I thought I'd kick in my ideas.  I'm one of the scholars Anne is talking about; I teach in an extremely rural area and am the only early modernist at my college.  There is no way that the college is going to subscribe to the EEBO just for little old me.  Now I must say that it is phenomenally convenient that when I drive the hour and a half to the nearest library that does subscribe, at least with the electronic version I can be far more efficient in getting all the materials I need.  At Delhi, in all fields, we are actually sometimes finding it a challenge to get our hands on materials *because* of the trend of electronic publication/subscription.  SUNY does not have a centralized library database system; with the exception of a few databases, each campus is on its own.  This means it has become *more* challenging to order things through interlibrary loan--campuses have signed agreements with their database providers to provide access only to their particular staff, students, and faculty (which makes absolute sense in terms of the economics for the providers).  At least with the print versions, libraries were often willing to make a photocopy and send it through snail mail.



I've had only one, not terribly positive, experience with e-books in the classroom, and it was this semester.  The bookstore had sent the books back earlier than expected.  So when students went to buy the next book, it was out of stock.  The bookstore sold them an electronic version.  One student did get this edition; it had no page numbers.  The other students never got their editions because the server was down for five days.  By the time they finally got a hold of a print version, it was two weeks later and we were on the last day of the book's discussion.  And I am pretty sure that electronic books are not going to solve the problem of students' failing to bring materials from class.  At least in terms of our student demographics, most students will not be able to afford a portable device.  In order for it to be economically viable for them, there would have to be huge buy-in from the majority of our faculty.  And I'm not confident that even if they did have the devices, they would actually remember to bring them to class.  



Finally, call me paranoid, suspicious, or just plain cranky, but I think it would be harder to spot those students not truly participating in class.  At least now it is relatively easy to see that a student has a magazine tucked into the textbook.



All that said, I do use a fair amount of technology in the classroom, and if e-books can somehow be made to work well to support pedagogical goals, I am interested in learning more.



Kathryn

 

Dr. Kathryn DeZur

Associate Professor

Liberal Arts and Sciences Division

Evenden Tower

SUNY Delhi

Delhi, NY 13753

(607) 746-4462

________________________________________

From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of ANNE PRESCOTT [[log in to unmask]]

Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2010 1:16 PM

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: E-books and such



Hi, David. I couldn't do my work without the websites you mention. Since my interests are slightly different I also have Cotgrave on my bookmark list, for example, and then there's a website on when the different countries switched to the Gregorian calendar and Roger Kuin sent me one with the French Revolutionary calendar). I have been sorting files so I can do a couple of essays over the next few months and keep finding notes I took on microfilmed early modern books. Remember University Microfilms? You could print out, very slowly, and for a dime an exposure. I know that most of my career was pre-EEBO, but it doesn't feel like it. And of course now you can e-mail research queries to friends on any continent. But here's a troublesome issue: you and I have all of this array, but many don't. I may be a bit of a Luddite when it comes to Kindles et al. replacing books, but I'm a Jacobin when it comes to the differences between rich and poor. A young scholar gets hired at a less than stellar place, then given too much to teach, and then has no access to EEBO and then finds it harder to publish . . . In my own Utopia EEBO and so forth would be made available to everybody and you and I would not be sitting on cyber-land we should share with the less fortunate. Growl.

    And now I can imagine one of my favorite Spenserians on his musty carpet with books nearby and minimal oxygen except what he generates by his scholarship. Anne.

   PS: I do hope Santa brings Germaine that Kindle. They are fun. I have all of Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe on mine--but in lousy editions.



On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 12:58 PM, David Miller <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

Dear Anne,



I am enjoying your thoughts--onscreen, of course--in a small, windowless office on the third floor (underground) of the Thomas Cooper Library at USC.  I treasure this space, in spite of the musty carpet and bare walls, because it is on the same floor of the library with the English lit stacks, because it contains a desk and shelves, and because I can store checked-out books behind its locked door.



I've got about a dozen shelves of books around me at the moment--it's the minilibrary I use to work on commentary for the Oxford Spenser.  I couldn't manage without this space, which I refer to as the Spenser Cave.



At the same time, the wireless access I get here is crucial as well.  We don't have Caxton's edition of the Golden Legend, so I need to consult EEBO.  I keep the online OED open in a window on my desktop to check it constantly; and I have a prize set of bookmarks in the browser that will take me to a whole range of online texts that are more rapidly accessible and more easily searchable than their codex counterparts.  I give daily thanks for the Latin Library, the Greek Dictionary, the Perseus Digital Library, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Middle English Dictionary, JSTOR, online editions of Holinshed and Camden  . . . even, yes, Wikipedia.



