Do we want something akin to topic challenges for books outside our bailiwick, to help alleviate the book diversity problem?

Question

Our site's growing a bit of a diversity problem. Most of us have read many of the same books, and so many of the questions we get are... about those books specifically. The top site tags betrays this bias: look past the generic tags, and you run face-first into George Orwell, 1984, Sherlock Holmes, JRR Tolkien, Arthur Conan Doyle, Harper Lee, William Golding, and Shakespeare.

This bias is derivative from the culture in which most of us grew up. Even across country lines, in English-speaking countries, many of the books that are considered "important" and "literary" are shared. We also may or may not be pulling some to much of this from Scifi Stack Exchange.

But there's a whole lot of literature out there sitting in topics we're not even touching. It's not that we're intentionally avoiding those areas - it's just that the way we've been taught to read has passively encouraged us to avoid books that are too far out from what we're used to. And the body of works that are deemed "classic" and "literary" by our culture is, despite its harsh limitation, so broad that one could spend decades reading and still not finish.

This is an issue for our site. Ultimately, a literature site is best served by being multicultural and pluralistic, rather than beset by an unconscious, unintentional, and very historical bias toward one category alone. Hamlet has remarked that this narrowing could be a serious risk to the site's health if it goes unaddressed, I think they may be correct.

There's hardly going to be a quick fix... but I had an idea. At least as first steps.

A lot of sites have topic challenges. These sites have a meta post where people answer with suggestions for what the next topic challenge could be, and when the next one rolls around, the top answer is picked and a new topic challenge is born. For the duration of the challenge, people post questions and answers pertaining to it.

I'm thinking of a variation of this for Literature.SE. How about we create a topic challenge dedicated specifically to content that fall well outside of what we normally read? Each month (month? discuss:), we pick the top answer, which has been selected by the community for its diversification, either culturally, structurally, or really in any positive way, and those of us who wish to do so go ahead and read it. It can be anything - oral tradition, mythology, fantasy, philosophy, you name it - as long as there's enough there to reasonably fill a casual month with reading, it's good.

We'd want to strongly encourage people to upvote books different than what they normally read, and to let be in peace answers that are pretty similar to books they've read in the past. We'd also want, perhaps, to encourage content that's challenging to understand.

There would be very few good reasons to downvote suggestions - maybe if they weren't large enough to reasonably fill a month, or if it's excessively difficult to get ahold of a copy of the book, or if it's not just hard but downright inaccessible as a text from outside the culture. (Though we have to be careful - books from different cultures are a priori harder both to get ahold of and to understand. We don't want to end up discouraging them.)

I think this is, at minimum, a good step toward addressing the quiet and surreptitious narrowing of the scope of the site. At the very minimum, actually getting our hands on multicultural books is the first step in learning how to handle and talk about these issues better, so it has to be our starting point.

What are your thoughts?

Answer 1

I like it. I like it a lot. I look forward to seeing more Rūmī (13th-century Persian poet) and Albert Wendt (contemporary Samoan poet and novelist) on the site!

But I'd like to add that building a diverse and multicultural scope must include more than seeking out the "important" works from other cultures: simultaneously we need to also seek out marginalised works that haven't made it into the literary canon. Many of the works we're asking questions about, we know because knowing them is a signal of good repute. It impresses people if we can reference Robert Frost, and recognising a Tolkien quote signals that we're part of the same clan as the person who recited it.

I encourage us to look outside the sphere of referential reputation in whatever culture we cast our gaze upon. Maybe nobody will get erudition points for quoting Robert Hayden (though we should; he was a notable Poet Laureate) but his poems are powerful and challenging and it will be rewarding to study them all the same. And maybe it's not a cultural touchstone, but I really want to read The Sea is Ours (an anthology of Southeast Asian steampunk stories by Southeast Asian authors) because it's part of a brand-new, consciously cultivated subgenre that's fascinating to watch grow in real time.

Of course, this isn't to say we shouldn't be reading Iraj Pezeškzâd (author of one of the most beloved Iranian novels in the last fifty years) or Kazuo Ishiguro (award-winning Japanese-British novelist) also. Just a reminder that important and acclaimed works are often a narrow and biased sample of the true richness a culture's literary abundance can offer, and we should work to look past cultural curation--both outside the cultures we're familiar with, and also within our own cultures.

