Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

October 21st, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook online and note the conversations by seven women on the side margins at The Golden Notebook Project.  Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.

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The Golden Notebook

Here are answers to some common questions:

What is this?
It’s an experiment in close-reading in which seven women are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins. The project went live on Monday 10 November 2008.

Why are you doing it?
It’s part of a long-term effort to encourage and enable a culture of collaborative learning.

What do you hope to learn?
We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn some of what we need to do to make this sort of collaboration as successful as possible.

How come only the seven women can comment in the margins?
Good conversations are messy, non-linear and complicated. The comment area, a chronological scrolling field just isn’t robust enough to follow a conversation among an infinite number of participants. Seven may even be too many. [Note: the forums are open to everyone and we do hope that readers beyond the initial seven will join the fray there both as regards the text and the process. We really want to know what you think works and what doesn’t.


List of book available by Doris Lessing: