Virtual Scholarship: Navigating Early Modern Studies on the
World Wide Web
Kevin Curran
McGill University
kevin.curran@mcgill.ca
Curran, Kevin. "Virtual Scholarship: Navigating
Early Modern Studies on the World Wide Web". Early Modern Literary
Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) 1.1-23 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/12-1/currvirt.htm>.
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The Internet has been a standard presence in the
academy for some time now, but the ever-increasing sense amongst academics
of having a professional obligation to put it to some use is relatively
recent. The question no longer seems to be, “Will I or will I not incorporate
Web-based resources into my teaching and research practices?” but rather,
“How will I incorporate Web-based resources into my teaching and
research practices?” This “how” is a challenging question, even for those
of us who are not new to the world of Humanities computing. As we all know,
even a cursory wander through the scholarly corners of the World Wide Web
turns up a dauntingly profuse array of sites, databases, glossaries, indexes,
texts, image-banks, and other online tools. The overwhelming impression
of copia can be particularly acute for individuals working in early
modern studies, a field that has been at the forefront of academia’s plunge
into cyberspace.
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So, where does one begin? What is out there? How much of it is useful, and in
what ways is it useful? This essay sets out to begin answering some of these
questions. Conceived loosely as a review article, it undertakes to discuss
a selection of freely-accessible, WWW resources for scholars of early modern
literature. It will comment on some of the specific ways in which WWW resources
are proving valuable to early modern studies and consider what new directions
Web-based scholarship might move in next. This article’s focus on free
websites inevitably excludes some large-scale electronic text repositories
from the discussion: for example, Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home)
and the Brown University Women Writers Project (http://www.wwp.brown.edu/).[1]
It should also be noted that the present article does not claim to provide
the exhaustive coverage of an annotated bibliography.[2] It seeks, rather, to establish
a core group of WWW resources that adequately represent the major uses to
which Web-based scholarship is being put. The article will, in addition,
comment on some of the practical, intellectual, and theoretical issues raised
by the use of the Internet in early modern studies and consider what kinds
of challenges these issues might pose to Humanities computing more generally.
Online Journals
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There are still very few peer-reviewed journals
which are available exclusively on the Internet and which are free of charge.
Those that do exist, however, are among the most frequently used resources
for early modernists currently available on the World Wide Web. Depending
on which one you are dealing with, online journals can foster extreme innovation
or be relatively conservative. Renaissance Forum, for instance, while
maintaining a high scholarly standard, tends to conform to the thematic
and formal norms of a traditional print journal, one which just happens
to be published online instead (http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/EL_Web/renforum/).
By contrast, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, edited
by Crystal Bartolovich and David Siar (http://eserver.org/emc/),
has from its inception attempted to engage with the cyber revolution of
which it is a part. Designed primarily to feature structured debates in
an essay-and-response format, this simple online resource is an excellent
example of how the immediacy and rapidity of electronic publication can
facilitate new functions for journals. The idea, the editors explain, is
“to create an online space for something like the active and on-going inquiry
of a good seminar.”[3]
No doubt, most of us find the idea of a dubious reader rapidly posting a
response to our work somewhat disconcerting; but we should not lose sight
of the pedagogical value of this kind of interaction. Online journals like
Early Modern Culture bring the intellectual banter of academics into
a forum where students (who are not normally present at our conferences
and colloquiums) can access it.
Electronic Texts
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Some of the uses to which the Internet has been
put in literary studies were foreseeable from the earliest days of Humanities
computing. The ability of computers to store large amounts of text combined
with the easy access afforded by the World Wide Web opened up a whole range
of new possibilities for disseminating primary-source materials. Richard
Bear was one of the first Renaissance enthusiasts to exploit these potentialities
in the service of creating an online text repository for early modern literature.
Although his pioneering Renascence Editions (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm)
does not claim to offer true scholarly editions, it is nevertheless
a gargantuan undertaking and provided the impetus for professional academics
to embark on their own electronic-text projects. I will be commenting on
some of these below.
