[EMLS 5.3/ SI 4 (January, 2000) Article Abstracts]

Early
Article Abstracts

Iter: Where Does the Path Lead?
William R. Bowen, University of Toronto.
[Abstract]

A Study of Early Music on CD-ROM.
Susan Forscher Weiss and Ichiro Fujinaga, The Peabody Conservatory.
[Abstract]

The Janus-Face of Early Modern Literary Studies:
Negotiating the Boundaries of Interactivity in an Electronic Journal for the Humanities.
Paul Dyck, University of Alberta, and R.G. Siemens, Malaspina University College,
Jennifer Lewin, Yale University, and Joanne Woolway Grenfell, Oriel College, Oxford.
[Abstract]

Reinventing Rare Books:
The "Virtual Furness Shakespeare Library" at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rebecca Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania.
[Abstract]

The Web and the Book:
The Memorial Electronic Edition of Andrea Alciato’s Book of Emblems.
Mark Feltham, University of Western Ontario, and William Barker, Memorial University.
[Abstract]

"How shall I measure out thy bloud?", or, "Weening is not measure":
TACT, Herbert, and Sacramental Devotion in the Electronic Temple.
Robert Whalen, University of Toronto.
[Abstract]

Hell and Hypertext Hath No Limits:
Electronic Texts and the Crises in Criticism.
Hilary J. Binda, Tufts University.
[Abstract]

Iter: Where Does the Path Lead?
William R. Bowen, University of Toronto.

This article describes the past, present, and future of Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Started in 1995, this online project now offers close to 300,000 bibliographical records for articles, books, and reviews pertaining to the period from 400 to 1700 AD. Having established the standards and procedures for its main bibliography, Iter is now building additional databases and laying the foundation for the creation of a digital library which will include multimedia documents and studies. In this way, Iter proposes to fulfill its purpose to advance learning for the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. At the same time, it will offer a model for the future of online bibliographies and digital collections.

A Study of Early Music on CD-ROM.
Susan Forscher Weiss and Ichiro Fujinaga, The Peabody Conservatory.

In 1996 a team of professors and students from The Peabody Conservatory of Music and The Johns Hopkins University joined together to produce a CD-ROM-based multimedia learning environment for the study of Medieval and Renaissance Music. The application has enhanced the classroom experience through the incorporation of various media, including live performances of the music on instruments from the period, digitized images of scores and paintings, videos demonstrating performance techniques and well-written, comprehensive texts, all easily accessible through an intuitive and attractive user-interface.

The current available texts, anthologies and recordings are woefully inaccurate, inadequate, and uninspired. When students are limited to these materials many lose interest in the subject matter. The application allows the student to work at his or her own pace, to take an active role in the learning and discovery process and to delve more deeply into the rich sources of information concerning musical performance culture and history before 1700. Students are able to explore music in civic settings, in aristocratic ones, in bourgeoisie environments, and in ecclesiastical settings, moving from area to area and making the connections between musical compositions, musicians, and styles within the overall social, historical, and cultural fabric of a region and a particular time period. Through extensive research, our team used Macromedia's suite of authoring packages which includes Director 4.0 -- the most powerful and most cost-effective of packages on the market in 1996.

We selected "Music at Court --16th Century-France" and began with a fairly well-known painting by the Master of Female Half-Lengths of three women making music. There is within the painting a segment of a vocal composition, "Jouissance vous donneray," by the 16th-century Parisian composer Claudin de Sermisy. The student can learn about the composition, a Parisian chanson, in general or as it applies to the oeuvre of Sermisy. Video and audio performance in as many as fifteen different combinations ranging from vocal versions to others combining voice and instrument and still others with instruments alone are available. Students can also learn about performance practice of the period, about compositional process, about the composer, the place where he lived and worked, and about the popularity of this piece of music. In addition, students can learn about the role of women in the period, about Mary Magdalene, about dance and about a host of other musical and cultural aspects of life in the 16th century. They can follow Sermisy on his travels going with him to Italy as he accompanies his patron Francois I, or can follow the path of the piece as it is disseminated in manuscript and print during Sermisy's lifetime and after.

Based on the CD-ROM we will expand the curriculum to earlier periods, add more interactivity, transfer the data from CD-ROM to web format, and make it available over the Internet.

The Janus-Face of Early Modern Literary Studies: Negotiating the Boundaries of Interactivity in an Electronic Journal for the Humanities.
Paul Dyck, University of Alberta, and R.G. Siemens, Malaspina University College, Jennifer Lewin, Yale University, and Joanne Woolway Grenfell, Oriel College, Oxford.

In its fourth year of publication at the time of writing, Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS) is, by many measures, accepted as an academic resource by the community it has intended from its outset to serve. But, while EMLS can enjoy the positive attributes of acceptance, a number of those associated with the journal also find that EMLS now faces several questions, questions of the type associated with introspection and self-evaluation.

From its beginning, EMLS has needed to define its role as a new publication in a field characterized by established journals and the print medium. Therein lay a dilemma. The editorial board was convinced that the electronic medium offered a radically new and powerful format for publishing, but it also recognized that EMLS needed to operate and seem much like a print journal in order to establish its legitimacy as a scholarly resource. The approach taken to address this dilemma was to split EMLS into two distinct sections: the journal proper, and interactive EMLS. The journal "proper," which publishes only fully refereed material, continues to face the old question of the legitimacy of non-paper publishing. The other section, interactive EMLS, faces a different set of questions, some old, and others evolving so quickly that they are difficult to identify. A key problem has been that, while the interactive section has had the responsibility to make the most of the electronic medium, its very separation from the refereed section of the journal implies its lesser importance. The answer that we are now pursuing is to relate more closely the two parts of the journal, to keep the important distinction between refereed and non-refereed material, but to provide clear passageways through the barrier.