Answer 2

Let me put it this way. At one point today, 90% of the questions on our homepage were about two books: 1984 and Lord of the Flies.

That's fine if you only want to read and ask questions about 1984 and Lord of the Flies. But what if you don't like those books and want to talk about something different? Given how many different stories exists, it's highly unlikely that those are the only books everyone wants to talk about. Personally, if I didn't know about the site and I saw the homepage today, I would have no interest in joining the site.

Here's an idea for all of us to consider. If someone isn't interested in discussing 1984 or Lord of the Flies (or the five or six books that make up most of the questions on this site), there should be other questions for that person to discuss that are visible on the homepage.

This meta post is a specific suggestion to address a broad issue. Topic challenges are a great idea and we should absolutely implement them. Everyone should participate. They'll be really fun. If you're motivated by fake Internet points, I'll even promise to give out bounties to those who participate.

But let's not ignore the larger issue, and let's take steps, both individually and collectively, to address it.

Answer 3

Yes.

This is a Good Idea. I've taken part in the Puzzling FTCs, and they've opened up my puzzling to include stuff I never would have known about. This site needs diversity even more.

The trouble is, what kind of topic challenge? Ignoring the time part for now, we have several options:

• Specific book

  This would be a topic challenge about a specific book/series, such as Fizz & Peppers at the Bottom of the World by M. G. King. This would inspire questions about books that nobody has heard of (how many of you heard of the book I just mentioned?)

• Author

  This would be a topic challenge about a specific author, such as Grant Morris (author of Deacon Leeds and the Pyramid of Symbols). This would have us reading things that, again, nobody knows. (Again: who's heard of him?)

• Genre

  This would not be poetry, short-stories, etc. This would be like science fiction/fantasy, epic poetry, reality fiction, etc. This would get users (like me) who tend to read a specific genre (in my case, SFF) and... not much else. This would help open up horizons.

• Media type

  This would be poetry, short-stories, and tags-like-that. This would help users who (again, like me,) tend to read a specific type of media (in my case, novels).

All of these types have merits. They each open things up in different ways. However, this is, IMO, the best option:

• All of them

  We can do all of these things as topic challenges! It's the best of all worlds! I really liked when Puzzling decided to allows FTCs that weren't just tags - and we can allow lots of things here. This way, we can all open up our horizons in lots of ways.

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_{P.S.
We should reuse topic challenges for things like media type/genre, but not for author/work.}

Answer 4

Each month (month? discuss:), we pick the top answer, which has been selected by the community for its diversification, either culturally, structurally, or really in any positive way, and those of us who wish to do so go ahead and read it. It can be anything - oral tradition, mythology, fantasy, philosophy, you name it - as long as there's enough there to reasonably fill a casual month with reading, it's good.

Here are some proposed guidelines for selecting topics:

1. Let's only select topics that aren't already on-topic on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange. The rational for this being (a) that many members of this site are also members of SFF and presumably are already reading new SFF books on their own, and (b) this will allow us to further distinguish our site from the rest of the Stack Exchange network.

2. Let's select bodies of work where the stories/reading material are available for free online. That way no one will be left out if they can't access a physical copy of the material.

3. Let's avoid bodies of work that already have tags on this site (i.e. things that we're already talking about).

4. Let's avoid bodies of work that are commonly taught in the western education system (e.g. middle and high school in the US), since many people on this site will have been exposed to them.

5. In each topic challenge, we should list (a) short stories that introduce the topic, and (b) longer stories for people who want more. That way everyone can participate no matter how much time they have.

6. And obviously, let's choose bodies of work that will diversify the content on this site (i.e. genres, authors, time-periods, and cultures that we don't talk about often on the site).

Thoughts? Suggestions? Let me know in the comments, or write an answer of your own to propose different guidelines.

In case it wasn't clear, I used the word "guideline" for a reason. There aren't hard and fast rules: these are just some guidelines to (hopefully) make it easier to select bodies of work for topic challenges. If a proposed topic doesn't meet all of these guidelines, then that doesn't mean that the proposed topic will be rejected.