- The obvious place to start this discussion is with Shakespeare, though
one will quickly find that while there is no shortage of Shakespeare resources
on the Internet, almost none of these are dedicated to providing comprehensive
and reliable online editions of his plays and poetry. One of the first Shakespeare
websites, The Works of the Bard (http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/%7Ematty/Shakespeare/),
is an exception, offering full texts of Shakespeare’s complete works, as well
as a slightly antiquated, though still useful, search engine.[4]
It should be said, however, that these texts are not editions per se,
but transcribed text files. Their reliability is limited and should not provide
the basis for any serious academic work on Shakespeare. It is with the nascent
Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) project (http://ise.uvic.ca/)
that we find the first concerted effort to present freely-accessible, online
texts of Shakespeare’s complete works which uphold the same rigorous standards
of scholarship displayed in trusted print editions like Arden, Cambridge,
and Oxford. The texts posted on the ISE website will be freshly
edited by well-known Renaissance scholars, under the direction of a prestigious
editorial board. The project will, no doubt, become a benchmark in
twenty-first century Shakespeare studies. For those who have used the ISE
website in the past, it will come as good news that a large-scale redesign
has recently reached completion.[5] The original version of
the site did the project an unfortunate disservice, being both visually unsophisticated
and difficult to navigate. Below are images of the old and new ISE
homepages (Figs. 1 and 2):
Fig. 1. Internet Shakespeare Editions (Old Version)
Fig. 2. Internet Shakespeare Editions (New Version)
Not only is the new version of the ISE interface easier to use
and organizationally more efficient, the aesthetic improvement goes much further
in reassuring users of the scholarly credibility of the ISE venture
as a whole. It seems to me vitally important that Web-based academic projects
- especially those seeking to set new standards for Internet scholarship -
avail themselves of expert design. (More on this topic later.)
- It is often in slightly smaller-scale endeavors that we encounter
some of the most impressive examples of what can be achieved in electronic
editing. As part of Ceres Online Publications Interactive (COPIA),
for instance, the Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service features
Andrew Zurcher’s Hap Hazard: A Manuscript Resource for Spenser Studies
(http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/haphazard/).
This site is home to a number of resources, including an edition-in-progress
of the Gonville and Caius College MS of A View of the Present State of
Ireland, complete with zoomable photographic reproductions of the manuscript
itself. However, the crown jewel of Hap Hazard has to be Zurcher’s
gathering of Spenser’s complete correspondences carried out between 1580 and
1589, the period during which the poet was secretary in Queen Elizabeth’s
administration in Ireland. This first-of-its-kind edited collection includes
an incisive introduction and a compendious bibliography. The letters themselves
have a shrewdly designed, multiple-window interface, allowing the user to
consult notes without having to jump continuously to and from the text (an
inconvenience of printed publication which electronic formats reproduce with
surprising frequency) (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. Hap Hazard: A Manuscript Resource for Spenser Studies
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Another example of a highly original and thoughtfully designed repository for
difficult-to-access material is Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae’s Early
Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources (Fig.
8), viewable at http://www.earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/index.html.
Bellany and McRae’s edition is the inaugural project in EMLS’s
“Texts Series.” Finally, for those interested in Humanistic writings of
the early modern period, the online Philological Museum of the
University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, overseen by Dana F.
Sutton and Martin Wiggins, holds a wide array of astutely edited English
and Latin texts, all presented in a neat, readable format, with critical
introductions, hyperlinked annotations and, in the case of the Latin texts,
English translations (http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/index.html).
The site also boasts an extraordinary “Analytic Bibliography of Online
Neo-Latin Titles” which presently contains an astounding 14,177 records
(http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/bibliography/index.htm).
Uses for the Database in Early Modern Studies
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The relentless endeavor to gather information (on
just about anything) and to store it has been going on since antiquity.
