Dear Friends and Colleagues:

About three months ago I posted a message to this list inviting subscribers
to participate in a large-scale online research project designed to gather
information about characters in British novels of the longer nineteenth
century.  The project was conceived by two literary scholars and two
psychologists (Joe Carroll, University of Missouri, St Louis; Jon
Gottschall, St. Lawrence University; John Johnson, Penn State University;
and Dan Kruger, University of Michigan) in hopes of addressing questions
relevant to both disciplines.  We asked scholars and avid readers to come to
our website and fill out questionnaires on any one of 2100 characters in 202
British novels, beginning with Austen and ending with Forster.  We are very
grateful to those of you who took the time to participate (while reminding
you that you are encouraged to fill out questionnaires on multiple
characters).
Appended below is my original posting, which describes our study in more
detail.  The website address is:
http://survey.ehap.isr.umich.edu/carroll-intro.html.
I am re-posting this material now in hopes of introducing our study to new
members of this list and bringing it to the attention of scholars who may
not have had the time for it in the heart of the semester.  Well over 1000
other readers have now participated in the study, and the more who do
participate, the more robust and interesting the findings will be.

Thank you very much,

Jonathan Gottschall
St. Lawrence University

ORIGINAL POSTING

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

            We would like to invite anyone who is interested in British
novels of the longer nineteenth century to participate in a collective
research project.  We are a research team consisting of two literary
scholars and two psychologists (Joe Carroll, Jon Gottschall, John Johnson,
and Dan Kruger).  We have put together a website questionnaire on about
2,100 characters from 202 novels—from Austen through Forster.
Here is the website address:
http://survey.ehap.isr.umich.edu/carroll-intro.html
            The novels are listed by author’s name, in alphabetical order,
and under the title of each novel we have listed a selection of
characters—an average of about ten characters per novel.   Participants can
fill out questionnaires on as few or as many characters in as few or as many
novels as they choose.  Filling out a questionnaire on a single character
usually takes less than five minutes.  All participation is anonymous.
Please feel free to distribute this URL to students, friends, and
colleagues.
            The questionnaire contains questions on each character’s
motives, personality, and agonistic status (protagonist/antagonist), on the
criteria the character uses for selecting a spouse or romantic partner, and
on your emotional response to the character.
The last ten questions on the questionnaire are designed to assess each
character on five major factors of personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness,
Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience.  After
you have filled out a questionnaire on a character, the program will provide
a graph that displays the results of your coding on those five factors.
            We have not set an ending date for the study.  We are opening
the website in January of 2005, and we anticipate that it will be open for
at least a year.  Once we have completed the study, we shall share our
findings with anyone who asks for them.  In the meantime, on the
questionnaire itself we shall provide a link to a page on which we shall
post the average results on all questions for all the characters in the
study, and we shall periodically update these averages.
This study is a type of "census" of vital statistics about the population of
"Victorian" literary characters—the first of its kind.  The "census-taker"
is you, the individual coder sitting at his or her computer.  Anyone who is
over 18 and who has read a Victorian novel is qualified to participate.
We want to gather information that will allow us systematically to answer
questions like the following: What features of characterization do males,
females, antagonists, protagonists, and other character types tend to share?
What exactly makes them different?  Do these features change much as we
cross historical boundaries?  How do these features vary by sex of author?
How about by sex or age of the interpreter?  What can consistent differences
between protagonists and antagonists tell us about the moral universe that
gave birth to the novels?  Do people generally agree about interpretation of
character?  Or are there large individual differences?  Can we do a better
job of answering certain literary questions by systematically gathering data
about reader response?  And, conversely, can literary works be mined as rich
sources of data for formal psychological studies?
These are just some of the important questions we hope to address in our
study. But we can't do it without your help.  Thank you in advance for your
assistance!

Sincerely,

Jonathan Gottschall
St. Lawrence University