Virtual Scholarship: Navigating Early Modern Studies on the World Wide Web.(Book review)

Publication: Early Modern Literary Studies

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Matthew Steggle

Virtual Scholarship: Navigating Early Modern Studies on the World Wide Web

Kevin Curran

McGill University

kevin.curran@mcgill.ca

Curran, Kevin. "Virtual Scholarship: Navigating Early Modern Studies on the World Wide Web". Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) 1.1-23 .



The Internet has been a standard presence in the academy for some time now, but the ever-increasing sense amongst academics of having a professional obligation to put it to some use is relatively recent. The question no longer seems to be, "Will I or will I not incorporate Web-based resources into my teaching and research practices?" but rather, "How will I incorporate Web-based resources into my teaching and research practices?" This "how" is a challenging question, even for those of us who are not new to the world of Humanities computing. As we all know, even a cursory wander through the scholarly corners of the World Wide Web turns up a dauntingly profuse array of sites, databases, glossaries, indexes, texts, image-banks, and other online tools. The overwhelming impression of copia can be particularly acute for individuals working in early modern studies, a field that has been at the forefront of academia's plunge into cyberspace.

So, where does one begin? What is out there? How much of it is useful, and in what ways is it useful? This essay sets out to begin answering some of these questions. Conceived loosely as a review article, it undertakes to discuss a selection of freely-accessible, WWW resources for scholars of early modern literature. It will comment on some of the specific ways in which WWW resources are proving valuable to early modern studies and consider what new directions Web-based scholarship might move in next. This article's focus on free websites inevitably excludes some large-scale electronic text repositories from the discussion: for example, Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home) and the Brown University Women Writers Project (http://www.wwp.brown.edu/).[1] It should also be noted that the present article does not claim to provide the exhaustive coverage of an annotated bibliography.[2] It seeks, rather, to establish a core group of WWW resources that adequately represent the major uses to which Web-based scholarship is being put. The article will, in addition, comment on some of the practical, intellectual, and theoretical issues raised by the use of the Internet in early modern studies and consider what kinds of challenges these issues might pose to Humanities computing more generally.

Online Journals

There are still very few peer-reviewed journals which are available exclusively on the Internet and which are free of charge. Those that do exist, however, are among the most frequently used resources for early modernists currently available on the World Wide Web. Depending on which one you are dealing with, online journals can foster extreme innovation or be relatively conservative. Renaissance Forum, for instance, while maintaining a high scholarly standard, tends to conform to the thematic and formal norms of a traditional print journal, one which just happens to be published online instead (http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/EL_Web/renforum/). By contrast, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, edited by Crystal Bartolovich and David Siar (http://eserver.org/emc/), has from its inception attempted to engage with the cyber revolution of which it is a part. Designed primarily to feature structured debates in an essay-and-response format, this simple online resource is an excellent example of how the immediacy and rapidity of electronic publication can facilitate new functions for journals. The idea, the editors explain, is "to create an online space for something like the active and on-going inquiry of a good seminar."[3] No doubt, most of us find the idea of a dubious reader rapidly posting a response to our work somewhat disconcerting; but we should not lose sight of the pedagogical value of this kind of interaction. Online journals like Early Modern Culture bring the intellectual banter of academics into a forum where students (who are not normally present at our conferences and colloquiums) can access it.

Electronic Texts

Some of the uses to which the Internet has been put in literary studies were foreseeable from the earliest days of Humanities computing. The ability of computers to store large amounts of text combined with the easy access afforded by the World Wide Web opened up a whole range of new possibilities for disseminating primary-source materials. Richard Bear was one of the first Renaissance enthusiasts to exploit these potentialities in the service of creating an online text repository for early modern literature. Although his pioneering Renascence Editions (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm) does not claim to offer true scholarly editions, it is nevertheless a gargantuan undertaking and provided the impetus for professional academics to embark on their own electronic-text projects. I will be commenting on some of these below.

The obvious place to start this discussion is with Shakespeare, though one will quickly find that while there is no shortage of Shakespeare resources on the Internet, almost none of these are dedicated to providing comprehensive and reliable online editions of his plays and poetry. One of the first Shakespeare websites, The Works of the Bard (http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/%7Ematty/Shakespeare/), is an exception, offering full texts of Shakespeare's complete works, as well as a slightly antiquated, though still useful, search engine.[4]...

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