Indeed, it could be thought of as something of a human obsession, one which
the computer answered with a never-before-seen capacity for space, speed,
and precision. Storing data of various sorts in an electronic ‘base’ was
one of the first widespread applications to which computers were put, and
the concept seems to have lost none of its efficacy. The field of Renaissance
literature boasts a wide range of useful databases, freely accessible on
the Internet. These range from specialized catalogues, such as Adam Smyth’s
excellent Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640-1682 (http://www.adamsmyth.clara.net)[6]
and The Perdita Project’s expansive bibliography of manuscripts compiled
by early modern women (http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/perdita/index.html),
to large multimedia text and image archives.
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Ian Lancashire’s Early Modern English Dictionary Database (EMEDD)
is a superb example of how even a very basic database framework can - if
cleverly deployed – open up new avenues for conducting research (http://chass.utoronto.ca/english/emed/emedd.html).
EMEDD stores full texts of sixteen dictionaries and lexicons published
in England between 1500 and 1660. A quick, precise, and easy-to-use search
engine allows you to look for words in individual texts or in the database
as a whole. The EMEDD provides early modernists with a much-needed
supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, which can be etymologically
misleading in its preference for literary source material. The database
will be of particular interest to editors and textual scholars.
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In addition to traditional text databases, academics have found exciting ways
to enrich their electronic archives with multimedia design, especially visuals.[7] Certainly one of the most
extraordinary examples of this is the Records of Early English Drama
(REED) “Patrons and Performances Web Site” (http://link.library.utoronto.ca/reed/)
(Fig. 4).
Fig. 4. REED, “Patrons and Performances Website”
REED has since 1975 sought to compile and edit
all the extant documentation pertaining to drama, minstrelsy, and
public ceremony in England before 1642. Starting with York
in 1979, the project has published 25 volumes of dramatic records
extracted from the archives of English towns and counties. The idea
behind the “Patrons and Performances Web Site” is to transfer all
of these records into an electronic database. This process will be
reaching completion over the course of the year 2006, though even
the present pilot version of the database is impressively extensive.
The “Patrons and Performances Web Site” is fully searchable by patron,
event, venue, or acting troupe; it is supplemented with photographs,
portraits, and architectural diagrams, and it features expertly designed
interactive maps that allow the user to pinpoint performance venues
and to chart the itineraries of early performance troupes (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5. REED, “Patrons and Performances Website” (interactive map)
This database is a truly interdisciplinary
resource, one which admirably exploits the multimedia potentials of
the World Wide Web. The REED “Patrons and Performances Web Site”
is also, without a doubt, the richest repository of documentary evidence
pertaining to Renaissance theatre currently available on the Internet.
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There are a number of other databases on the World Wide Web that make fruitful
use of both text and image. The curious interplay between pictorial and
orthographic display in Renaissance emblem books beg just such a multimedia
interface. Answering this are several interesting databases dedicated to
emblem literature. One impressive example is The Minerva Britanna Project
(http://f01.middlebury.edu/FS010A/STUDENTS/index.htm),
an online edition of Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612). It
features scanned images of the complete text, shrewd commentaries on each
emblem, and a group of short critical essays. Extraordinarily, this website
and all of its contents was put together by the first-year students of Timothy
Billings’s seminar on “Emblem Literature” at Middlebury College: it stands
as a powerful reminder of the pedagogical uses to which multimedia design
can be put in the Humanities.
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Another noteworthy emblem-book database comprises the core of the Penn State
University English Emblem Book Project (http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/home.htm).
This website allows users to browse page-by-page through a choice of nine
early modern emblem books held at the Penn State University Library. It
includes a useful discussion on the role of emblem books in Renaissance
culture (pitched at undergraduate level), as well as a sizable list of print
and hypermedia resources for emblem studies. The website is, unfortunately,
poorly served by a cranky search engine which only allows for the most basic
queries. This is not too much of an obstacle at present since the database
is still relatively small and easy enough to browse manually. It may, however,
become aggravating as the database grows. (It will eventually hold a collection
of emblem books dating from the sixteenth all the way up to the nineteenth
century.)[8]
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Before closing this section on databases, I should mention the particularly remarkable
Digital Catalogue of Watermarks and Type Ornaments Used by William Stansby
in the Printing of “The Workes of Benjamin Jonson” (1616) (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/gants/Folio.html).
