Description: The focus of this project is to begin development at Reed of "electronic texts," i.e., online texts which are annotated through hypermedia links. The technology for creating such texts is already available and is being used for scholarly research. The creation of electronic texts by (and for) undergraduates as part of their curricular studies, however, is still in its infancy. The ability to scan a text electronically, to perform lexical, syntactic, and stylistic analyses, and to follow links within the text to related works, criticism, and other background materials, opens up new strategies for close reading that can be used to augment &endash;&endash; though not to replace &endash;&endash; traditional methods.
Many of my ideas about using this technology in literary education were sparked by attending the sixth annual summer seminar on electronic texts in the humanities at Princeton University, sponsored by the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH). The handbooks accompanying the seminar are thorough and detailed, addresses of pertinent web pages are easy to find, and the personnel at CETH, especially the Director, Susan Hockey, and Reed alumnus Willard McCarty of King's College, London, have promised to be generous with their counsel and support. Moreover, the hands-on electronic textual analysis that I was able to engage in convinces me that students of literature should find it useful to look at textual patterns which computerized analysis makes (sometimes uniquely) visible.
Implementation Plan
During the summer of 1997, I will devote full time and attention to learning and evaluating text markup and analysis software. As of this writing, the most promising markup programs appear to be SoftQuad's SGML Editor and possibly BBEdit's less specific but highly versatile text editor, now in an update of its fourth version; the most likely text analysis software seems to include Michael Barlow's Monoconc and Paraconc, the University of Toronto's TACT, and two Oxford University Press programs, OCP (a batch processor) and WordSmith Tools (recently given a good review in Computers and Texts, Number 12). I've also begun learning Icon, a good language for string analysis, and may see whether I can cobble together a few primitive tools of my own. Early in the fall semester of 1997, I will offer a workshop for interested students and colleagues, in which I will explain and demonstrate the basics of textual markup and analysis.
In the spring of 1998, I will make at least two texts available for electronic analysis by students, probably in a new version of English 374. Depending on hardware and software availability and compatability, this analysis may be more or less primitive: some Macintosh software exists, but the best software seems to run exclusively on Intel or Unix machines.
I will invite Willard McCarty to give a lecture and seminar sometime during the academic year 1997-98. Before Willard arrives, I will have given the above-mentioned workshop, so at least some members of his audience should be modestly well-informed about his topic. Willard has a contract with Princeton University Press to publish his onomasticon on Ovid's Metamorphoses in both conventional format and CD-ROM (projected publication date, 1997). I'll expect his lecture to talk about that work and its results and implications for our understanding of Ovid; I'll expect his workshop to provide us with practical advice on how to integrate electronic textual analysis into the curriculum.
As a by-product of the project, I hope to address several broad questions: