This Lancaster Literacy Research Centre event will be a talk from Robbie Love and Marcello Giovanelli on Lockdown reading habits: investigating a survey corpus

Abstract

From July-August 2020, we ran an online survey investigating the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic affected the UK public’s reading habits. We gathered responses from 860 participants, including nearly 100,000 words of free-text responses, which forms a substantial amount of data ready for analysis. In this paper, we discuss our corpus-driven analysis of responses to the survey in order to investigate whether people had increased or reduced their reading, preferred or avoided particular genres, revisited books from the past, and refined the ways they read and talked about reading with others. Focussing on keywords, we extracted salient topics including those of escapism and re-reading as a form of comfort. We reflect on how such data can be used to better understand the coping strategies people use in times of crisis.

Event schedule:

Event start time - Welcomes & introductions (please enter the meeting with your 'real' name as your display name, and your camera switched on, to allow us to all put faces to each others' names)

Event start time + 5 - Presentation from Speaker Name(s) (please turn your camera off and mute your microphone during the presentation)

Event start time + 40 - Discussion (please use the raise hand feature on Teams to indicate you would like to have a turn speaking and once asked to speak by an event facilitator, please un-mute your microphone and turn your camera on)

Robbie Love and Marcello Giovanelli work in the Department of English, Languages and Applied Linguistics at Aston University.