RED: Reading Experience Database

Discover the New Zealand contribution to RED, an initiative that aims to better understand reading experiences by and about New Zealanders.

Victoria University of Wellington was one of a number of international partners collaborating on the History of Reading with the UK Open University’s International Digital Networks Initiative. While the NZ-RED encompasses all reading experiences by and about New Zealanders at home and abroad, our research focused initially on Reading in Conflict. Our first project, Reading in WWI, collected and analysed reading experiences by and about New Zealanders, at the front, in the trenches, on the troopships, and at home. Research assistant Perrine Gilkison and Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr Susann Liebich contributed much to our understanding of the impact of war on professional and ordinary readers alike. Read about Katherine Mansfield's wartime reading experiences and follow Susann's ongoing scholarship in this and related areas.

The Reading Experience Database [RED] was launched in 1996 at the UK Open University. Its mission is to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of British subjects from 1450 to 1945. Follow this link for further information about the UK-RED and news about its most recent projects.

The UK-RED project is now a partner with the EU-initiated READ-IT (Reading Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool) consortium. READ-IT is a 3-year (2018-2021) transnational, interdisciplinary Research & Development project funded by the Joint Programming Initiative for Cultural Heritage (JPICH). READ-IT will build an unique large-scale, user-friendly, open access, semantically-enriched investigation tool to identify and share groundbreaking evidence about the Cultural Heritage of reading in Europe from the 18th century to the present day.