---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: 27 February 2002 00:00 -0500
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 25 Feb 2002 to 26 Feb 2002 (#2002-58)
There are 23 messages totalling 879 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?) (8)
2. Wordsworth Poem Misattributed to Tennyson (2)
3. Arnoldian rhetoric on NPR 2-26-02 (2)
4. C19 German Names (was Teaching research skills)
5. SUFFRAGISTS (3)
6. Ally Sloper (2)
7. an introduction
8. BAVS newsletter (2)
9. Blunt & Ouida
10. mid-atlantic conference
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Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 09:32:54 -0000
From: Chris Willis <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?)
Hi!
I think part of the problem is that students no longer have free access
to the academic libraries they need to use. Without this, it's difficult
for them to see academic journals, the Wellesley Index and many of the other
resources that most of us take for granted.
For example, the University of London Library now charges a hefty membership
fee which is well beyond the means of most students (and many staff!)
And some libraries now operate a dress code which effectively bars many
students. Not long ago I was thrown out of one prestigious academic library
for wearing jeans and a leather jacket. No wonder students don't go there!
I can't blame students for making use of the list when they are debarred
from accessing many of the library facilities they need.
Having said which, if I get one more email beginning, "Where can I find
books by ...?" I may spontaneously combust! :-)
All the best,
Chris
================================================================
Chris Willis - London Guildhall University
[log in to unmask]
http://www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/
"Generally, an English Lit degree trains you to be a useless member of the
modern world and that's what I'm being in the only way I know how." (Zadie
Smith)
================================================================
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Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 08:33:05 -0700
From: Jason Boyd <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?)
As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, I was required to
take two courses on Bibliography and research methods, the first on
general issues, the second on issues specific to the period in which I
was specialising. Both courses were excellent, partly becuase they took
the form of exercises which required the use of a wide variety of tools
and methods. We started with the formidable Philip Gaskell and learned
about paper manufacture, sizes, binding, typesetting and by the end were
were doing surveys and evaluations of web-sites. Besides learning about
bibliographical issues and research sources, we also were taught to
evaluate them critically (ie, what do they include and what do they
leave out?) and we also looked at issues like copyright and editorial
proceedure (in say, the selection and editing of letters) While this
could have been tedious, the method of structure the courses as a series
of exercises that allowed students to focus on the literature and period
that interested them, made it interesting, because one was invested with
the feeling that Aladdin must have had when he said 'Open Sesame' --
what had been a wall of arcane indices suddenly became a treasure-trove
of heretofore 'unaccessible' information.
But I wonder if a large part of the problem is the laziness that
technology encourages. I remember, during my MA, having the entire run
of the printed MLA bibliography all to myself while a few feet away,
students were feverishly reserving computer time and waiting impatiently
to access the same material on the databse version. The thought of
having to go to a library, find a call number, go to a shelf, pull down
a book, find the page on which the information is, write it down (and
all this as a *preliminary* research step) seems to be too much trouble
for a generation brought up to expect that such information should be
immediately accessible from their home computer.
Jason Boyd
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 09:14:39 -0500
From: "Jason A. Pierce" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Wordsworth Poem Misattributed to Tennyson
Does anyone have any idea why websites featuring Wordsworth's sonnet
"After-Thought" misattribute it to Tennyson? A student of mine working on a
hypertext project submitted the poem as Wordsworth's, and when I brought up
the error, he pointed me to the site on which he'd found his copy-text.
Poking about a little, I found four additional sources that similarly
misattribute the poem:
http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/707/
http://www.netpoets.com/classic/064001.htm
http://dreamer.8k.com/Pclassic/Tennyson/After.htm
http://www.20best.com/20best/books/Poets.asp
http://www.poetryworld.co.za/displaypoem.php?poemid=687
Two of these provide information by amateurs, but the other three are
supposedly "professional" sites that claim to have some authority. My first
response is to believe that this is yet another example of why websites
simply aren't very reliable sources of information -- this from a college
webmaster! But I wonder whether the error might have originated before
widespread use of the web, perhaps in an inexpensive and poorly edited
anthology or a posthumous work of Tennyson hagiography that sought to
expand his fame by crediting him with one of Wordsworth's lesser-known
poems.
******************************************
Dr. Jason A. Pierce
Asst. Prof. of English & Acting Webmaster
Mars Hill College
Mars Hill, NC 28754
(828) 689-1237
(828) 779-1281 (cell)
http://users.mhc.edu/facultystaff/jpierce/
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 08:54:22 -0600
From: Tracey S Rosenberg <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?)
I'm glad this thread came up because I've been doing a little off-line
whining on it myself. :)
Chris Willis wrote:
> I think part of the problem is that students no longer have free access
> to the academic libraries they need to use. [cites University of
> London]
This was (unpleasant) news to me. I suppose I've been spoiled by the
copyright libraries (British Library, Bodleian, National Library of
Scotland), which will let you in without blinking if you flash a graduate
student ID and burble about the rarity of the books you need for your
thesis. Certainly, yes, paying for access can be a huge problem, as I'm
finding with attempts to access the national records office (about $20 for
a half-day session, when I live on $75 a week).
The English department of the University of Edinburgh, where I am a cash
cow--'scuse me, an overseas tuition paying PhD candidate--requires all of
its grad students to take a one-term (10 weeks) research methods course.
I found this helpful, but limited. For starters, 10 weeks is only enough
to give the merest taste of various topics (rare books/special
collections, archives, database searching, manuscript transcription).
There is also the serious problem that most of the students in the course
were there to do one-year taught master's courses and had barely thought
about the possibility of doing a PhD, much less selected a topic. And I'd
guess that most of them had never had the access to both a decent
university library and a library of legal deposit with its 6 million or so
volumes. Whereas I, who cut my teeth in Oxford and then did a master's
thesis focusing on the topic that is now my PhD, had a clear sense of what
I needed to research, as well as experience knowing what the NLS was
likely to have, and the knowledge that if they didn't have it, I'd get it
at the Bod or BL. Moreover, my needs are drastically different from those
of the woman working on postmodernism, even though she's roughly at the
same research stage I am. It's impossible to tailor a research methods
course to that wide a range.
[And I would still give a lot to have a specialized handwriting
transcription course the way Oxford does.]
On the other hand, the main point of such a research methods course is,
nearly HAS to be, not so much telling you what to find as alerting you to
the fact that it's there. One of the profs said he regularly has students
coming back two years later, saying 'what was that you mentioned about
manuscripts...?' When people on Victoria-L started discussing the
Gerritsen online database, and I realized it would be incredibly useful, I
knew who in the library to ask about getting a trial subscription, because
she'd taught the first two sessions. Turns out that, in fact, she was not
the person to ask--but she zipped my request to the correct person, and
lo, my research blew open in ten different directions, all of them good.
And *that's* what's bothering me about this spate of 'cheap' research
questions. Victoria-L is an incredible resource, and y'all are getting a
collective citation on my acknowledgements page with at least two people
thanked by name, but there are other resources--supervisors, other people
in the department, reference librarians. Not knowing who these people
are, not knowing what they can offer, means that a grad student is cutting
herself off not merely from specialized knowledge, but from a much broader
range of information. The reference librarian who says 'oh, have you
tried thus-and-such here on the shelf?' or who makes notes of things she
comes across that she thinks might be useful to you is worth her weight in
gold.
I'm worried that people who approach the list with 'easy' questions are
doing so because they don't know where else to turn. And that frightens
me for two reasons: one, because (as has been discussed in other posts)
the universities/departments/libraries should be ensuring that they *do*
know, and two, because without that curiosity someone cited through a Zora
Neale Hurston quotation, without the love of digging in and reading 10
years of a periodical just in case it might be useful, or browsing the old
manual catalog, or skimming Who's Who instead of merely targeting the one
entry you want, what's the point of doing this at all? Research can be
tedious and awful at times, yes, but if you don't like it for its own
sake....
