C20th British Novelists

We’ve joined the dots of the literary landscape of 20th century Britain with the team at the Open University to give learners the chance to discover the connections between 20th century novelists.

With 60 authors the data set covers shared genres, cultural themes, universities, jobs and awards among others, as well as the literary sets they belonged to, and the social relations they had with each other: who was related to whom, who married whom, who was taught by whom and who hated whom. In total this added up to a staggering 3500 connections!

As we always say, it’s difficult to make things simple. In this case we have an extremely complicated web of connections – that’s the whole fascination, but the complexity’s overwhelming in the raw. The key to making this project a success was taking the thousands of connections and combing out the tangles – organising the material to provoke curiosity and invite a deeper delve.

A huge part of the story of the British novel in the C20th is, of course, the Penguin paperback, so it’s no coincidence that we nod towards Jan Tschihold’s iconic designs in the type and colour choices. In many ways the web in C21st follows on from the paperback in the C20th: it’s fast, popular and accessible to most of us. Unlike a well-loved novel, though, in electronic media the text is too often the bit you end up skipping over to get to the glossy visuals. We knew that we wanted to create an experience sympathetic to reading, and with this in mind, we commissioned illustration to work like manuscript illumination, decorating the text rather than distracting attention.

The end result is a playful interactive, turning complex relationships into beautiful non-linear story of your own making.

Your story starts here.

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