3.
At UC Santa Barbara, I was supervised by Rita Raley, with whom I had bi-monthly meetings about my project. She advised me on theories of attention and media as well as methodological issues. I presented my research on several occasions in the context of the research groups Transcriptions and Literature and Mind (the latter also was the context for a focus group session which formed the basis for article 3). More extensive forms of collaboration were
Early March 2022, I ended my outgoing phase at UC Santa Barbara with a one-day conference titled Transformations of Attention, for which I invited top scholars on media and attention from a broad range of fields like N. Katherine Hayles, Maryanne Wolf, Joe Walther, Susanna Paasonen, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Alice Marwick, and my co-author on a forthcoming publication, Lucie Chateau.
From March onwards, I worked with Anne Mangen and Frank Hakemulder at the Reading Research Center at University of Stavanger, Norway. Here, I received training in empirical literary studies, and designed the eyetracking experiments for WP4. A also planned to do a pilot study but we decided against this, as the eye-tracking lab at University of Stavanger had not yet been finished, so I could not use their equipment. The pilot study will be conducted in Fall 2022 at Tilburg university, where I have returned as planned for the last year of my project.
