“Geographies of Empathy” at SLSA 2022 Conference November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 jshanahan Leave a comment There’s been a lot of fascinating scholarship on affective reading and, more recently, on the outsized role of empathic reading and “bibliotherapy” in social media. Inspired by Sarah Brouillette’s recent essay in Post45 and e.g. Joseph Worthen’s on “Empathy Aptitude Reading”, last month John Shanahan presented work-in-progress about “One Book One Chicago” geography data (and subject of a forthcoming paper by John and Mihaela Stoica). The presentation at SLSA 2022 (Society for Literature Science and the Arts) at Purdue explores… Read more
Why “City Scale” Matters June 23, 2016October 10, 2016 jshanahan Leave a comment Reading Benjamin Barber’s suggestive If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (Yale UP, 2013) reminds me of the lofty aspirations Mayor Richard M. Daley had for the One Book One Chicago program in its early years. In a prefatory note in the guide for the third season, fall 2002, on Willa Cather’s My Antonia, he wrote: “One Book, One Chicago encourages all our citizens to read the same book at the same time to create a citywide book club. … One Book, One Chicago cultivates a culture of reading and discussion by bringing our diverse city together around one great… Read more