I'm not addressing any specific recent question, btw. (And I'm now
wondering if clearing my inbox and recovering from a trans-Atlantic flight
should be juxtaposed like this....)
> And some libraries now operate a dress code which effectively bars
> many students. Not long ago I was thrown out of one prestigious
> academic library for wearing jeans and a leather jacket. No wonder
> students don't go there!
Good lord, which one?! Thankfully the NLS has no such code. Though I
sometimes wish they did for the *staff*; one of the reading room
assistants occasionally turns up in shiny black PVC, looking as though
she's heading to a Goth club right after her shift ends.
--Tracey S. Rosenberg ([log in to unmask])
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 10:17:02 -0500
From: Angela Bryant <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?)
As a current PhD candidate (who takes her exams soon--I scheduled my orals
for Good Friday in the hopes of Divine Assistance), I wonder if an
emphasis on interdisciplinary studies inadvertently has allowed some to
fall between the cracks. I am in a Comparative Literature Department and
our introductory course was more on approaches to the field rather than how
to research--but I am not certain how else they could have done it. Our
library has offered good programs on research, but my problems as I begin
research involve where to find non-literary material. For example, where do
I find certain texts on hysteria in mares in the 19th century or early
screen adaptations of Aurora Floyd and Black Beauty? Fortunately my
committee has been very helpful in putting me in contact with people who
can assist, though i must admit feeling a little silly in having to ask for
it at times. I have developed a new admiration for the great skill and
dedication of research librarians withou! t whom I would be lost.
The program where I am teaching has its freshman go through a fairly
intense library orientation. Many students complained at first that it was
boring, but when it came time to write their research papers I think they
realized the value of their efforts.
I am very grateful to the members of this list who have provided invaluable
advice to those of us who are just getting started.
Angela Bryant
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 15:38:57 -0000
From: Michel Faber <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?)
Jason Boyd wrote:
> I wonder if a large part of the problem is the laziness that
> technology encourages. I remember, during my MA, having the entire run
> of the printed MLA bibliography all to myself while a few feet away,
> students were feverishly reserving computer time and waiting impatiently
> to access the same material on the database version. The thought of
> having to go to a library, find a call number, go to a shelf, pull down
> a book, find the page on which the information is, write it down (and
> all this as a *preliminary* research step) seems to be too much trouble
> for a generation brought up to expect that such information should be
> immediately accessible from their home computer.
I have found that the "immediate accessibility" and "instant access"
on which computer technology encourages people to rely is often
illusory anyway. Processes that are supposed to be instantaneous
are often delayed by a succession of obstacles -- queues [literal
and virtual], glitches, software limitations, breakdowns, etc etc. Even
the undoubted miracle of such resources as Google can swallow up
unexpected amounts of time, as zillions of useless or barely relevant
items must be ploughed through in the search for what's wanted.
Thus, reliance on technology encourages not so much laziness as a
passive acceptance of inconvenience, frustration and loss of data.
I have observed people who've lost hours of their precious time
coping with technical setbacks who still feel that they're having a
productive day; I suspect these same people would feel that a few
minutes' delay in locating a book on a shelf would be an
unacceptable waste of time. In other words, it can be a mindset
issue, rather than strictly one of practicality. There's still no clearly
superior substitute for a library well-stocked with books, and the
skills to find and evaluate them.
That said, technology allows [among many other wonderfully
worthwhile things] a resource like VICTORIA to exist, for which I'll be
always grateful. Living as I do many hours' journey away from the
nearest decent academic library, the phenomenon of scholarly
information being accessible through binary code inside machines
has helped me enormously. Thank you, VICTORIA.
One of the central ironies of all this is that Bill Gates, a deeply
philistine man whose fondest dream is to eliminate books and
achieve a virtual Utopia in which all reading is done on PC monitors,
has helped literary scholarship so much, especially scholarship of
pre-modern literature. Victorianists anywhere in the world can, for
example, read texts which would once have been known/accessible
only to a very few, courtesy of internet resources like the Victorian
Women Writers Project (http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/).
Best wishes,
Michel Faber
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 10:52:42 -0500
From: Erin Webster Garrett <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?)
