Last month we launched the final survey in our Novel Perceptions study to help academics at The University of Wolverhampton understand why we value different literary texts.
The research was inspired by the BBC's 'The Novels That Shaped Our World' project - a list of 100 books chosen by a diverse panel of authors and critics. Our surveys - one for each of the ten themes in the BBC list - ask users to give their own responses the BBC's selection, and then suggest the novels they think should have been included.
Creating the surveys - which run on the Open University's nQuire platform - has been a labour of love over the past few months. The nQuire site has some nifty tools to provide participants with personalised feedback. As an incentive for taking part, we offer respondents a personalised selection of titles we think they'll enjoy, based on their responses. As well as crafting a feedback algorithm, I helped collate six hundred different recommendations from our own panel of literary experts. These proved really popular in user testing, so hopefully we've helped a few people discover some new favourite reads.
We can't reveal too much about what we've learned so far, but we have released a few early findings. You can read more here.