This highly specialized multimedia archive – currently nearing completion
- was constructed under the direction of David Gants at the Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, home to such
notable multimedia databases as The Abraham Cowley Text and Image Archive
(http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/kinney/)
and Ovid Illustrated: The Renaissance Reception of Ovid in Image and
Text (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/ovidillust.html).
As Gants explains in the “About This Project” section of the website, the
Digital Catalogue “aims to create a model archive for the storage
and circulation of material evidence concerning the printing industry in
late Tudor and early Stuart London.” The website is organized under a series
of menu headings dedicated to the different types of paper and printers’
ornaments used in the production of Jonson’s 1616 folio. There is also an
“Index to Works,” and a “Brief Biography” of Stansby. In the paper sections,
the user is presented with low-resolution images of the watermarks that
designate each paper-group (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6. Digital Catalogue of Watermarks and Type Ornaments Used by William
Stansby in the Printing of “The Workes of Benjamin Jonson” (1616)
Clicking on any watermark image brings
you to a detailed specifications page, listing the exact dimensions
of both watermark and paper. Beneath this is a list of the years
in which the given paper was used in Stansby’s shop; each year
is hyperlinked to an expanded bibliographical entry in the “Index
of Works” section. Simple, but shrewd. This is a database which,
despite its specialist content, is easy to use and, most importantly,
easy to learn from.
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No doubt one of the Internet’s most precious contributions
to scholarship of the early modern period has been in the field of manuscript
studies. While it is commonly held that an intimate understanding of early
modern literary culture is only possible if one becomes conversant with
the period’s various textual media, for many, learning about manuscript
writing presents a crux in that it is dependent upon either being fortunate
enough to work at or near one of the few institutions with a good early
modern manuscript collection or, alternatively, upon being able to secure
the time and grant money needed to visit those institutions. What we have
now, however, is a small group of websites that make it possible to consult
a selection of early modern manuscripts online. For anyone relying heavily
on manuscript sources in their research, these websites will not, of course,
alleviate the necessity of visiting the appropriate libraries and archives.
What they do offer is an invaluable opportunity for beginners to attain
a basic level of competency before setting off to consult actual manuscripts
in situ.
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Different manuscript websites offer different services.
If you simply want to consult manuscripts, Oxford University has an excellent
Early Manuscripts site which showcases a sizable collection of high-resolution
images of mostly, though not exclusively, literary manuscripts housed at
the Bodleian Library and some of the older Oxford colleges (http://image.ox.ac.uk/list?collection=all).
A great deal of the collection dates from slightly before our period, but
there is enough Renaissance material to make the site worth mentioning.
For a specialized website dealing with manuscript annotations of printed
Shakespeare texts, see Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth
Century (http://etext.virginia.edu/bsuva/promptbook/index.html).
Edited by G. Blakemore Evans under the auspices of the Bibliographical Society
of the University of Virginia, the website presents a wide array of early
printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays which have been marked up by contemporary
hands for stage production. It is an indispensable resource for those interested
in the history of early Shakespearean performance practices, and though
it is not the most visually attractive website it is intelligently designed
and relatively simple to navigate.
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By far the most outstanding manuscript resource on the World Wide Web is English
Handwriting, 1500-1700: An Online Course (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/).[9]
Here, hats must go off once again to Andrew Zurcher who designed and continues
to maintain this site as part of COPIA. Drawing on a massive archive
of high-resolution images of manuscripts from Cambridge University, English
Handwriting offers a total of 28 lessons in transcription, all ranked
in difficulty on a scale of one to five. That these lessons are so effective
has a lot to do, I think, with the ingenious design of the website (Fig.
7).
Fig. 7. English Handwriting, 1500-1700: An Online Course
Choosing a lesson brings you to the lesson
interface: in one window – the largest – you have a high-res,
zoomable image of the manuscript that you will be working with;
another window provides a space for you to type your transcription;
yet another displays information “About this Hand,” including
bibliographical details, description, and dating. A menu of symbols
lines the bottom of the interface; clicking on them allows the
user at any point during their transcription to, for example,
view a sample transcription, take a test on the transcription,
view an upper or lower-case alphabet, see a table of common brevigraphs
and abbreviations, zoom in on the manuscript image, view some
notes on dating and describing the given hand, or view other manuscripts
in the same hand. This website is a remarkably generous undertaking;
if used properly, it is highly effective in instilling even a
complete beginner with basic paleographical skills.
Sound
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It seems only appropriate to include a few words
on sound. The Internet has, after all, permitted scholars to explore the
medium of sound in a way never before possible with print. In addition to
the many early music resources now available on the World Wide Web,[10] there have been valuable
attempts to investigate links between sound and literary culture. Early
Modern Literary Studies, for example, has produced a special
issue on “Listening to the Early Modern,” in which six articles consider
how sound can function as a category of critical enquiry in early modern
studies. In the article, “Hearing Green: Logomarginality in Hamlet,”
Bruce Smith embeds actual sound files into his text in order to recreate
the acoustic matrix within which the character Hamlet would have defined
himself in the original Globe Theater production (http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/07-1/logomarg/intro.htm).
We find another astute exploitation of the Internet’s sonic capabilities
on the COPIA website at Cambridge University. Sidneiana, a
resource for manuscript-based research relating to Sir Philip Sidney and
his circle, features musical reconstructions of Philip Sidney’s Certain
Sonnets 6 and Robert Sidney’s Song 12, complete with sound files
(http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/sidneiana/songs.htm).
Ventures such Bruce Smith’s “Hearing Green” and COPIA’s Sidneiana
highlight the intellectual applicability of the Internet in the most salient
terms. For they testify not merely to how the World Wide Web changes the
medium through which we produce and consume scholarly work, but to how this
medium permits us to enquire into cultural phenomena (such as aural experience)
which would otherwise remain at the margins of early modern studies.
Futures of Web-Based Scholarship
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What are the futures for the World Wide Web in
early modern studies? One functionality of the Internet which has not yet
been as widely drawn upon as hypertext, digitally scanned images, or sound,
is video. And yet in the relatively small number of places where we do find
video being deployed in our field, its pedagogical merits are strongly manifest.
Alan Liu, for instance, webmaster of the vast Humanities website, Voice
of the Shuttle (http://vos.ucsb.edu/),
features on his homepage a number of links to webcasts of important talks
he has given (http://vos.ucsb.edu/liu-profile.asp).
There is also the “English Web Video Page” hosted by Arizona State University
(http://www.asu.edu/english/video).
As well as presenting video files of departmental presentations on literary
topics, the Web page archives “Professional Development Workshops,” in which
faculty members advise audiences of advanced graduate students and junior
faculty members on the academic job market. This latter resource will be
of particular utility for someone who, for example, did their graduate studies
in the UK but would like to work in North America. The “English Web and
Video Page” provides an insider’s view into the kinds of expectations and
protocols that underlie the North American job market. Finally, the Shakespeare
Moot Court Project at McGill University – a radical attempt to find new
formats for teaching students about the relationship between language and
cultural value - is supported by a website that includes a video archive
of past trials (http://www.mcgill.ca/shakespearemoot/).
Here, the medium of video plays a key role in conveying to a wider academic
community an important experiment in education, one which may not be fully
communicable in a written description alone. It is hoped that the use of
video technologies in early modern studies will continue to be expanded
in years to come.
