Deadline:
Friday, February 4, 2011
For Credit: Adventures in ECCO (deadline extended and bumped)
As you embark on the 1st assignment, feel free to ask questions, describe any frustrations you encounter working with ECCO, compare notes on your findings, or reflect on the task here. Feel free to ask questions, as well--I'll be checking this thread frequently over the weekend.
Deadline:Friday (2/4), 1pm Monday (2/7), start of class.
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12 comments:
When I first read the instructions and saw that we had to search for a poem for this assignment I didn't have a positive outlook on it because I thought it might be difficult. After taking the time to do a search and look up things I thought was interesting I did not really have a problem finding a poem and one that I was interested in as well. I don't know if there will be future problems but after playing around with the search engine I think it will be easier to use or helpful with our group projects.
I've found ECCO alright, and it makes it really easy to search for specific subjects between a specific date. But, I'm having trouble filtering out the stories and passages from the poems. I've tried several different subjects that interest me and I can't find any poems. I've tried looking through each search's table of contents, but I'm coming up short. Please let me know if there is a trick to finding strictly poems of if I'm confusing a part of the assignment. Thanks.
@PMV: you might try doing a title word search for "poems" and then within the results of that search do a keyword search for the specific subject that interests you. When you click on any entry within the results of *that* search, a window in the left-hand sidebar will give you a link to the specific page on which your keyword appears. You'll still need to check a few of your "results" before you find a suitable poem, but that strategy should narrow things down a bit. Let me know if you run into further problems!
One of my concerns is tackling letter "c" of the assignment: provide footnotes that explain any lines, metaphors, concepts, or ideas that may confuse or bewilder undergraduates. This, in addition to explaining to the student what the poem is about, really has me worried because I have struggled with understanding the last few poems. Discussing them in class usually clears things up for me, but I'm on my own for this one.
I've looked up many of the unknown words in the Oxford English Dictionary, however I either don't quite understand their explanation of the word, or they don't have the word listed at all. As a result, this makes it difficult for me to understand the details of the poem, therefore causing me to be sketchy on certain lines/significant features of the poem.
Do we have to hit the answers to letter "c" and "d" of the assignment dead on, or is it more interpretive? I know there is always more than one way to look at a poem, but it is easy to overlook what the poem is actually about. I know that I have completely missed the meaning of the last two poems, so I'm a bit concerned that I'm missing key pieces of the poem I picked out.
First and foremost, I found ECCO to be a bit more difficult to navigate than I had anticipated. It took me over an hour and a half to find poems I considered to be remotely interesting to work with (ones that weren't anonymous or incredibly long) and even then I'm not 100% sure I'll be using them. I mean, this all could just be me. Perhaps I wasn't being specific enough in my searches? Is there an easier way of going about this process that I may have missed? It was definitely a lot easier after I read KW's response to PMV, but before then, I was pretty lost.
That being said, my biggest concerns now (now that I think I've narrowed down my choices) are similar to Cholie's. I suppose my biggest question is: how do we know the poem we've chosen IS significant to C18 literature, and not just one we happened to like? Or is this "not knowing" the whole point of the assignment?
Because I'm not entirely certain of the historical context in which the poem was written or know any information about the author (are we allowed to do Google searches on those kinds of things? I did a really fast search [not at all in-depth] but I really didn't find anything that would be of help/relevant), I'm not entirely sure whether or not I'll interpret my poems correctly either. And even if I did, I feel as though I'm going to have a difficult time coming up with a headnote for it (I'm thinking about intros I've read in Norton anthologies that include a mini bio, brief history, etc.), describing the significance and importance of it in the larger context of C18 literature when I don't even know it myself (I mean, I don't know about everyone else, but I'm choosing my poem based on what sound nice to me, hah). To reemphasize Cholie's question, do parts C and D have to be absolutely correct or are we allowed a bit of room to interpret?
Perhaps all the vagueness and uncertainty is the point of the assignment (which I suppose could be really cool in a mildly frustrating kind of way, haha), I just want to make sure I'm not going to fail miserably if I "guess." Are these silly concerns? Does anyone have any helpful suggestions?