Hi all!
I feel compelled to add my two cents as the conversation has turned to a
topic about which I brood far too often.
> I'm worried that people who approach the list with 'easy' questions are
> doing so because they don't know where else to turn. And that frightens
> me for two reasons: one, because (as has been discussed in other posts)
> the universities/departments/libraries should be ensuring that they *do*
> know, and two, because without that curiosity someone cited through a Zora
> Neale Hurston quotation, without the love of digging in and reading 10
> years of a periodical just in case it might be useful, or browsing the old
> manual catalog, or skimming Who's Who instead of merely targeting the one
> entry you want, what's the point of doing this at all? Research can be
> tedious and awful at times, yes, but if you don't like it for its own
> sake....
I wonder if the real culprit isn't lack of interest or laziness on the part
of aspiring scholars, but lack of time. I, for one, have been singularly
dismayed by the rising expectations for graduate students who now are
supposed to come out of the gate, PhD in hand, adept at teaching,
conferencing, and publishing. Indeed, the "publish or perish" mentality
seems to have trickled down to graduate students and to have created a
drastic climate where the emphasis isn't on quality of work or thought but
on quantity of out put. Out put requires speed, and speed, whether we like
it or not, and especially if you are teaching while taking courses, calls
for a savvy use of short cuts. The fact that students are turning to lists
such as this one may also indicate the amount of pressure their own
professors are under. I was aghast while working on my own dissertation at
how quickly my committee would disappear when I needed them, not because
they dreaded working with me (so they assured me later on), but because
their plates were already overflowing. It takes time to mentor, and the
current trend in academia seems to be ensuring that there are fewer
full-time, trained faculty with less and less time at their disposal to
meet the needs of more and more students. It's a depressing situation all
the way around.
Again to draw on my own experience, I found lists such as VICTORIA and NASSR
to be invaluable resources. When my own committee seemed to have taken to
the hills, I could go to one of these resources and get knowledgeable and
encouraging responses from scholars I trusted and recognized as potential
mentors. Granted, I'm biased (I thank NASSR and VICTORIA on my dissertation
acknowledgments page!), but I hope that graduate students (and junior
faculty!) can continue to come here with their earnest questions, even if
they seem rather mickey-mouse.
All the best,
Erin
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Erin Webster Garrett
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Radford University
540-831-5203
"One truth discovered, one pang of
regret at not being able to express
it, is better than all the fluency
and flippancy in the world."
--William Hazlitt, *My First Acquaintance with Poets*
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 09:55:16 -0600
From: Martin A Danahay <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Arnoldian rhetoric on NPR 2-26-02
While it was not as direct and dramatic as the reading of Tennyson's
"Ulysses" some weeks back, I was struck by a feeling of Victorian deja vu
when listening to the U.S. National Public Radio network this morning. A
"security expert" justified widespread surveillance of all public spaces by
video camera because there was "a thin line between a police state and
anarchy." This sounded to me like a line straight out of "Culture and
Anarchy" where the world is split into binaries, one of anarchy, violence
and lawlessness (as in the Hyde Park "riot") the other of beneficent and
enlightened control (and "light"). In the face of such a dichotomy the
reasonable center sounds mild and unexceptionable - except that the problem
in this Arnoldian rhetoric lies in the creation of the dichotomy between
"culture" and "anarchy" itself.
Martin Danahay
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 08:27:36 -0800
From: James Jayo <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Wordsworth Poem Misattributed to Tennyson
Jason Pierce wrote:
> Does anyone have any idea why websites featuring
> Wordsworth's sonnet "After-Thought" misattribute it
> to Tennyson?
I vote for a chain of laziness.
FWIW,
~James
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 11:35:57 -0500
From: Kara Pietrantonio <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?)
This discussion has been particularly interesting to me, and I've
hesitated jumping in until now. As a second-year M.A. student (with
sights set on the PhD), I can certainly speak from experience regarding
research courses.
