ENG 720 - Medieval Seminar: Electronic Editing
(x-ref INF 510: Informatics for the Humanities: Electronic Documents)
This course will use three ongoing multimedia projects to explore the methods used for constructing image-based scholarly electronic editions of Medieval texts.
- Alfred the Great's Electronic Boethius
Ælfric's Lives of Saints (Digital Atheneum: new techniques for restoring, accessing, and editing humanities collections)
The Electronic Beowulf
Each project provides a wealth of digital images, transcripts, glossaries, editions, and new software development to illustrate the many advantages of electronic editions over traditional print-bound ones. We will compare the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches to editing as part of the course. Whether working with Old English materials or creating new resources for other areas of study, students will receive practical training in the tools and techniques, from image-capture to image-processing, from text-encoding to editing, needed to create electronic editions in a collaborative enterprise. Although the course will use Old English texts and digital image collections as examples, no prior knowledge of Old English is required, and modern English translations will be available.
Readings:
Most of the readings are available on the Syllabus page and the Resource page of this website and will be assigned on a weekly basis, following our progress.
Requirements:
Active participation in class and in online discussions (50 percent); one or two oral presentations on an electronic research topic (25 percent); a final online project (25 percent) based on the oral presentation and due no later than the last day of classes, 24 April 2002.
(Note: for students interested in pursuing a graduate certificate in Informatics for the Humanities, this course counts as the second of the three required courses. For details about the Informatics program, see me or consult the Informatics webpage.)