Project - READ-IT -- Crowdsourcing and Engaging with Readers
A crowdsourcing and engagement application powered by Tellit as a headless CMS and dedicated content hub for gathering and engaging with book readers.
- Financed by
- Joint Programming Initiative On Cultural Heritage and Global Change
- Duration
Overview
READ-IT (Reading Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool) is a three-year transnational research and development project funded by the Joint Programming Initiative for Cultural Heritage. Its goal is to create a large-scale, user-friendly, open-access investigation tool that brings together and shares new evidence on the cultural heritage of reading in Europe from the 18th century to the present. By combining semantic technologies with advanced information systems, READ-IT makes previously scattered and untraceable data on reading practices discoverable, structured, and reusable.
The project brings together an interdisciplinary consortium of digital humanists, social scientists, and computer scientists from leading European institutions, alongside IN2. READ-IT explores innovative methods for collecting and enriching data through crowdsourcing, web crawling, and the reuse of existing datasets. By extracting descriptors from multilingual sources, the project develops robust ontologies and thesauri that capture shared European reading experiences across time, languages, and cultures, forming a rich, multi-media “human archive” of reading
READ-IT acts as an enabling platform for both researchers and the public, offering smart APIs and intuitive user interfaces that support co-curation, exploration, and analysis of reading heritage. Through a series of diverse use cases — ranging from historical and multilingual text analysis to studies of reading education, blind readers’ experiences, and contemporary social media practices — the project demonstrates how digitally mediated knowledge can deepen understanding of the social, cultural, and intellectual impact of reading in Europe.
Alongside IN2, the consortium was composed by the following partners:
- Le Mans Université, France
- The Open University, United Kingdom
- Utrecht University, Digital Humanities Lab, The Netherlands
- Institute of Czech literature, Czech Republic
- IRISA, France
Associate partners:
- Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany
- Queen Mary University, London, United Kingdom
- Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
Our role
- Multilingual campaign creation tool for reader engagement
- Digital postcard interface and workflow
- Contribution portal for uploading videos, images, documents and other materials.
- Multilingual user interfaces
- Pilots and Applications with the project's end users
