Monthly Topic Challenges aren't getting much attention. How can we change them?

Question

Monthly topic challenges on Lit.SE don't get a whole lot of attention. Christopher Strobbe rightfully points out that participation has been almost negligible in recent months. This is in spite of overall site participation on the site remaining relatively constant.

One of the major difficulties with a monthly challenge is just in reading speed. Lit.SE participation is something a lot of us do in our free time, and having the investment to acquire and finish a book within the specified time frame, when most of us either don't have time to read or are busy reading other books, is... high. This also normalizes non-participation: since it's difficult to ask questions within the allotted time, and you get no credit for missing the window even by a day, it becomes more normal to avoid topic challenges entirely. (It's even more worrying to me that people might learn to ignore changes to the sidebar entirely.)

I think we can revisit the actual aim of the topic challenge, though, without normalizing non-participation. The original desire for the topic challenge wasn't just to drive activity to the site; it was to provide a list of recommendations outside our usual reading to help bring diversity and variability in literature to light.

So: can we fulfill this aim in another way?

The general social requirements on this are:

1. It has to be difficult to normalize non-participation. Once people start feeling like it's normal not to join in the challenge, that's a problem.
2. It has to be relatively easy to have discourse about. The disadvantage of the Q&A format is that most of us aren't academic essayists, and formulating a good question and good answer is a snippet of factual information exchange. We really need something we can talk about meaningfully.
3. It has to encourage highlighting unique, diverse, and variable works, as with the standard topic challenge.

---

I'm open to ideas here, but I have one of my own.

We replace the "topic challenge" with a Lit.SE Reading Recommendation List. At first, the list comprises every book that has been a topic challenge to date. To add books, at set intervals, we either: hold a small vote; or just select a top voted response. Then we add it to the list of reading recommendations with a date. This part should hopefully drive discussion by itself.

We can even expand this to fiction, nonfiction, essays, critical theory books, etc. -- not just literature, but also content that helps when trying to approach literature, like Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison.

There's no time pressure to pick these up, there's no expiration date past which you fail to get credit. Maybe if you want, you can list yourself as having read that book in the recommendations list, but it doesn't really matter when you do it.

This allows us to compile the kind of compendium of diverse reading that could really help the site, and encourages interesting & deep questions. There's no pressure to ask a question; there's no failure if you don't. But the books are interesting and you found them here, so if you have questions, why not?

Totally open to other ideas, though. I'm mostly sketching this one out to see how it floats.

Answer 1

Rather than replacing the topic challenges with something else, I would like to think about ways to attract more activity.

As others have pointed out, one of the "challenges" (sorry for the pun) is that it can be hard to find the suggested literature and read it in time within a month. This is probably why one of our most successful challenges, by number of questions, was Nalo Hopkinson in August 2018: a dozen of the author's stories could be read online, so there was no need to order books and read through hundreds of pages. This leads to the following suggestions:

1. Post more proposals for shorter works that are available online. This makes the proposal more accessible to everyone. The potential downside to this suggestion is that it may be harder to find find non-English texts, especially non-English texts that are also available in an English translation, especially online, unless the content is so old that it is in the public domain.
2. So far, we have always decided the topic of the reading challenge on the first day of the month, which means that people have at most 31 days (sometimes only 28) to find and read the proposed texts. To mitigate this, we might start announcing the next reading challenge one month in advance. This would give people much more time to find those texts.
3. We can also extend the duration of reading challenges from one month to, e.g., two months. The obvious downside is that if you're not interested in a challenge, you're stuck with it for two months. But since participation is purely voluntary, this shouldn't be a big deal.
4. Combining Gallifreyan's last suggestion with my last suggestion, we could have two (or more?) challenges running at the same time, with some overlap in time: e.g. topic A starts in January and runs for two months, topic B starts in February and runs for two months, topic C starts in March and runs for two months etc. So there is a fresh challenge every month and there should be sufficient time to participate in it.

Update: I would also like to add this quote from How do weekly topic challenges work? on Meta SE (emphasis mine):

After the challenge is over, it's nice to write up a simple answer that enumerates the questions generated. There's a danger here, however. If you only get one or two questions (or zero!), you might be tempted to call the challenge a failure. But think of it more like playing poker: you have to lose a few hands in order to win others.

