'Computers and English Studies'

A six-week course held at the English Faculty, St Cross Building, Lecture Room 2. Aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates of the English Faculty, but open to all students.

General Reading list:

• Chernaik, W., Deegan, M., and Gibson, A., Beyond the Book: Theory, Culture, and the Politics of Cyberspace, OHC Publications 7 (Oxford: OHC, 1996).
• Chernaik, W., Davis, C., and Deegan, M., The Politics of the Electronic Text, OHC Publications 3 (Oxford: OHC, 1993).
• Lanham, R., The Electronic Word (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• Publications of the CTI Centre for Textual Studies, most notably their Guide to Digital Resources and their newsletter Computers & Texts.

Course list:

1. Dr Lee: 'The Internet and Literary Studies' (21st Jan, 3pm, Lecture Room 2, St Cross building).
2. Dr Lee: 'Analysing the Electronic Text' (28th Jan, 3pm, Lecture Room 2, St Cross building).
3. Dr Lee: 'Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Multimedia' (4th Feb, 3pm, Lecture Room 2, St Cross building).
4. Dr Lee: 'The Electronic Edition' (11th Feb, 3pm, Lecture Room 2, St Cross building).
5. Mr Burnard: 'Corpora and Corpus Linguistics' (18th Feb, 3pm, Lecture Room 2, St Cross building).
6. Dr Warwick: 'Electronic Publishing' (25th Feb, 3pm, Lecture Room 2, St Cross building).

'The Internet and Literary Studies'

This lecture addresses the following points: cultural myths relating to the computer; the place of the Internet in our society; the history of the Internet; resources available for literary studies; the Web and its effects on literary studies.

Reading List

• J. Nielsen Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond (Mountain view, CA, 1995) - A good introductory guide to the Web. Out of date now somewhat put explains clearly some of the problems and solutions of using such a large hypertext system.
• S. Lee, 'The Internet and the Humanities Scholar' in C. Mullings, M. Deegan, S. Ross, and S. Kenna (eds.) New Technologies for the Humanities (London: Bowker-Saur, 1996), pp. 426-41.
• D. Kovac's Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences - allows you to search for an e-mail discussion list of your choice.
• The Internet also allows you to remotely access material elsewhere. For example, the FirstSearch database held at Bath allows you to search the contents of journals (you will need a password for this available from your faculty library). For a full list of the type of datasets you can access look at the service run by the NISS gateway.
• AltaVista - the best search engine for the Web. Allows you to search almost every page published.
• 'Unofficial' History of the Internet - tells you exactly how it all began.
• Voice of the Shuttle - the best set of literary links around. Mirrored at the English Faculty library. See also the HUMBUL gateway's collection of literary links.
• Virtual Classroom Workshop - an extensive list of links relating to the Internet established for a workshop held at Oxford.

'Analysing the Electronic Text'

This lecture addresses the following points: what is an electronic text (simply machine-readable or searchable?); the creation of the electronic text; document analysis and text mark-up; and text analysis itself.

Reading List

• A. Kenny The Computation of Style (Pergamon, 1982) - though a bit dated now it provides a good introduction to the types of analyses literary scholars use computers for.
• D. I. Holmes, and R. S. Forsyth, 'The Federalist Revisited: New Directions in Authorship Attribution', Literary and Linguistic Computing 10.2 (1995), 111-27.
• D. I. Holmes 'Authorship Attribution', Computers and the Humanities 28.2 (1994), 87-106.
• Electronic Texts and Text Analysis Tools section in the CTI Centre for Textual Studies' Resources Guide, (eds.) L. Hughes and S. Lee (on-line version edited by Mike FRaser and Sarah Porter).
• Electronic Texts on the World-Wide Web - An electronic handout for a recent workshop, containing links to major literary web archives.
• Web Concordances - some examples, based at the University of Dundee, of concordances of literary texts delivered over the Internet.
• A Gentle Introduction to SGML and An Introduction to TEI.

'Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Multimedia'

This lecture will address the areas of hypertext and hypermedia. It will look at: the difference between hypertext, hypermedia, and multimedia; the development of the area; hypertext theory; literature and hypertext.

Reading List:

• Bass, R. 'A Bigger Place to Play, or,Text, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in theElectronic Age
• Berners-Lee, T., and Caulliau, R., 'World-Wide Web Proposal for a Hypertext Project' CERN, 1990.
• Bush, V. 'As We May Think' Atlantic Monthly 176 (July, 1945), pp. 101-08.
• Delaney, P., and Landow, G. (eds.) Hypermedia and Literary Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
• Holland, P. 'Authorship and Collaboration: The Problem of Editing' in Politics of the Electronic Text (see above).
• 'Hypermedia Systems: Authoring Tools and Applications' in CTI Centre's Resources Guide (see above).
• Landow, G., Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (London, 1992).
• Landow, G. (ed.) Hyper/Text/Theory (London, 1994) - esp. E. J. Aarseth's 'Nonlinearity and Literary Theory', pp. 51-86.
• Nielsen, J. Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond (Boston, 1995).
• Nelson, T., Literary Machines (self-published, 1981).
• Nelson, T., 'Hyperformance' on MediaActive CD-ROM.
• Pickering, J., 'Hypermedia: When will they feel natural?' in Beyond the Book (see above).
• Sutherland, K. 'Looking and Knowing: Textual Encounters of a Postponed Kind' in Beyond the Book (see above).
• Wolf, G., 'The Curse of Xanadu', Wired (June, 1995).

The Electronic Edition

This talk will look at the following issues: What is an edition? Various Electronic Editions; The Failure of E-Texts; TEI Headers; The Death of the Book.

Reading List

• The Canterbury Tales Project
• D. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York, 1992) - See the appendix on the types of editions.
• P. Robinson, 'Manuscript Politics' in Politics of the Electronic Text (see above), pp. 9-15.
• P. Robinson, The Digitisation of Primary Textual Sources (Oxford, 1994).
• P. Schillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Electronic Age (London, 1986).
• TEI Lite

Electronic Publishing

This lecture discusses the current state of electronic publishing, predominantly in the commercial sector. I discuss the historical development of electronic publishing and try to assess its impact on the theory and practice of English studies.

Reading List

• McCarty, W."The Shape of Things to Come is Continuous Change: Fundamental Problems in Online Publication." URL: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/ruhc/ohc/shape.html
• Unsworth. J, "Esoteric vs. Exoteric: Economic Models for Electronic Publishing", URL: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/esoteric.publishing.html.
• Brent, D."Stevan Harnad's "Subversive Proposal": Kick-Starting Electronic Scholarship. A Summary and Analysis" URL: http://rachel.albany.edu/~ejournal/v5n1/article.html
• Arnold, K. URL: "The Body in the Virtual Library: Rethinking Scholarly Communication" http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/works/arnold.body.html
• Fillmore, L. "How We Must Think" URL: http://www.press.umich..edu/jep/works/fillmore.think.html
• Fillmore, L."Internet Publishing in a Borderless Environment: Bookworms into Butterflies"URL: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/works/fillmore.butterflies.html