Digital Scholarship Seminar: Digital Scholarship in the Online Archive PPT presentation by Laura McGrane, Haverford College

1. The Digital Archive as Argument:
Enhancing Undergraduate Literary
Scholarship
Laura McGrane
Haverford College
February, 2011

2. Guiding Question
What is at stake in using,
producing and presenting
archival materials in various
media forms at an
undergraduate level?

3. Relevant Digital Collections
• ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online)
• 17th-18th Century Burney Coll. Newspapers
• Early American Imprints
• American Periodicals Series
• ARTstor
• EEBO (Early English Books Online)

4. Integrating Historical Digital
Collections into the Curriculum
• Institutional economic imperatives
• Fostering the student as scholar
• Enabling original research that moves beyond
a set syllabus

5. Importance of Prep Work
• Understanding search terms
(‘ribbon’/’ribband’) (‘wig’/’periwig’)
• Discovering how database organization
produces assumptions and knowledge

6. Search Mechanisms
Here compare the subject/genre searches.

7. Constructing the digital archive

8. Low-Tech Software
• HyperStudio
• PowerPoint
• WordPress
• Pachyderm

9. Crucial components
• Multi-directional navigation
• Balance between user- and architect-driven
modes of reading
• Multi-media forms
• Interdisciplinary texts
• Student work as progress versus product
• Projects that open out into the public sphere

10. Examples from Student Archives
What follows are screen shots from various
points in student digital archives. In the “real”
thing, all links are live (and many are invisible
here), and allow the reader to move through
primary texts and arguments freely.

11. Hermit Literature in Early America
MAIN MENU
This archive attempts to present and analyze
various accounts of the hermit in eighteenth and
early nineteenth-century America through the
following lenses:
Accounts written about (or by) a real
hermit, in which the hermit often becomes
a sort of social and/or political
commentator
Poetic and fictional representations of the
hermit, in which he becomes a romantic,
fantastical, or idealized literary figure
These categories, which separate hermit
documents into those constructed by a writer’s
imagination and those modeled after real hermits,
work together to reveal the American hermit as a
figure that reflects and refashions emerging
thematic and rhetorical markers of a new American
identity.
Annie Reading, December 2010
See Bibliography

12. Non-Fictional Hermit Accounts
Each piece of hermit literature in this archive displays at
least one of the following themes. Click on a topic to
explore examples in non-fictional hermit accounts. From
there you will have the option to see how similar themes
arise in poetic representations of hermits:
Unique Wisdom
Past Trauma
Religion
Nature
Liberty
Main
Menu

13. Two Georges: Revolutionary Politics
How do
George
Washington
and George
III mirror
each other in
revolutionary
discourse?
Anxieties of
imitation
Main
Menu

14. Gastronomic Revolutions (Greg Toy, 2010)

15. Prior to the ratification of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776,
many American colonists had been engaged in political discussions and
disputes regarding the taxable status of essential food items. Indeed, due to
the successive English parliamentary acts that imposed tariffs on molasses,
sugar, and tea, the colonists had become conscious of the social implications
and political connotations of food. Although the Declaration of
Independence and the following Revolutionary War effectively ended
England’s egregious political control over the American diet, remnants of
English culture still permeated the culinary landscape of America; though the
American colonies successfully achieved political independence, they still
remained culturally attached to England. Consequently, situated within this
revolutionary context, this archive endeavors to conceptualize the changing
relationship between England and America by examining the changing
culinary landscape as depicted in popular domestic guides and cookbooks;
through the juxtaposition and purposeful ordering of British and American
documents, this archive traces a second revolution. (Gregory Toy, Fall 2010)

16. “Most of the American fruits are extremely odoriferous, and therefore
are very disgusting at first to us Europeans: on the contrary, our fruits
appear insipid to them, for want of odour.”
Samuel Pegge in The Forme Of Cury (1780)
1. Beef
2. Turkey
3. Salmon
2
4. American
Specialties 3
1
4
Main
Menu

17. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Alexandria: Cottom & Stewart, 1805.
(Originally published in 1747 in London. Later reprinted in America)
The English Way
Choosing Beef
How would you characterize
each excerpt?
The American Way
Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery. Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin, 1796.
Main
Menu

18. American Specialties
Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery. Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin, 1796.
What makes these recipes uniquely
American?
Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Alexandria: Cottom & Stewart, 1805.
(Originally published in 1747 in London. Later reprinted in America)
Main
Menu

19. Student as Amateur
Archivist/Scholar
• Archival materials as fodder for original thesis
work and beyond
• Cultural literacy (students look to all
collections Google Books, iTunes, museum
displays) with an eye to arrangement and
exclusion
• Next steps: students can become involved in
larger international projects for “real” online
archives and annotational work.

20. Outcomes
• Open out the syllabus to cultural materials
• Opportunities for undergraduates to produce
genuinely new knowledge
• Projects that move beyond the boundaries of
the classroom
• Projects that encourage the reader/user to
roam freely, but within the constraints of an
archival argument

21. Re:Humanities http://news.haverford.edu/blogs/rehumanities/
Tri-college Digital Humanities: http://www.brynmawr.edu/tdh/