Answer 2

Since two of the answers that have been posted so far focused more on why some recent monthly challenges attracted little activity than on concrete (i.e. explaining how to implement them) proposals for addressing the issue, I am posting another proposal as an alternative to my previous answer. This proposal is intended to address the following issues that were raised in other answers and comments, especially the following:

• Some of the challenges were about works that are rather long. Some people say they would contribute more when challenges focuses on short stories or poems.
• Some of the challenges were about works that are hard to find in a library. Challenges that focus on works that are available online may attract a bigger audience.
• Some (or many?) of the challenges focused on works or authors that are too far out of the way for an audience that reads fiction mostly in English. (Of course, addressing this issue strictly speaking creates a conflict with the original goal of reading "books outside our bailiwick", but the proposal below describes a compromise. I also realise it is not strictly about English versus other languages, since some proposals for English-language fiction from outside the Western world also have problems to get selected.)
• The topic challenges about Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and about Ursula K. Le Guin were atypical in the sense that the goal of the challenges was to suggest works and authors that were not already popular among the current audience, which focuses mostly on literature in English. See for example the following comment on the Blake proposal: "In my mind, William Blake is very similar to a lot of the authors we already have questions about on the site. And he seems pretty well known to me." Another comment on the Emily Dickinson proposal is in the same vein: "I don't think a well-known American poet is really in the spirit of the topic challenges."

So here is my proposal:

1. We create a new list or meta post for reading suggestions, but this time for works or authors that meet at least two of the following criteria:
   • The work or works must be available in English (translations are OK).
   • The work must be available online. If an author is proposed, at least one of their works must be available online.
   • The work or works must be short, i.e. one should be able to read the work in at most two hours without speed-reading techniques (or an audiobook at an increased speech rate).
2. The new list does not replace the current list but complements it: each month, we alternate between both lists, e.g. "classic" challenges start at the beginning of the odd months, while "popular" challenges start at the beginning of even months.
3. Each challenge runs for two months, so works that are hard to find or long (especially for the "classic" challenges) can still be read and discussed before the end of the challenge.

The new category of challenges would welcome suggestions for authors such as Emily Dickinson, William Blake and Ursula Le Guin (see above) without creating a conflict with the original goal of the monthly challenges. Participants who want to read works they had not previously not considered reading will continue to find suggestions. At the same time, participants who prefer more "accessible" works (which is by no means intended as a depreciatory description) will also find suggestions to their taste.

Beyond that, I don't think that anything else needs to change. However, if we choose new names for the "classic" and "popular" challenges (these are just temporary names), we should take care that those names are not perceived as stigmatising or denigrating. In addition, it should still be perfectly OK not to participate in a reading challenge (which is something that the current challenges already point out).

Answer 3

I think one of the reasons here lies in the way the challenges were framed and the intention they were founded on. The idea was to diversify the site, to make people read something they wouldn't have read otherwise, and maybe have some questions about it here.

There are a few things I could think of:

1. The books proposed so far haven't been the easiest books to find - some of them were, true, and some were even online for free, but even having a pretty well-stocked university library I couldn't get some of those books.

2. They weren't the shortest books around. True, a good book is as long as it has to be, but it's hard to consume a 400+ page tome, understand it, and think of good questions to ask, all in one month.

3. It's just hard to pick up a book one hasn't heard about at all, and read it completely, especially if it's completely unlike anything one has read before. I realise this was exactly the point of the challenge - to step out of the comfort zone and boundaries of the cultures we've been brought up in and lived in - but it's still hard.

I like the idea of the challenges. I loved how the first ones were a success, and none of them were a failure at all - at the very least my university's library got a few books it never had, and, hopefully, someone else will read them. But we could do something about the challenge to make it more accessible.

For instance, instead of choosing a single book, we could have a few, but narrower challenges - e.g. one of them would be a book, like it is now; the other would be a genre; another could be an author (maybe a well-known author, but instead of reading their works we're reading something that's like their work in some ways); another could be about an academic paper discussing a movement in literature (this would attract some experts here).

Having multiple challenges lowers the threshold - there's a higher chance someone will actually find the book, there's a higher chance they'll like it. I think it's a bit more welcoming when there's a sort of "pick what you like" approach to the challenge.

Answer 4

I have participated in them in the past, but I haven't participated in them in awhile for the primary reason that the books that have been selected recently aren't interesting to me.

As the original post indicates, I tend to be quite busy (I'm working full-time and getting a graduate degree part-time), so given my limited time I have to be somewhat selective in what I read. I almost feel bad for saying this, but odds are I would not read a book just because it's this month's topic challenge (unless it was something that's interesting to me for other reasons, too). The topic challenges I've participated in in the past have all been the kind of book I like to read anyway but wouldn't necessarily have thought of reading (e.g. Michael Ende, the Wizard of Earthsea series) or have been something that I felt I would benefit from reading anyway (e.g. William Blake's poetry).