<<On the other hand, the main point of such a research methods course
is, nearly HAS to be, not so much telling you what to find as alerting
you to the fact that it's there.>>
This, I think, is the first problem. At my university, we're required
to take an "introduction to graduate studies" course, which, as the name
implies, deals with different aspects of the graduate student
experience. It's been several semesters since I've taken this course,
and while we definitely discussed publication, we didn't discuss
details. (Actually, if memory serves, we spent most of our time
discussing how difficult it is to get published!)
There was a research-methods facet to the course that covered
approximately 6-8 weeks of a 16-week course. However, that aspect of
the course wasn't helpful in the least. We spent far too much time
discussing things like how to create Web pages (something most of us
knew how to do already), search for listservs (again, something most of
us knew how to do), and use the online MLA Bibliography (something I
learned how to use as an undergrad), and far too little time discussing
(for instance) the library's special collections. The woman who taught
the library section of the course was obviously not interested in
teaching it (and is not teaching it anymore). It was a frustrating
experience, and I think I've learned more about our university library
by DOING research than I did by taking a class on it.
Kara Pietrantonio
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 13:27:30 -0500
From: Rick Albright <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Teaching research skills (was Where to Publish?)
Jason Boyd wrote:
> The thought of
> having to go to a library, find a call number, go to a shelf, pull down
> a book, find the page on which the information is, write it down (and
> all this as a *preliminary* research step) seems to be too much trouble
> for a generation brought up to expect that such information should be
> immediately accessible from their home computer.
And, somewhat ironically, one of the sources of such expectations, at least
in the US (I can't speak for the UK) is the universities themselves,
constantly touting their on-line access and on-line courses. If I read one
more newspaper feature that begins with a variation on, "Jason rolls out of
his bunk, and, still in his boxer shorts, logs onto his on-line course. He
can take courses, do his library research and write his papers any time of
the day or night without ever having to leave his dorm room..."--I'll be
sick. Not, I hasten to add, that there aren't some clear advantages to such
access, which I try to use in my own courses from time to time. And not that
I don't appreciate being able to find some recent journal articles in
Acrobat Reader format without having to go into the stacks--which I
certainly do. And there's a place for on-line courses alongside traditional
courses. But it's more a matter of how the universities represent themselves
to the public. I've seen quite a few campus tours for prospective students
and their parents, both at my own institution, and as a parent of two
college students myself. No matter where the school is in the US or how
large or small, the two features that are unfailingly emphasized on the
tours are (1) security callboxes; and (2) the computers, which are often
pointed out in the library tour, and receive more emphasis than the library
facility itself. And my own university makes it a point of replacing those
library computers--most of which are used only to display the library
catalog--with the "latest and greatest" at least every two years, while
those of us who are teaching assistants make do with relics--the silicon
equivalents of the paleolithic era.
So, no wonder students come to campus thinking they can point and click
their way to an education. The schools have certainly fostered this
impression.
--
====================================================
"A scar is the sign not of a past wound, but of 'the present fact of
having been wounded.'" --Gilles Deleuze, _Difference and Repetition_
====================================================
====================================================
Rick Albright, Dept. of English
Lehigh University
Bethlehem PA 18015
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.lehigh.edu/~rsa2/rsa2.html
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 19:42:11 +0000
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: C19 German Names (was Teaching research skills)
Hello, VICTORIAns.
> If I read one
> more newspaper feature that begins with a variation
on, "Jason rolls out of
> his bunk, and, still in his boxer shorts, logs onto
his on-line course. "--I'll be sick.
And what does any of this have to do with the Victorian
era? Come on, folks, quit wasting bandwidth.
REAL C19 QUESTION: I'm looking through some German C19
periodicals, and have found articles by "Br. Schnabel."
Can anyone help me in puzzling out what name the "Br."
stood for in 1884 (and probably still does today)? My
German is getting rusty--and no, it doesn't stand
for "Teufelsdrockh."
Regards,
Tom
s/Thomas J. Tobin, Ph.D.
Governing Committee
The William Morris Society in the
United States
PO Box 53263
Washington, DC 20009
[log in to unmask]
http://www.morrissociety.org/
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