This is the reason our Oxford edition of the Collected Works will be backed up with the best online archive we can build.



Now and then, of course, I still take a few minutes to worry about my children's attention-spans, but the human organism has always adapted to changes in its environment, and they've always brought losses as well as gains.  This, as I recall, is the reason Socrates compares writing to a poison, or is it a medicine?



Best,



David



On Dec 1, 2010, at 12:36 PM, ANNE PRESCOTT wrote:



Thanks for these thoughts, David. I do still find these devices harder than books to relate to, much as I love the two I have, in part because it's harder to have piles, physical piles, or even shelves, to consult rapidly--you can do it on a Kindle, but reaching for your David Lee Miller and then your Judith Anderson to check something you recall they say about the Spenser you have on the nearby table is simply, physically, easier (for me, anyway). What I want for Christmas is a book wheel of the sort many on this list have seen: you can rotate it in stead of having the books you need on the floor or table, and they can be open to what you are interested in right now. Yes, we have Windows, and I can do some paging back and forth with my Kindle, but it's just physically faster to have--in my immediate case--Philogelos, Cicero, Castiglione, and Louis Joubert on jokes right next to me, face down and pick-upable. And then there's the look of a row of books on a shelf, which has yet another advantage in that you can mislay a book but not, or not usually, a bookshelf. You can also use books to show off (I have my French ones in my living room and was planning to move my Loeb Greek and Latin until my classics-major daughter pointed out that Loebs are an admission that I'm not so hot at reading the originals). Yes, you can say the same thing about scrolls . . . and in some ways my Kindle feels like a return to scrolls. There's a reason the codex replaced the scroll. Anne Luddite Prescott.

    PS: one pleasure of getting youtube forwards is that there are all those other ones. The Star Wars one was a bit of a bore, though. The one David recommended, alas new to me, is indeed just hilarious. Of course there's also the matter of economics--MS culture continued, we know, but if I worked as a scribe in c. 1500 I'd still be very, very nervous.



On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 6:37 AM, David Miller <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

Hi Friends,



There is an annual forecast of things to come called the "Horizon Report," issued by a group known as the New Media Consortium.  You can find it online if you're so inclined.



The last report predicted that electronic readers will replace textbooks in the classroom.  I don't recall whether this was part of the 2-3 year horizon (the report is organized according to a series of such "horizons," running from one to five years), but it was soon.



The CDH at South Carolina has to stay on top of such developments (it's part of the mission statement), so we ordered a Kindle about a year ago.  Many of you have noted the drawbacks I saw very quickly:  it's not yet ready for prime time in the classroom by any means.



The Kindle was quickly succeeded by the iPad, which is a big step forward but still not the answer.  The biggest drawback is still the limitation on available content.  Right now each device is tied to its own content provider:  Kindle gets you Amazon, and so forth.



That has to change before these devices will provide any serious competition to the book.  The whole economics of distribution has to catch up with the technology.



Other issues such as formatting, note-taking, searching and page-turning are quickly coming around.  What our students will want, to replace their 80-lb. backpacks filled with textbooks (a worthy goal), is a device that lets them underline and take marginal notes with a stylus, turn pages with a swipe, and search easily.  In other words, a device that combines many of the intuitive features of the codex (I can find something because I remember where it was on the "page") with the powers of the digital text.



This device is coming very soon; how soon the marketing and distribution of content will catch up with it is harder to predict.  But I can tell you that there are already projects out there that assume the widespread availability of handheld digital readers in classrooms very soon:  for example, an art education project that is perfecting the software needed to bring high-resolution images from museum collections into the classroom on handheld devices.



There is a hilarious youtube video called "medieval help desk" in which a monk accustomed to reading scrolls calls for tech support to help him sort out a newfangled device known as the "book."  Most of you have probably seen it, but if you haven't, or if you just want to laugh really hard again, it may be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ



Warm holiday wishes to all,



David



David Lee Miller

Carolina Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Director, Center for Digital Humanities at South Carolina

University of South Carolina

Columbia, SC  29208



(803) 777-4256

FAX   777-9064



please note new email address:  [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>



Here lies an honest miller,

And that is strange.

--Essex gravestone, c. 1450



On Nov 30, 2010, at 10:51 PM, Jean Goodrich wrote: