The Golden Notebook is an experiment in close-reading in which seven women are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins. The project went live in November 2008.
The project is part of a long-term effort to encourage and enable a culture of collaborative learning.
The aim of the project was to try to understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and to help us learn some of what we need to do to make this sort of collaboration as successful as possible.
Seven women were chosen to read the book and then comment in the margins. The readers were Naomi Alderman, Nona Willis Aronowitz, Laura Kipnis, Philippa Levine, Lenelle Mo, Helen Oyeyemi and Harriet Rubin.
Harper Collins made the book available for free online and the readers carried out their conversation – and plotted their thoughts – over a period of approximately 5-6 weeks.