It's also very helpful if there's an audiobook version available of the title in question, since I do spend a fair amount of time driving for my job.

Traditionally, in proposing and voting on Meta proposals, we've considered what kind of book the site would benefit from having questions on. The current highest-voted question starts with the following sentence: "Since this site needs more questions about non-Western literature, here is another author challenge." This isn't necessarily wrong, but the proposal doesn't really consider the likelihood that people would actually benefit from and enjoy reading the book. (I've probably been just as guilty of that as anyone, come to think of it). Going forward, in writing and voting on proposals, we should consider the actual likelihood that people would be interested in reading the book.

The William Blake challenge was a perfect example for me. I wouldn't necessarily have read that on my own, and poetry isn't really my typical genre, but I thought that I would benefit from reading it and it and there's a free audiobook available of the songs of innocence and experience. Participating in it was a good challenge for me, and I actually enjoyed the poems.

Answer 5

I have already posted two proposals to increase participation in the monthly topic challenges. This third proposal takes a different approach, with the explicit goal of promoting literature in languages other than English.

1. Instead of one list of suggestions, we use two lists: one for literature in English and one for literature in other languages. There will always be two challenges running in parallel, i.e. one for a work or author from English literature, and one from a non-English literature.
2. Each suggestion is for a challenge that will run for two months, unless the submitter proposes a shorter time span, i.e. one month or two weeks. This allows the duration of the challenge to be somewhat adapted to the nature of the chosen work or works. It also means that a "longer" challenge may be running in parallel with a "shorter" challenge.
3. Two weeks before the end of a challenge, the next one from the same category is selected from the same list or category based on net upvotes. This means that each new challenge can be announced two weeks in advance.
4. For non-English literature, the availability of an English translation is an advantage but not a requirement. It should be possible to discuss literature that has never been translated into English.

Answer 6

"Every thing hath ende", and maybe the "Monthly Topic Challenge" has run its course, at least for now. I suggest trying something different for a while and see if it works. My suggestion is this:

---

Regularly choose a short poem (story, lyric, essay, etc.) that's available in full online and post a generic question asking for interpretation and analysis, perhaps something along the lines of, "What is this work about? What literary and rhetorical devices does the writer use? What are its difficult aspects and how can they be interpreted?"

---

The reasoning behind this idea:

• The goals of the "Monthly Topic Challenge" seem to be (1) Promote shared experiences, that is, situations in which everyone is reading a text at the same time, like a book club; (2) Persuade site participants to read more diverse range of texts; (3) Promote more, and more diverse, site activity (that is, questions and answers). But (2) is in tension with (1) and (3) — simply telling people to read more challenging texts is inevitably going to lower the participation rate.
• Hence this proposal avoids the main difficulty, which is reading the work and coming up with questions. A generic question can always be posted in Main right away.
• My hope is that this question will tempt people into reading the chosen text, and that this will work better than telling them to do so. (This is based on my own experience: I've read a lot of texts because I saw an interesting question about them on Main, but never read any of the texts I was told to read in the "Monthly Topic Challenge".)
• Posting a question in Main also avoids the difficulty of discovering that the challenge even exists (see comments by Spagirl starting here). We could also use a tag to identify these questions, or encourage answers in the usual way by offering a bounty.
• Requiring the work to be short and available online makes it possible for anyone to have a go at answering the question.
• Interpretations are the most interesting and valuable kinds of answers on the site and I would like to see more of them.
• Scholars tend only to interpret the works of a few famous writers, leaving a large literature available for original interpretation.
• Questions of this form have worked well on the site in the past. See for example: "The Sick Rose" by William Blake; "Fire Is Not a Nice Guest" by Russell Edson; "No Ordinary Sun" by Hone Tuwhare; "Praxis" by Wendy Xu.
• There's no need for someone to collate the responses, as currently required for the "Monthly Topic Challenge"; instead, the Stack Exchange software will do it for us.

Answering the questions of Christophe Strobbe in comments:

1. I would be very happy to see a diverse range of works chosen for interpretation.
2. Since this is a community activity, the works should be chosen by polling the community. I don't have any strong opinion on how this should be done.
3. Questions posted as a result of this idea will persist until they are closed, or for the lifetime of the site if not. I don't have any strong opinion about the frequency of these questions. It all depends on how well they turn out to work in practice. If people are very enthusiastic, then I can see them working as often as weekly; if moderately keen, then fortnightly or monthly; if not keen at all then we should abandon the idea and try something else.