UPDATE: This now being done via The Scott Polar Research Institute, here.
So: a few days ago I wrote about my ambition to ‘blog’ the entries of the Journal of Captain Scott, in sync with the present day calendar. I am getting twitterfeed to post to a twitter account (http://twitter.com/scottslastexp) as well, so you can follow in a couple of ways.
Nothing much happens until November really, but I have been thinking about what else to do with this idea, and have reached a few conclusions. I had thought it would be fun to post contemporary newspaper reports, also in sync, but have finally decided against this. There is a wonderful project to be attempted, bringing all the cuttings together, but I realised that the key thing I am trying to find out about here is whether new ways of reading books can shed new light on old books.
Hugh McGuire of BookOven has written about ‘hybrid readers’, of which I am one. I can read the same book in several ways; from the screen of my iPod, via an audiobook on the way to work, from the computer screen during lunch, from a nice book-book volume beside my bed before sleeping.
The traditional idea of how one ‘should’ read a book seems to involve a fireside and four hours of unbroken silence. (The only person I know who reads in this way is my 11-year-old daughter, who can read with unbroken concentration in the midst of chaos.) As idyllic as this picture seems, with the grandfather clock ticking approvingly in the corner, is it not possible that we miss something by reading like that?
Listening to an audiobook of a challenging work, if the reader really knows the text, can open up meanings which one can miss reading alone in silence, just as a good performance of a Shakespeare play offers interpretations of lines we would never have thought of.
And if we have a story which took two years to play out, how much could we gain from reading it over two years?
So, I will add photos from the original book, and wikipedia links where necessary, and where Scott gives a location, I will give a link to Google Earth. But, other than that, I think I should leave the book intact, and see what happens. The only other disservice I can inflict it to record each entry, and release it as a podcast, and at the end donate the whole recoding to LibriVox. Still deciding about that bit – all that recording…