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Technological advance, however, is only one aspect
of what will be involved in ensuring a progressive evolution for Web-based
scholarship. There are also some important practical and theoretical issues
which will need to be addressed. In the websites that have been considered
here, I have been particularly struck by the extent to which the scholarly
integrity of an online resource is affected by the design of its interface.
The old Internet Shakespeare Editions website provides a perfect
example of how a crude and confusing interface can unjustly diminish the
sound scholarship that lies just beneath it. This is a new kind of problem
for academics. In the case of printed books, establishing credibility has
very little to do with interface. When someone tells us not to judge a book
by its cover, this makes sense as piece of proverbial wisdom because we
know – at least in the case of academic publishing - that what lies behind
that cover will adhere to a relatively standard set of organizational criteria.
This allows us to evaluate the intellectual content of a book in its own
right, without having to be too concerned with how that content is being
mediated. Digital interfaces, by contrast, are so varied and unpredictable
that basic levels of formal coherence cannot be taken for granted. This
changes our normal processes of scholarly assessment. Intellectual merit
becomes much more difficult to judge in isolation from its mode of delivery.
In cyber-space, form and content exist in a far more closely bound up relationship
than they do in the world of print-based knowledge. Designers of academic
websites need to be responsive to this, taking particular care to communicate
the scholarly integrity of their resource through its interface. Towards
this end, it seems essential that the international academic community eventually
decide upon some shared set of criteria for organizing and designing their
websites
- Another issue which I have seen emerge from this survey has to do
with the handling of images. Some websites are very thorough in their documentation
of pictorial material. REED, for instance, appears to be acutely aware
of the status of their pictures as material evidence. The paintings, antiquarian
maps, and ground plans that have been incorporated into the Web pages are
treated with the same respect for origin and historical context as any textual
matter. The same can be said of the images of watermarks in David Gants’s
Digital Catalogue of Watermarks Used by William Stansby. But not all
academic websites display such documentary scrupulousness. Sometimes images
from early modern texts are used more as decoration than as evidence. This
is the case of the satyr-figure we find on the Early Stuart Libels homepage
(Fig. 8).
Fig. 8. Early Stuart Libels Database: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript
Sources
Is this a problem? Do we need to establish a more
firm set of criteria for the use of images on scholarly websites? Part
of me is tempted to answer “yes,” if only for the sake of upholding
a certain standard of documentary consistency in Web-based scholarship.
But actually applying such criteria would be less straightforward than
it might seem. Things become complicated when we consider a website
like English Handwriting, 1500-1700, in particular the sample
alphabet that Zurcher has constructed from various manuscript sources
(Fig. 9).
Fig. 9. Letter “a” from English Handwriting, 1500-1700: An Online Course
For none of these “a” images is textual provenance
recorded; but I believe the omission was a wise decision. Demanding
copious documentation in this case would just clutter the website,
detracting from its coherence and, ultimately, its utility. The
manuscript alphabet shows Zurcher doing exactly what he should
be doing as a Web-designer/scholar: exploiting the vast visual
possibilities afforded by Web-design to make a better pedagogical
tool.
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Image handling, then, is a vexed issue. While shared standards of documentation
are needed if we intend to use and trust Internet projects in the same way
we do printed books, the essentially visual nature of Web-based knowledge
can make such a demand seem counterproductive from a practical point of
view. Equally vexed is the matter of interface design. For while it is of
paramount importance that academics establish some system of structural
and visual standardization for their websites, the diversity of uses to
which Internet scholarship is being put will make agreeing on such standards
an extremely difficult task. It is, nevertheless, crucial that we take these
matters seriously. A first - if modest - step in that direction might be
simply to acknowledge interface design and image-handling as concerns which
are consequential to the future of Web-based scholarship, and to
begin thinking about how these issues might be addressed as Humanities computing
moves into its next phase.
Some Closing Words
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The primary purpose of this article has been to
gesture towards the variety of uses to which the Internet is being put in
our field, with the underlying goal of helping early modernists locate WWW
resources that connect meaningfully to their own teaching and research interests.
