DELETE NOW unless you are interested in some responses to the Literature
Online databases, for which british-poets were offered temporary free
passwords. This is my open letter to Chadwyck Healey's webperson.
> Dear Nikki,
>
> I have spent the whole day around Literature Online, partly because
> computers are SO SLOW and yr pages do take a bit of time ...but I
> guess
> it gets better eventually i.e. when we upgrade to Windows 95 or
> something, but it has been fun. I've been aware for years of the
> English
> Poetry, 1100-1900 database but rarely used it (though my dad does, to
> track down quotations for a literary quiz). I'm impressed now by its
> sheer size, and by all the other databases too. The early English
> prose
> fiction, and Eighteenth century fiction, are great. I can't imagine
> who's going to read Jane Austen & Dickens online (the Nineteenth
> Century
> Novel, coming soon) but still... people can do vocabulary analyses
> online I guess, or just follow the story of one of the characters.
> It's
> good to have the dictionary, encyclopedia, Bible, periodical indexes
> etc
> in the Reference sources section, and I especially like the Other
> Resources bit which is nice & simple, in its chronological divisions,
> &
> full of interesting other websites to surf, and lists and discussion
> groups to join, including our own dear britpo, and at the moment it's
> not too forbiddingly huge, though I suppose those sections will grow a
>
> lot. All sites you list are "of high quality and genuinely contribute
> to
> their field of study", and you'll be checking regularly for dead
> links.
>
> The freebie anthology of 1000 love poems (
> http://lionheart.chadwyck.co.uk ) is a nice idea, a great loss leader
> I
> should think! and gives people a really good sense of what using the
> 'real' databases is like. The option to restrict search by gender of
> poet already suggests some research opportunities...
>
> You know already that there are objections to the great claims of
> universality & totality made for this venture; that the very idea of
> 'the canon' is in any case one that scholars have rejected, all
> so-called canons are ideologically determined and Literature Online is
>
> determined by a whole host of further historical and economic factors,
>
> so an acknowledgement of its partiality would be preferable,
> especially
> if many of your users will be students who need to develop a
> questioning
> rather than an accepting view of the text that happens to be in front
> of
> their eyes. These are not in any case the 'best texts' for many kinds
> of
> serious research; and not only the complete lack, as far as I can see,
>
> of for instance Yeats (copyright refusal?) but also the presence only
> of
> anthologised bits of Scott's & Sam. Johnson's poems - yes, of course
> this is the greatest collection of British / English / whatever poetry
>
> in existence and it's fantastic and it's just one of this whole suite
> of
> literary resources ... but "essentially the complete English poetic
> canon" ... a. it absolutely isn't, and b. the very idea of such a
> thing
> is not appropriate. You yourselves emphasise how well the works of
> women, and 'post-colonial' writers are represented in the databases,
> including the one of African-American Poetry 1750-1900, so you are
> aware
> of these issues!
>
> I think that the synthetic name-and-title Master Index, albeit it
> sounds
> a bit ubermensch, is a great tool, covering as it does all the
> databases and more besides. I would hope it would be available to
> subscribers to even a single one of your databases (and would
> eventually
> encourage them to get the rest on board I should think). It of course
> enables you to signal and in that sense fill, the gaps in your own
> coverage, as well as collate authors who appear in more than one
> database. I am a bit confused as to the relationship between the Index
>
> and the 'Further Resources' file: I had assumed that the references to
>
> other sites found through the Index would be the ones listed in
> Further
> Resources; but I don't find Index entries for e.g. aforementioned
> Yeats,
> or for Eliot, let alone James Joyce or John Cage, even though you
> point
> to websites for those people in 'Further Resources'. (Eliot has I take
>
> it been ineligible for any of your databases by virtue of his dates -
> English Poetry and American Poetry both end in 1900, and English drama
>
> in 1915, though writers who started publishing before those dates do
> have their later work included. But if you can get Faber on board the
> Contemporary Poetry database, alongside O.U.P. and the especially
> interesting & wide-ranging Carcanet, presumably Eliot will be invited
> to
> enter the 'canon'??)
>
> The Index seems to need a bit of authority control - there are some
> duplicate entries for the same people under different forms of name.
>
> I think everything's quite well designed: the text is clear
> (crucially).
> Presentation of poems hard up against the left margin, with every line
>
> numbered, is not especially beautiful (I expect if it had been
> technically feasible to provide line numbering only if the user
> wanted,
> you would have done it.) Your pages are designed a bit bigger than my
> screen, but it's only really annoying in the free Poet-in-Residence
> and
> Discussion Groups section where the frames jostle for space and one
> might not realise there's a form to fill in at the bottom of the page.
>
> (I also sometimes seem to find myself stuck in one of these
> discussions,
> with no way back or out. How like life.)
>
> Just a few of the texts seem to have got corrupted: I came across a
> previously unrecorded concrete poem of Shelley's, towards the end of
> 'Queen Mab', and also scrolling through Miles Champion's book
> (Contemporary Poetry database) on page 55 begins a particularly
> beautiful example, with the page numbers flicking through in red while
>
> the text blackens across the page from the left until all that's
> legible
> is the word 'prick'.
>
> Anyway, thanks again Nikki for lending me my free password to
> Literature
> Online. I think it's great and I wish I could get at it all the time!
> I
> couldn't find subscription prices anywhere online... In London one
> can
> get access to some at least of the poetry databases at the Poetry
> Library, South Bank.
>
> elizabeth
>
> --
> Elizabeth James
>
> National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7 2RL
> +44 (0)171 938 8460; fax +44 (0)171 938 8461
>
> "to catalogue is not merely to ascertain ... but also to appropriate"
> (R. Barthes)
--
Elizabeth James
National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London SW7 2RL
+44 (0)171 938 8460; fax +44 (0)171 938 8461
"to catalogue is not merely to ascertain ... but also to appropriate"
(R. Barthes)
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|