Adopt a text: Scholarly Annotations and Research Paper

Due dates

M 10/21: Choose your text to annotate.
F 11/08: Complete a draft round of annotations and choose a topic to investigate at greater length in the paper.
M 11/18: Research milestone: develop researched annotations and rough draft of paper.
M 12/02: Submit research paper and finalize annotations on the digital text.

Overview of the Assignment

This assignment involves your choosing a text to adopt and to create your own web edition of it, using the annotation tool hypothes.is to write researched annotations directed to an audience of literate and interested readers on the world-wide web. It will also involve you in writing a research essay on your text, regarding its approach to a significant issue in nineteenth-century literature. The essay you write might take the form of a website pointing to your edition, but should first be drafted in a word processing program for careful review.

Select a Text

Begin by selecting a web edition of a text from the list below, and use hypothes.is to annotate the list with your name to “claim” this text. Note: It’s important, unless you have arranged this with me, that each of you work with a different text. If you would like to work with a text or a website edition that I have not included on this list, locate a good web edition of it and speak to me about working with it. If I have listed a question with your topic, I will expect you to address it in your annotations and documentation on the text.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, England in 1819 and The Mask of Anarchy
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Witch of Atlas
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Cloud” (explores the life cycle of a cloud, including its experiences in an electrical storm)
A chapter or portion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on Project Gutenberg:
- Walton’s framing letters, at the start and end of the text
- Chapters 1-3: Victor’s family, upbringing, early education.
- Chapters 4-5 with Chapters 17-20: Victor’s project, The Creature’s demand, making a Female Creature
- Chapters 11-14: The Creature’s first experiences and the Cottagers (Felix and Safie)
- Chapters 7-8 with Chapters 21-23: Legal Actions
Lord Byron, The Giaour (an Orientalist narrative poem, features a Western foreigner, or “giaour” in conflict with Islam. Byron annotates this poem.)
Lord Byron, The Prisoner of Chillon (composed in the same year as Frankenstein. Use Peter Cochran’s edition as a resource.).
Lord Byron, “Ode on Venice”
Felicia Hemans, “Joan of Arc, In Rheims”
Felicia Hemans, “The Indian City” (set in India)
John Keats, “Ode to Psyche”
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”
John Keats, Isabella, or the Pot of Basil: A Story from Boccaccio
John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Mother and Poet”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Walter’s Wife
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, pair of sonnets: “To George Sand: A Desire” and “To George Sand: A Recognition”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: any one or two of her Sonnets from the Portuguese (choose from the page linked)
Robert Browning, “A Toccata of Gallupi’s”
Robert Browning, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1832 version of “The Lady of Shalott”: Note (among other things) the differences between this and the 1842 text (the version in our anthology).
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lotos Eaters”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall
portions of Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (three or four students may share this)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Epic” and/or The Morte d’Arthur
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”
William Morris, “The Haystack in the Floods”
Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”
Christina Rossetti, “The Convent Threshold”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Jenny” (Here is Dan Block’s helpful introductory background on Victorian Web for this poem.)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland (Dec. 6, 7, 1875)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Solitary Cyclist

Part 1: Create an Annotated Edition of Your Text:

You are tasked with “adopting” the text you have chosen, to take the lead in researching the contexts in which this text was written as well as its references to people, places, events, other writers and texts. You (alone, or in a group of two) will write annotations that guide readers through the poem. Your audience would be other hypothes.is users, a growing community of annotators on the public web mostly rooted in educational institutions. Your annotations should gloss all unfamiliar names and phrases, and should guide readers through the text’s shifts in topic or location, discuss difficult passages and, where relevant, alternate versions in other editions. Comment on uses of imagery, symbolism, and sensory effects, and provide context for these. Your glosses should link to relevant information on the public web, and reference current scholarly articles and/or books discussing this text.

