TEXT IN TRANSIT: A GUIDE TO GENRE IN POPULAR LITERATURE

The Text in Transit project brings together transitory pieces of popular literature: portable, forgettable, ephemeral and tossable. These objects have been undervalued for far too long, and should be regarded as markers of both literary and popular culture. The website provides a taxonomy of the genres of popular literature, and investigates what makes each genre what it is. By navigating through the categories presented, we can recognize and come to understand what ordinary people are reading as they move through their daily lives.

Text in Transit is a subsiduary of the pilot Edmonton Research Project, which examines the wealth of texts circulating at the local level. Through a study of what people here, in Edmonton, are reading today, in 2004, we can situate our city and its population amid readership of the world at large. The Text in Transit site utilizes the Streetprint Engine, also developed in the CRC Humanities Computing Studio, to best catalogue and present visual and textual information about genre and popular literature, in a highly accessible and dynamic format.


DIGITIZATION PROCEDURES