Reinventing Rare Books: The "Virtual Furness Shakespeare Library" at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rebecca Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania.

Internet technology and the World Wide Web offer a powerful means for disseminating the "raw materials" of English Renaissance culture to a world of students and teachers who lack access to them. With this mode of dissemination, the practice of early modern cultural studies can be democratized. While, over the years, Renaissance scholars and editors have produced an admirable numbers of editions and facsimiles of early texts, these series and edition tend to be found only in major research libraries and are expensive to own. By making these materials available for free on the Web, we can reach teachers and students all over the world and show them new ways to understand and use these materials when they study Shakespeare, Milton, or any of the canonical texts of this vital moment of European history. In a unique collaboration between the Department of English and the Department of Special Collections in Van Pelt, a group at the University of Pennsylvania has created a site on the World Wide Web that presents facsimile texts and images from the Furness Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of early printed materials relating to Shakespeare, theater history, and the early modern period. With the support of a three-year grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, this group is now in the process of transforming this site into a teaching resource as well as an archive for scholars. This new project, called "The English Renaissance in Context," will integrate into the Furness Shakespeare Library site the essential pedagogical elements that will help to make it accessible to a wider audience, adding the background texts, teaching exercises, and educational network that will make it work for students and teachers at many levels.

The Web and the Book: The Memorial Electronic Edition of Andrea Alciato’s Book of Emblems.
Mark Feltham, University of Western Ontario, and William Barker, Memorial University.

Our electronic edition of Andrea Alciato’s Book of Emblems realizes the benefits of electronic text while simultaneously erasing some aspects of meaning deriving from the medium of the book. Sharing a concern with indexing and cataloguing that animates emblem studies, David Graham describes the benefits or of hypertext as tool for emblem scholars. We analyze Graham’s work within the context of broader issues surrounding electronic textuality, drawing on sociological and material extensions of the concept of textuality that counter the bias against the material book sometimes found in hypertext theory. However, although we acknowledge that meaning is lost in the translation from book to web, this loss is also an inevitable result of textual transmission. We attempt a tentative description of the characteristics of reading emblems online. Material features of the book disappear, while the text is more accessible, more easily manipulated. Moreover, the reading trance gives way to the trance of the game, and the reading experience is less meditative.

"How shall I measure out thy bloud?", or, "Weening is not measure": TACT, Herbert, and Sacramental Devotion in the Electronic Temple.
Robert Whalen, University of Toronto.

This article is an experiment in criticism that supplements a conventional reading of Herbert's verse, including its historical and cultural ontogeny, with a reading of data generated in response to the concerns of that initial critical experience -- a computer-assisted inquiry that foregrounds features of the text only implicitly available otherwise. The subject of this inquiry is the relationship in Herbert's English verse between sacrament and devotion, a binarism pivotal to our understanding both of The Temple and of the early Stuart religious scene that is its historical moment. By sacrament I mean, in addition to the material aspects of sacramental ritual, all outward, public, sacerdotal and ecclesiastically oriented forms of religious expression. Devotion, conversely, is defined as that personal spiritual reflection and deliberation over one's soteriological status we have come to associate with puritan enthusiasm and its decidedly Reform theological pedigree. My purpose is to explore what for the ecclesiastical establishment -- and the establishment divine, George Herbert -- was an increasingly divisive ideological issue, namely, the identity, modus and locus of spiritual authority. Whereas the argument is posited with considerable confidence, interpretive conclusions as to the relationship between it and the data are offered somewhat more tentatively, for reasons that will become apparent. I intend not so much to prove the thesis through scientific means as to discover ways in which the data may reflect, temper or even contradict my initial findings. I hope, finally, to have articulated a procedure that allows TACT to complement conventional criticism -- a methodology, moreover, that combines two very different, if related, approaches to textual phenomena, and which advances multiple dimensions of literary meaning.

Hell and Hypertext Hath No Limits: Electronic Texts and the Crises in Criticism.
Hilary J. Binda, Tufts University.

This analysis of the trope of hypertextuality as it is figured in several contemporary theories of the new electronic technologies challenges a radical distinction between print and hypertext, and between the "logics" of linearity and nonlinearity with which each respectively is associated. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus provides a productive ground for such a challenge as it posits the very simultaneity of linearity and nonlinearity, endlessness and boundedness, that inheres in textuality whether it be electronic or not.

I examine the interplay between the linear and the nonlinear through a consideration of the hypertextual Marlowe Web site, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe: An Electronic Edition (URL: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/Marlowe.html), that I have developed as part of the Perseus Project at Tufts University. This paper situates the production of a scholarly hypertextual Web site within the historical debates that belong to the field of textual criticism and begins to point to some of the effects of the intersection of literary analysis with electronic editing, such as the return to the material text and to the practice of close reading. By considering the process of developing this site, I suggest several ways that a dialectic of linearity and nonlinearity structures electronic hypertextuality, and as such challenges the looser definition of hypertextuality that undergirds many contemporary analyses. Though we speak of hypertext's nonlinear, associative environment, it is the rigorous and linear structuring of the electronic text that, paradoxically, provides the condition for its instability and prolific, nonlinear recombinations.

This paper ends with a return to the text of Doctor Faustus where I locate what I anachronistically call Marlovian hypertextuality. Marlowe and Doctor Faustus in particular seem to be ideal figures for discussing not simply textual ambiguity but the necessity of limits, linearity, and meaning, not only in the electronic medium but in the structure of textuality more broadly.