@SMR and @Cholie: You guys ask some GREAT questions. In fact, I ended up devoting an entire new post to answering them! See the latest post to the blog...
I was very frustrated by ECCO. This isn't something that can be blamed on ECCO (honestly, the fact that it can search through the text of every single document on the site is amazing), but it proved difficult for me to find poems, and once I was able to find those, it took even longer to find poems that weren't prohibitively long. The search function gives a good sense of just how much material was written during this period.
In response to some of the worries above about the poem we choose having a lack of significance to 18th-century literature, I actually took the opposite approach with Google. I deliberately tried to find a poem that didn't come up easily on Google out of fear that, had I picked a poem that had plenty of easy-to-find commentary online, I would possibly be accused of poor selection. My selection seems to be an obscure poem written by a nameless woman that's devoted mostly to praising God. I remember "prayer poems" being something we covered in ENGL 209, and I'm worried that, since these poems tend to lack much depth, they might not be worth looking at in the scope of 18th-century literature.
With all of that said, I think this is a really cool assignment. I've never considered how the editors of an anthology go about compiling their books, but now I'll be thinking about that whenever I read something out of an anthology.
Okay, I'm mostly all done! The only problem is, I'm not sure how to cite this MLA-style. I have a poem from a larger work of poems, but I found it through ECCO, an electronic database. Do I cite this all as I would a poem from an anthology? Or perhaps a web article? Do I need the full website hyperlink for where that book is found? If I need page numbers, do I need "image numbers" too? The website tells me the printer and seller of this book, and would either of these men count as the editor or the larger work?
I had a predetermined fear of using ECCO when we were first assigned this project, and I read that searching through the library's databases was required for its completion. Last semester in English 251, I had to compile this horrific 30 page bibliography on American literature after 1914. Do not get me wrong, I learned a great deal about American literature, and found a few novels to add to my winter break reading list, but the task at hand was overwhelmingly daunting and time-consuming. We had to research, summarize, and provide biographies for several dozen different genres, authors, etc. That being said, I was worrying about the initial filtering process, and finding a solid poem that I wanted to work with. ECCO overall was pretty organized and not as traumatizing as I anticipated. I actually kind of stumbled upon the poem I selected. I think of it as a hidden gem...it is not by a known author, but it is simple and beautiful. So overall, using ECCO for this assignment was absolutely bearable.
I was quite frustrated by ECCO myself as well. It definitely can like to make the process a bit complicated at first, especially if you are unaware as for what exactly you are looking to find (basically our situation in a nutshell). But on a more positive note, I did fine that the more I used the site and its functions, the process of looking for materials did become a bit easier (not enjoyable entirely) and definitely more manageable. Part of the problem with ECCO I feel is willing yourself to commit to the research process. Once you do that it becomes infinitely more likely to succeed.
I did have the same question as Aaron though. I was unsure as to the process regarding citing for MLA. Were there any thoughts on that?
For citing your text, here's the template I would use with some modifications (lifted from the Tufts University guide to MLA style):
Lastname, Firstname. "Title of Article." Title of Periodical. Volume. (Date): pages. Name of Database. Medium (web) Date of access.
But of course, you're citing a book, not a journal article, so you'll need to adjust that template accordingly.
Listing C18 publishers is always challenging. Publishing houses as we know them don't really exist. There are printers (who print everything from books to boilerplate legal documents to broadsides to newspapers to theater tickets, and so on) and booksellers, who tend to be instrumental in getting printers to print particular books, often by fronting the production costs. So books are often printed by [the printer] for [a bookseller]. You can either use the printer alone or "[printer] for [bookseller]."
Hope that helps!
I found the ECCO was a tad bit easier than expected since I started reader other classmates posts earlier on. The only dilimma I encountered was which poem should I use. However, upon my selection I wasn't certain about one thing. How long or short should the poem we choose should actually be? Well, hopefully the one I decided to go with is an appropriate length.
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