At least four of your annotations should demonstrate that you have read current scholarly articles or books discussing this poem (current, meaning published in the last 10 to 15 years, or at least between the 1990s and the present). While your annotations should speak to a general audience of readers on the public web, we also aim with this assignment to add a layer of academic scholarship to lend authority, accuracy, and reliability to the annotated editions you are creating. You will therefore include a list of at least three bibliography citations in an annotation on the title of your text, as references for further reading, and you will cite specific sources within your annotations. Only provide links to sources available on the public web. You should have other sources you have located in the Pitt Digital Library, but a direct link may not be possible to reach these without a Pitt login. Follow MLA Citation style, adapted for presentation in your annotations, in this form:

Article:

Author’s Last Name, First. “Article Title.” Journal Title. Volume: Issue (Date of publication), pages. Name of Library Database (e.g. JSTOR, Project Muse, etc.) (If you can find the article on Google Scholar, link out to it.)

Book:

Author’s Last Name, First. Book Title. Place of Pub: Publisher, date. Pages.

Part 2: Write an Essay, Synthesizing A Discovery or a Amplifying a Particular Topic in Your Annotations

In the process of writing your annotations, you will discover particular focal points of interest, some of which should prompt larger reflections on the text you are discussing, such as for example how it responds to a particular historical event or to social issues like gender or class inequality. You might investigate how your text reflects or responds to Orientalism, or how it represents exotic non-English cultures, beliefs, and practices. Or you might notice how your text responds to scentific ideas of its time, or speculates on altered mental states such as dreaming. Build on the research you began with your annotations to investigate this topic in more detail. Based on your careful and close reflection on the text you have annotated and the reading you have done. Your paper should reference at least one or two of your annotations, pointing to the edition of the text you have anntoated online with a link, and you should cite least four to six authoritative sources. Think of this paper as growing out of your annotation research, to amplify a particular discovery of interest and explain it more thoroughly and with reference to more portions of the text than you could easily do in single annotations. Your paper should be about five to seven pages in a 12-point font (about 1200 to 1800 words). Submit the paper on Courseweb.

Doing the Research:

Do Your Research in Stages:

Start with the Search Window in PittCAT+. Start a list of keywords and keyword combinations connected with your topic ideas. Experiment for a while:
- Notice the different kinds of results you get from changing a word subtly: (Lord Byron and Islam, Lord Byron and Muslim, Lord Byron and Gulnare, Lord Byron and Orientalism, Lord Byron and caliph, etc.).
- Notice what happens when you enter character names as well as authors and titles, for example. Try “Justine Moritz and Frankenstein” or “Little Black Boy and William Blake.”
- Also try broadening your search beyond a particular writer: (Romanticism and Orientalism). Notice when you start turning up good results, what new keyword possibilities emerge. Jot these down to keep a record for yourself! Keywords matter.
Refine your search: Use the delimiters on the left-hand side of the search screen to narrow your search:
- Select “Limit to articles from scholarly publications, including peer-review”: to locate good scholarly articles.
- Now, try delimiting by date, to turn up the most recent material in the last 10 or 20 years.
- Try looking for books, specifically: Click on "Items in Library Catalog" and "Book/ebook" delimiters. Some books will turn up in our campus library. If they are at other Pitt campus libraries, request them by “Get-It” and they’ll usually be sent to our library within a couple of days.
Work with specific databases when attempting to track down something specific—such as to read reviews at the time a text was published, or to see how a writer or a scandal was represented in 19th-century British Newspapers. Try the database leads posted in our Libguide (Library Research Guide) for our class. Please feel free to check in with me at my office, or our Reference Librarian, Amanda Folk, for help with this.
- See the specific databases recommended on our Libguide (via Courseweb).
- Check the Tabs on the Libguide for “Finding British Literature Books” and “Finding British Literature Articles.”
- To track down 19th-century reviews of a particular text, or to see how people responded to a text or a writer in the nineteenth century, try the “19th century UK Periodicals” database and the “British Periodicals” Database.
- In some cases PittCAT+ may lead to a bad link to an article, and you may want to look it up in another database (like JSTOR or Project Muse) to see if you can access it after all.)

Citing your sources: Use MLA style, with parenthetical documentation in the text of your paper. Use the “How to Cite” Tab on our Libguide, which contains some helpful links and models (including to the Purdue OWL for MLA style.) Libguide “How to Cite” Tab

***Confused? Need Help? Ask me! I can help if you are having trouble understanding something in your source materials, if you aren’t quite sure how to approach your annotations or focus your paper, if you would like some personalized guidance with researching, or if you would like me to read a draft. Stop by my office in FOB 204 or write me at ebb8 at pitt.edu to arrange a meeting with me.