I take the point of google searching, but students may not always know what they should search, and many of them coming to a poem like the FQ for the first time need to know so much that they couldn't get through the poem if they had to do another search for every word they couldn't recognize.
I've been dealing with these questions this semester by working with a group of undergraduates at the University of South Carolina. The course is on the 1590 FQ, but we approach it by way of questions about annotation, and the students, instead of doing conventional term papers, are working up their own sets of glosses on assigned passages.
One thing seems to be a consensus. Students say they'd be lost without Hamilton's glosses. They don't always think he tells them enough, or tells them the right things at the right time, but they are almost unanimously sold on the value of the relatively heavy glossing you get in the Longman.
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David Lee Miller
Professor of English & Comparative Literature
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
>>> [log in to unmask] 04/14 4:50 PM >>>
The Internet and search engines have a problem, though: everything is
treated as being of equal value. You could say that Google's method of
assigning greater importance to pages that have more incoming links
helps, because it's as though those pages have been "cited" more often.
But still, if many different web pages are returned in a search result,
how do you decide which set of information is more reliable? Web link
popularity isn't always a good indicator. And if there's only a single
search result, should you take what it says as true?
Meanwhile, a well-annotated book at least gives you consistency with
respect to reliability. This is important especially for non-scholars
who like to study works that mainstream society considers obscure...
Hardin, Richard F wrote:
> On annotating: Has anyone weighed the Norton Anthology lately? The
> newest ed. has become something of a self-parody, bloated with apparatus
> and selections that could almost all be found via Google. The same
> tendency is observable in some Shakespeare texts. You wonder when the
> text publishing industry will catch up with the digital age.
> Dick Hardin
>
>
--
Kevin Farnham
Author: "MySpace Safety: 51 Tips for Teens and Parents"
Publisher: http://www.HowToPrimers.com
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