MLA Convention 2013, Special Session 384 Friday, 4 January 2013, 5.15pm Participants Presider: James Murphy Discussants: Ann Ardis (Professor of English, University of Delaware), Sean Latham (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Tulsa), Dallas Liddle (Associate Professor of English, Augsburg University), James Mussell (Lecturer in English, University of Birmingham), and Matthew Philpotts (Senior Lecturer in German Studies, University of Manchester) Position Papers Ann Ardis, ‘Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies’ Sean Latham, ‘Affordance and Emergence: Magazine as New
Read moreTag: Digital Humanities
Mapping the Victorian Novel
This week in my research I came across Maps of the Classics, a website where a selection of novels – mostly English, European, and American nineteenth-century novels – have been plotted onto interactive maps. Texts featured include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, The Mill on the Floss, and Anna Karenina. On each map, locations are helpfully marked with short explanations of their appearance in the text, and fictional locations have been mapped onto the real locations on which they are thought
Read moreTeaching with Blogs: “The English 19th century Novel”
Dr Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick) Context The English Nineteenth-Century Novel is an honours-level undergraduate module in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, on which I teach 3 classes of 15 students in weekly 1.5 hour lecture-seminars. I set up a teaching blog for this module at the start of the 2011-12 academic year, having previously experimented with using a teaching blog for a first-year literary theory module. There are many ways in
Read moreBlogging about Hacking the Book
Jim Mussell (University of Birmingham) Hacking the Book’ is a third-year undergraduate module run in the English Department at the University of Birmingham. The module came about after a discussion on Twitter between myself and a colleague, Oliver Mason in the summer of 2010. I was at a conference in Edinburgh and had just tweeted that I thought lecturers needed to ‘integrate digital humanities research and teaching in undergrad classes.’ Oliver’s response was to suggest that we put on a
Read moreStudying Nineteenth Century Media: Marking the Shift from ‘Reader’ to ‘User’
Clare Horrocks, Liverpool John Moores University C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age by James Mussell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, vii + 232 pages, illustrated, £55 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-230-23553-3 In this much-awaited volume on the impact of the digital age on our study of the nineteenth century press, James Mussell is able to demonstrate how the traditional monograph no longer serves the professional needs of the academy (xi). Identifying a new era for research he asserts that there are
Read moreDigital Forum On Pedagogy, Issue 16.1 (April 2011)
Digital resources transform the terms on which we can teach the various disciplines that constitute nineteenth-century studies. No longer restricted to the teaching edition or to brief visits to Special Collections, students can engage with a far richer repertoire of nineteenth-century artefacts. However, working with this material demands that students are comfortable encountering such strange objects free of the usual apparatus that accompanies them. They also need to be comfortable using various digital technologies, both to locate material and to
Read moreDigital Forum: Processing the Past
In JVC 15.2., the three contributors to this Digital Forum discuss the exciting new opportunities for quantitative research. Richard Deswarte focuses on the holdings of the History Data Service and considers what makes a useful quantitative data source. Alexis Weedon assesses the production of resources suitable for quantitative research and the use of geographical information to argue for greater convergence between types of data. Michaela Mahlberg offers an introduction to corpus linguistics, exploring what corpus approaches can offer existing research
Read moreDigital Forum: Readers and Users
In the Digital Forum of JVC 15.1, James Mussell asks what happens to readers in digital environments? Do we read differently on screen from how we read a printed text and, if so, how does this effect the way we respond to and make use of material in digital archives? Shafquat Towheed considers the consequences of reading nineteenth-century texts, not in their original form, but in twenty-first century digital space. Dana Wheeles reports how NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship)
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