Honors Research Seminar

2016-2017

Long before the Internet made it easy for anyone to write stories and circulate them, many people wrote short stories, plays, and even full novels by hand and shared them with their friends and family. By luck, some of these works survive in archives all over the world, hiding in recipe books, stacks of letters, and even government documents. Participants will help to create the first database collecting this material into one publicly accessible digital archive. This course will give students in allied majors or minors material for their honors senior year experience (thesis), and students from across the University transferrable skills. Course is one grade for the year to be given at end of Spring term (if needed, Dr. Friedman will provide letters of reference for students applying to graduate school during this course). Interested students will have the opportunity to present their work at a national conference and co-author articles with Dr. Friedman.

Honors Research Seminar: Projects

Course Details

About

In addition, visitors from a variety of digital projects from around the country
will join us in person and via Skype throughout the year!

Assignments will be scaffolded, including:
Informal Work:
Reflective Writing
Practice Assignments:
Transcriptions (old school but really important transformation of handwriting into digital text)
TEI Markup (you will learn best practices in coding text for preservation)
Metadata tagging
Formal Final Portfolio
Formal transcriptions with metadata tags
Conference Paper length presentation on provenance of a single text suitable for AU Research Week and external conferences

Assigned Texts:
Class will begin with a discussion of Nicholas Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, and the CLIR report The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections (Online)
We will read essays from Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists
We will read Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (2013)
In order to situate you in the "rise" of the novel, we will read Spacks' Novel Beginnings, which is WAY overpriced new but available for less than the price of a delivery pizza on Amazon and the other usual suspects.
I will also help each participant select one work of fiction to read independently from either the eighteenth-century, the Romantic era, or the Victorian lists of Broadview Press editions. I will ask that you select a work of prose fiction from between 1740 and 1870.

Readings May Include Excerpts From:
Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, and/or Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.
St Clair, Reading Nation in the Romantic Period
Brewer, The Afterlife of Character
Jack, The Woman Reader
Schmid, British literary salons of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
Flint, The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Pearson, Women's reading in Britain, 1750-1835 : a dangerous recreation.
De Ritter, Imagining women readers, 1789-1820 : well-regulated minds.
Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell, Eds. Encounters in the Victorian press : editors, authors, readers.
Caroline Franklin, E.J. Clery, Peter Garside, Eds. Authorship, commerce, and the public : scenes of writing, 1750-1850.
McCarthy, Relationships of sympathy : the writer and the reader in British romanticism
Bigold, Women of letters, manuscript circulation, and print afterlives in the eighteenth century : Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, and Elizabeth Carter.
George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker, Eds. Women's writing and the circulation of ideas : manuscript publication in England, 1550-1800.
Schellenberg, The professionalization of women writers in eighteenth-century Britain.

Tentative Course Schedule

Fall Semester 2016

Week 1: Introduction to course, discussion of expectations and student reading experience
Week 2: Discussion of History of Reading
Week 3: Discussion of Eighteenth-Century Reading Practices
Week 4: Discussion of Nineteenth-Century Reading Practices
Week 5: Introductory Special Collections Visit with Greg Schmidt / Paleography Intro
Week 6: Paleography exercises [National Archive/Cambridge] [in class with samples]
Week 7: Transcription exercises
Week 8: Begin Transcriptions
Week 9: Continue Transcription, Discussion of transcription challenges
Week 10: Continue Transcription, Discussion of Digital Resources
Week 11: Introduction to TEI Encoding (XML)
Week 12: Transcription/TEI Encoding (all transcription from here will be into TEI-compliant XML)
Week 13: Introduction to Metadata tagging with specialist Dana Caudle
Week 14: Transcription and Metadata tagging
Week 15: Thanksgiving
Week 16: Group Assessment of Progress, Revision to Data Dictionary and/or Plan of Work

Spring Semester 2017

Week 1: Re-Group
Week 2: Transcription and Metadata tagging
Week 3: Transcription and Metadata tagging
Week 4: Transcription and Metadata tagging
Week 5: Transcription and Metadata tagging
Week 6: Transcription and Metadata tagging
Week 7: Student Selection of Texts to Investigate
Week 8: Provenance Research Methods (ODNB, National Archives, etc.)
Week 9: Guided Reading Assigned to Small Student Groups
Week 10: Provenance Research
Week 11: Spring Break
Week 12: Provenance Research
Week 13: Drafts of Provenance Conference Papers Due, Peer Review
Week 14: Dry Run of Conference Presentations and Critiques
Week 15: Dry Run of Conference Presentations and Critiques
Week 16: Presentations to Stakeholders

Honors Research Seminar: About