The World Hobbit Project Database

The World Hobbit Project (2013-4) was a major collaborative effort involving researchers in 46 countries, designed to gather audience responses to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of JRR Tolkien’s book from across the world. Enabled by a small grant from the British Academy (to whom we acknowledge our thanks), the project garnered responses to an online questionnaire which was designed using the same basic ‘qualiquant’ methodology as the earlier Lord of the Rings international project. A total of just over 36, 000 completions were gathered, and stored in a searchable database. We are now making this database available to other researchers who may wish to use it. We ask only that due acknowledgement of the source of any data you gain from using this, to be properly acknowledged in any presentation or publication. Any queries about this, or about other matters relating to the questionnaire/database, should be addressed to the Project’s overall coordinator, Martin Barker, at: [e-mail]. The Project was centred around one key question, from which five subsidiary ones flowed: how do films which originate as an English children’s story acquire meaning and value for different audiences across the world? Within this broad question, we asked: 1) How are responses to The Hobbit related to age, sex, income, nationality and reading experience? 2) How does wider knowledge (eg, of Tolkien’s work, of Jackson’s films) affect people’s engagements? 3) How are vernacular labellings of the film patterned, and how do these relate to interpretive strategies (for example, to recalling and valuing particular elements of the story)? 4) How do different audiences relate their responses to wider (real, virtual or imagined) communities? 5) What criteria undergird different evaluations of the film, and how are these evidenced within responses? It will be seen from these questions that this Project was not hypothesis-driven. Rather, it was designed to elicit a richly structured combination of data and discourses. This of course means that it retains potential for further discoveries and knowledge, beyond what has already been extracted by members of the Project’s network. A good deal has been published from the Project by a number of its participant researchers. The largest collection of these can be found in a Special Issue of the journal Participations (Volume 13:2, 2016) at www.participations.org. A broad summary of the Project’s intentions, methodology, and initial findings can be found there in the Issue’s Introduction. Available here are: a) A copy of the Questionnaire, with indications (for all multiple-choice questions) as to the ways in which answers are coded (numerically or alphabetically) within the database. b) The entire database, in EXCEL and ACCESS formats, of the responses to our Questionnaire.

世界霍比特人项目（2013—2014年）是一项覆盖46个国家研究者的大型协作研究项目，旨在收集全球受众对彼得·杰克逊（Peter Jackson）改编自J.R.R.托尔金（JRR Tolkien）原著的三部曲电影的反馈。本项目获英国学术院（British Academy）小额资助，在此谨致谢忱。项目采用与此前《指环王》（The Lord of the Rings）国际项目一致的“定性定量混合（qualiquant）”研究方法，设计并发放了在线问卷，最终共收集到逾3.6万份有效问卷，并存入可检索数据库中。
现我们将该数据库对外开放，供其他有使用需求的研究者使用。我们仅要求，若您使用本数据库获取相关数据，请在所有汇报或发表成果中对数据来源予以恰当标注致谢。若您对此项目、问卷或数据库有任何疑问，请联系项目总协调人马丁·巴克（Martin Barker），邮箱：[e-mail]。
本项目以一个核心问题为核心，由此衍生出五个子问题：源自英语儿童文学作品的电影，如何为全球不同受众赋予意义与价值？围绕这一核心问题，我们提出如下五个子问题：
1. 观众对《霍比特人》的反馈与其年龄、性别、收入、国籍及阅读经历存在何种关联？
2. 更广泛的相关知识（例如对托尔金作品、杰克逊电影的了解）如何影响受众的观影参与度？
3. 该电影的本土通俗称谓有何分布规律？这些称谓与解读策略（例如对故事特定元素的回忆与评价）存在何种关联？
4. 不同受众如何将自身反馈与更广泛的（现实、虚拟或想象中的）社群建立关联？
5. 支撑受众对该电影产生差异化评价的评判标准是什么？这些标准在反馈中如何体现？
从上述问题可见，本项目并非以假设为导向，而是旨在获取兼具结构化特征的数据与话语资料。这无疑意味着，相较于项目团队成员已挖掘出的成果，本数据库仍具备进一步探索并获取新知的潜力。
项目的诸多参与研究者已基于本项目产出了大量学术成果，其中最完整的成果合集刊载于《参与》（Participations）期刊2016年第13卷第2期特刊，网址为www.participations.org。该特刊的引言部分对本项目的研究宗旨、方法与初步发现进行了全面概述。
本页面可供下载的资源包括：
a) 问卷原件，其中标注了所有选择题的答案编码规则（数据库内以数字或字母形式编码）；
b) 所有问卷反馈的完整数据库，包含Excel与Access两种格式。