The official report on the Centre's Happenstance research project has now been published on NESTA's website - you can download it here. There is also a Centre blog post about learning from failure, linked to the report, plus a short YouTube video about the project.

David Wright has written a book chapter now published in From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century from University of Massachusetts Press. The book, edited by Anouk Lang and featuring contributions from Janice Radway, Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo amongst others, offers a range of perspectives on how readers interact with texts, with one another and with the technologies that shape the contemporary reading experience.

David’s chapter, ‘Literary taste and List Culture in a Time of “Endless Choice”’, considers the cultural list in its various forms - guide, bestseller chart, poll – as a means of shaping reading choices. The chapter reflects on how new kinds of lists - the customer or algorithm determined lists of on-line retail – reflect new forms of authority in directing readers to books.

You can read a review of the book in the Columbia Journalism Review here, and follow David’s research on academia.edu.

David Wright's new article, 'Making tastes for everything: omnivorousness and cultural abundance' has been published in the latest edition of the Journal for Cultural Research. The article offers some speculative discussion on the current state of what has been termed 'the omnivore debate', about emerging patterns of cultural consumption in Western societies. It argues that some of the 'discoveries' about omnivorousness - especially those relating to the crossing of cultural hierarchies - are increasingly unremarkable in a world where 'legitimate' and 'popular' culture are distributed on commercial terms and central to the curricula of accrediting institutions. This might require new ways of finding out how 'taste' matters to social organisation.

Warwick students can read the article via the library web-page here

The article is available via the Journal Home-page here

You can follow David Wright's research on Academia.edu