Initially organized by their relations both to a timeline and to a map of eighteenth-century London, the items will also be found to be linked to each other in various and intricate ways. This resource will be of major value to classes in eighteenth-century British literature (including cultural studies), history, and dramatic arts. It will be a valuable secondary resource to any course centered on drama, social and cultural history, or cultural studies.
Users of this resource may be either "co-builders" or simply "explorers." For teachers wishing to have their students participate in building the site, I will also develop a teachers' packet including a simplified template for hypertext documents and sample syllabi and assignments. Co-builders will be able to upload materials proposed for the site either on disk or by e mail, though members of the Advisory Board and I will have to be the final arbiters of what is included. Co-builders, as the name implies, will actually participate in the expansion of the site.
Those choosing the "explorer" option, including members of the scholarly community and the general public who have access to the Internet, will be able to explore London in the "long" eighteenth century (1660-1800) from the point of view of a theater-goer, even though they will not participate in creating and enlarging the website. Beginning with a year, a place, a person, a play, or a category such as "learning to act," "coffee-houses," "marriages," or "censorship," explorers may move in many directions to discover the network of people and activities that make up this "world" and to find multi-media resources for further exploration.
Students will not only experience the opportunity to contribute new
items to the project, they will also discover that previous contributions
can be improved upon:for instance, articles may contain errors or fail
to allow for new discoveries and insights. Their own work will be literally
or figuratively in competition with the work of other students past and
present, and they should become also more critical readers of "experts"
in both print and electronic media. They will learn much about eighteenth-century
London and its drama; they will learn, if the experience is new to them,
the basics of the use of hypertext and the Internet. But they will learn
still more about how to question, how to investigate, how to make their
own evaluations and interpretations of evidence both visual and verbal,
and how to communicate what they learn.
Why the eighteenth century? Why British? Why theater? The period from 1660-1800 encompasses the Restoration, the "Glorious Revolution," the first age of modern industrialism and the scientific revolution, the American revolution, and the French revolution. Journalism, fiction, diaries, letters, biography, and history come into being or flourish as never before in English. The English-speaking world formed one political and economic unit ranging from India to North America, self-consciously British but very much involved with the rest of Europe as well, especially with Britain's principal colonial competitors, France and Holland. In every aspect of social, economic, political, domestic, intellectual, scientific/technological, and artistic life in Britain, there were exciting new developments of which the people experiencing them were excitedly (or nervously) aware. All of these developments centered on a single city, London. In that city, one form of entertainment and instruction reached both genders and all classes: the theater.
STAGE ONE:
The first period of the grant (May-August 1997) would be devoted to
acquiring and digitizing new primary sources. This will require travel
to London and to research collections in the United States (New York: Lincoln
Center Library of the Performing Arts and Pierpont Morgan Library; Washington,
D.C.: Folger Library; Harvard: Belknap Theater Collection). In these locations
I would identify and request permission to reproduce new materials (described
below), and in London would also photograph buildings and other objects
and sites appropriate for the course.
New Materials: In print and microform, there are wonderful resources (for examples, see appendix 1, selected print and microform reference resources) for studying early modern British culture, especially the drama and theater history, though they are rarely fully utilized in undergraduate courses, even in research institutions fortunate enough to own them. But theater history, and early modern British history in general, are not yet well represented on the Web, and even literature of the period is represented principally by digitized texts of particular works. The new primary sources will therefore be a resource for scholars as well as students. They will fall into two categories, visual and textual.
Among the visual resources will be not only digitized images of the actors and theaters, but images of other places in London and other persons of the time. The map itself will be a valuable new resource--at the moment, there is no historical map of London on the Web, much less one from which one can select particular streets and buildings to explore. Images of artifacts from popular culture--advertisements, playbills, tradesmen's bills, pages from promptbooks, photographs of furniture and clothing, etc. will be included.
The textual resources will include both public and private texts. The public texts--reviews, periodical essays about the theater and about contemporary life, and selected news articles--will be relatively easy to find, but not necessarily available in the average college or university library, much less a high school or town library; the new resources in this category would, however, serve not only as resources in themselves, but as examples of the kinds of texts that exist. These examples would be supplemented by references to existing print and microform sources, and I would expect students to find and contribute more examples of such public texts. Less accessible public texts might include the equivalent of case histories: summaries or descriptions of celebrated political debates, public events and spectacles, divorce cases, etc., that might be reflected in the plays.
