How a Harry Potter Quiz Gave Back to Science

For all his triumphs, Harry Potter was seldom more than a “reasonably talented” student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. So I’m pleased to report that he can now pad his curriculum vitae with a contribution to new, original research in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality. This feather in Mr. Potter’s cap is the result of a partnership between TIME and social scientists at the University of Cambridge that shows a new way academics and journalists can work together. Here’s how it came about. In the spring of 2017, TIME was gearing up for the vaunted 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter novel, which hit shelves in the United Kingdom on June 26, 1997. In the course of bandying about ideas for a digital interactive to contribute to our coverage, we kept coming back to a quiz that would assign readers into one of the four Houses at Hogwarts: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or Slytherin. House assignments are a seminal part of the Harry Potter mythopoeia: On their first night, new Hogwarts students each don the talking Sorting Hat, an ancient wizard cap that probes students’ psyche and determines which of the four Houses best suits them. There was only one problem: There were already at least a dozen such quizzes out there, including one on Pottermore.com, J. K. Rowling’s official fan site for all things Potter. Still, I reread the Sorting Hat’s self-introduction in the first volume, in which it lays out...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Harry Potter interactive studios onetime social science University of Cambridge Source Type: news