The Reading Room

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BESW

00:03

"Appreciating Poetry," a zine by Carly M. Ho. A short guide that goes over some features that you might be interested in looking for in poetry, as well as some places you can find interesting poetry.

7 hours later…

Mithrandir

07:16

@Gallifreyan seems reasonable

Gareth Rees

08:03

@Gallifreyan I'm not convinced that there's any immediate prospect of consensus on the Monthly Challenge. The problem is that the goals for the challenge are to some extent in tension with each other.

The goals seem to be (1) Promote shared experience, i.e. situation in which everyone is reading a text at the same time, like a book club; (2) Persuade site participants to read more diverse range of texts; (3) Promote site activity (more questions and answers). But (2) is in tension with (1) and (3) — simply telling people to read more challenging texts is inevitably going to lower the participation rate.

This is the thinking behind my proposal, in which the idea is to go directly from selecting a text to asking a question on Main, cutting out the need for people to read the text first.

My hope is that so long as the chosen texts are available and short enough, the questions will tempt people into reading them and that this will work better than telling them. I feel this is more likely to work, based on my own experience: I've read a lot of texts because I saw an interesting question about them on Main, but never read any of the texts I was told to read in the Monthly Challenge.

1 hour later…

Gareth Rees

09:30

In particular, less than half of my answers are on texts that I had previously read (i.e. before I saw the question). But possibly I am an outlier in this respect, so I'd be interested to hear other participants' experiences: do you only ever answer questions on texts you have previously read, or do questions tempt you into reading texts in order to be able to write answers?

Christophe Strobbe

09:51

@Gallifreyan Thanks. I have added that now.

@Gallifreyan @Mithrandir @GarethRees Since there was no community decision to suspend them (Aza's meta question cannot be seen as such a decision), the monthly challenges aren't suspended; they merely skip a month.

Mithrandir

While they're in flux, with no clear consensus yet on moving forward, putting them on hold for August seems like a reasonable thing to do.

Napoleon Wilson

@ChristopheStrobbe Isn't that what a suspension is, in contrast to a cancellation?

Christophe Strobbe

@GarethRees Rereading the original proposal, the main goal was to promote more diversity in the texts and authors that we discuss. I also read Hamlet's "Everyone should participate" in this light: i.e. as an encouragement for people to diversify their reading, rather than setting a high level of participation as a goal that is at the same level as increasing diversity. I don't see the third goal in the original proposal.

Napoleon Wilson

The 3rd one seems to be an implied goal of the topic challenge system (if it isn't an underlying goal of many community-building actions).

Christophe Strobbe

@NapoleonWilson Suspension sounds like something that is indefinite, until an agreed-upon time period has passed or until a decision has been reached. Skipping a month is something that has happened before (and I couldn't find why we had not topic challenges in December 2017 and January 2018).

Napoleon Wilson

10:05

I see.

Christophe Strobbe

> If you only get one or two questions (or zero!), you might be tempted to call the challenge a failure. But think of it more like playing poker: you have to lose a few hands in order to win others. (meta.stackexchange.com/q/240634/340816)

Napoleon Wilson

>

And a space? ;-)

Christophe Strobbe

Too many types of syntax ...

Napoleon Wilson

The same as in questions and answers, though.

Mithrandir

You don't need a space in posts

Napoleon Wilson

10:10

Granted.

Christophe Strobbe

@NapoleonWilson Perhaps we should try to generate more activity by attracting new users through promotional activities, e.g. tweets, Reddit posts, etc. A few years ago, I collected a bunch of site promotion ideas on Language Learning Stack Exchange.

Since a whole bunch of sites graduated recently, including a few that are language related, we should look into community promotion ads again? (When the next "round" starts; I'm not sure I completely understand how that works.)

Napoleon Wilson

If only that "graduation" was more than simply dropping 4 letters from the site name. ;-)

(I doubt they'll get Community Promotion Ads anytime soon.)

They might next year when the new iteration starts, though.

Christophe Strobbe

I was under the impression that those iterations start in February. I hope we'll be able to get some ads for out site in.

Napoleon Wilson

Sure.

Christophe Strobbe

With regard to the number of questions in the monthly challenges: there have been occasions on which I read the relevant work(s) but didn't post any questions (i.e. Songs of Innocence and Experience; Jean Rhys; My Uncle Napoleon). In a sense, the challenge achieved its main goal for me; it just didn't translate into questions. So the statistics are of some value but they don't tell the whole story.

For example, I read all of Jean Rhys' fiction. I had only read Wide Sargasso Sea before I posted the challenge.

Gareth Rees

10:27

@ChristopheStrobbe Certainly (2) was the main goal of the original proposal, but (3) is surely also there — Emrakul aka Zyerah aka Aza wrote "many of the questions we get are... about those books specifically" and "there's a whole lot of literature out there sitting in topics we're not even touching" and :Ultimately, a literature site is best served by being multicultural and pluralistic" etc.

The only way I can interpret these remarks is that the purpose of the proposal was to generate (diverse) site activity.

But the original proposal is not a sacred text—we are free to put forward other goals

Christophe Strobbe

More diversity can lead to more activity. Strictly speaking if you first have 100 questions about 10 works, and the next 100 questions are about 20 different works, you have achieved more diversity without more activity (assuming the QPD is stable). I see your point, but we should not confuse those two goals.

Gareth Rees

In general, if you disagree with me that (1) and (3) should be among the goals of the challenge, then please say so! It is best to be clear about this kind of disagreement

Christophe Strobbe

For the challenges, I see the second goal as the main goal and the other two as side effects. This does not mean that I'm not interested in promoting shared experience or in generating more site activity, but I think we should explore other means of achieving those goals.

For the shared-experience aspect, we should try out the chat sessions that heather proposed in one of her comments.

Gareth Rees

10:49

It sounds as thought the challenges are working for you in their current form. But you wrote, "Participation in reading challenges has been rather low in recent months" — clearly participation/activity is also a concern

Christophe Strobbe

If there's no participation in the topic challenges, they can't reach the diversity goal, after all (except through offline reading).

But to track the diversity aspect properly, we need a script that generates data about questions that have a language-related tag versus questions that don't have one (which are then usually about literature in English).

I would like this site to be more than just "English literature with some other stuff on the side".

Librarian

11:12

Q: What would be a good timeslot for bimonthly chat sessions?

In a comment on "Monthly Topic Challenges aren't getting much attention. How can we change them?", heather made the following suggestion: It might be interesting to have the topic challenge, but also an, e.g., bimonthly chat session discussing it - easier to jump in and participate. In the ...

Gareth Rees

11:26

@ChristopheStrobbe It sounds as though, if I revised goal (3) to say, "promote more (and more diverse) site activity", you would be on board, is that right?

Christophe Strobbe

11:56

@GarethRees I would be on board if you removed the parentheses.

4 hours later…

Gareth Rees

15:28

@ChristopheStrobbe Sure, I'm happy to remove the parentheses for you!

2 hours later…

Bookworm

17:38

Q: Larry Csonka and the Chocolate Factory confirmation of existence

(Note: Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but this link: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/300800/where-can-i-ask-questions-about-a-broadway-show brought me here.) My friend and I were chatting about Miami fullback Larry Csonka the other day (it was a Mystery Scienc...

theater

4 hours later…

Bookworm

21:17

Q: Why is Lorca so angry against 'the urban faggots?'

In Lorca's Ode to Walt Whitman, his hommage to the great American poet, he has the following few verses: That's why I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman ... ... against the men with that green look in their eyes who love other men and burn their lips in silence. This would be odd...