Successfully navigating early modern studies on the World Wide Web does
not mean trading one form of scholarly practice for another, newer one:
it does not entail making a break from print-based scholarship. Resources
such as Open Source Shakespeare or Internet
Shakespeare Editions, for instance, do not stake
their claim to our attention by being categorically ‘better’ than print
editions from a textual or intellectual point of view. Rather, their usefulness
lies in the fact that they possess functionalities which print editions
do not have, and therefore represent a constructive adjunct to the print
editions on the market. Likewise, the online paleography course, English
Handwriting: 1500-1700, does not aim to replace or minimize the need
to consult actual manuscripts in archives and research libraries. To the
contrary, it seeks to encourage academics to continue working on location
with primary sources by instilling in them the basic skills and confidence
needed to do so. Navigating early modern studies on the World Wide Web,
then, is about finding constructive continuities between traditional and
technologically more progressive forms of scholarship; it involves building
upon already-existent foundations of intellectual enquiry rather than obliterating
or revolutionizing those foundations. Indeed, the most impressive Internet
projects considered in this article – sites like the REED “Patrons
and Performances Web Site,” English Handwriting, or the Digital
Catalogue of Watermarks Used by William Stansby – were undertaken by
academics, or teams of academics, who have strong groundings in time-honored
fields such as bibliography, paleography, and book history. These resources
issue a valuable reminder that the Internet is not just creating new disciplines
for early modernists to delve into, but helping old disciplines to move
forward in exiting ways.
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Our present position in the world of Web-based scholarship might aptly be compared
to the position of textual editing at the turn of the twentieth century:
a great deal of important work has been done, but all in the absence of
any real formal, procedural, or scholarly standards. Finding ways of agreeing
upon and implementing such criteria may very well prove to be one of the
key challenges facing Humanities computing in the future.
Special thanks to Alastair Bellany and Andrew
McRae, Michael Best, David Gants, Sally-Beth MacLean, and Andrew Zurcher
for permission to use screen shots from their respective websites. Thanks
as well to Katherine Acheson for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of
this essay.
[1]
A useful review of Early English Books Online was written by Gabriel
Egan and John Jowett. See “Review of the Early English Books Online (EEBO).”
Interactive Early Modern Literary Studies (January, 2001): 1-13 <URL:
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/iemls/reviews/jowetteebo.htm>.
For the Brown University Women Writers Project, see Elizabeth Hagglund,
“Review of the Brown University Women Writers Project and the Perdita Project.”
Interactive Early Modern Literary Studies (May, 2000): 1-9 <URL:
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/iemls/reviews/hagglund.htm>.
[4]
For an extremely advanced search engine, go to the excellent Open Source
Shakespeare site, where you can search with precision across all or
parts of Shakespeare’s canon for anything from individual words to individual
characters’ lines (http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/).
[5]
My gratitude to Michael Best, Coordinating Editor of the ISE project,
for generously supplying me with URLs that gave me a sneak preview of the
new interface before it was up and running.
[6]
A detailed description and discussion of this website is supplied
by Adam Smyth, “An Online Index of Poetry in Printed Miscellanies, 1640-1682.”
Early Modern Literary Studies 8. 1 (May, 2002): 5.1-9<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/08-1/smyth.htm>.
[7]
My discussion of multimedia databases would, of course, have to be greatly
expanded if resources for historians of Renaissance art were included. This
essay confines itself to the field of literary studies, but for readers
who are interested in consulting art history websites, the following links
provide good listings: Art History Resources on the Web (http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html);
the Art and Architecture section of EMLS’s “WWW-Accessible Resources”
page (http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlsweb.html).
[8]
For an emblem book database with a much more advanced search engine – and
one serving a much larger collection – see the Emblem Books in Leiden
website (http://www.etcl.nl:8080/book-publ/emblem/).
Unlike the English Emblem Book Project, however, this is not a multimedia
archive, but a bibliographic catalogue.