Private texts, such as the comments of members of the audience on performers and actors, personal documents such as letters and bills related to the theater, and similar materials relating to the plays as texts, are, for the most part, much harder to find, with a few exceptions such as those contained Helen McAfee's Pepys on the Restoration Stage or David Roberts' recent book The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama . The private texts provided would include not only excerpts from letters and diaries, but also collected conversations (-ana) that related to the theater. Such texts would be selected to illustrate the whole experience of living in eighteenth-century London, not just directly theatrical matters. Again, texts transferred from microform or transcribed from manuscripts will also enrich the range of primary materials available to individuals and students who do not have access to a research library.
STAGE TWO: WORKING WITH STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
The next stage of the project, during the fall semester of 1997-1998, will have two purposes. I will teach a pilot version of this course, either for graduate students or for honors undergraduates, in the Networked Writing Environment here at the University of Florida, in order to develop a body of student-contributed resources for the site. At the same time, I will be actively recruiting teachers at other institutions who will join me in teaching this course in the second semester and developing the pilot version of the teachers' packet.
The actual teaching of a pilot version of the course is essential to my project. Though the site I wish to develop should be valuable as a product, the intention of this project is to create an on-going opportunity for student scholarship. In the construction of this site, student co-builders will have the experience of participating in the creation of a real scholarly and educational tool. The very size of the project, a problem if finality were desirable within a limited time, is an obvious asset for this purpose. In principle, the site can never be "finished," because no contribution is necessarily final. If someone can do it better, the better version will replace or supplement the earlier attempt. This first semester, however, will permit the site to be open for business and especially will allow me to experiment with ways of using it to propose to other teachers.
Preparation of the articles the students will contribute requires them
to learn a great deal about traditional as well as electronic research
tools (including, at our institution, CD-ROM and/or online versions of
such traditional print resources as the MLA Bibliography and Historical
Abstracts), and both the project and the discovered links among the
separate items actually demonstrate what the course asserts, that no text,
and especially no dramatic text, can be understood in isolation from the
context in which it is created, of which it is a part, and which it alters,
however subtly, by what it contributes. Moreover, students seeing modern
film and television performances of the plays and/or tracing parallels
between themes, plots, and characters in the eighteenth century works and
those in twentieth-century works can perceive unexamined cultural assumptions
of our time as well as the eighteenth century, and can appreciate cross-cultural
values and issues. Finally, as in other web-publication tasks for students,
there is a major beneficial effect for the student writer in recognizing
an audience beyond the teacher.
In the present semester I am teaching, without a computer classroom,
a very preliminary version of this course. At first limiting our ambition
to compiling a "portfolio" on paper that would represent the kinds of files
we would like to have if we had an Internet site, the students and I decided
to try to go online, in a modest way. Despite the obvious handicap of my
having to enter all the computer materials for our pioneering site myself,
the students have been very excited about what we are doing. Feedback from
them suggests not only a greatly enlarged understanding of the complexity
of the past and the similarities and differences between its historical
remains and its self-representation in literature, but a sense that they
themselves are active participants in the creation of the course, not passive
consumers. They also have a heightened sense of responsibility for the
quality of their own work--not just its grade.
I warned them that no paper below a B would be "published," and they
have been eager to rewrite papers with lower grades even though the point
system (see Syllabus and examples of Additional
Assignments in Appendix 2) would allow them to avoid damage to their
grade point averages without rewriting. What is most interesting is the
students who have insisted on rewriting their B or better papers; I have
never heard so many students say, "I don't want other people to see something
that isn't really good." Owing to the practical difficulties of myself
as sole conduit between their work and the site, however, none of their
longer papers have yet been posted on the WWW. This very preliminary site
may be visited
at http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~craddock/lonthe1.html.
More than half the students, incidentally, have access to the Internet through various means. On the other hand, several students consider themselves only marginally "computer literate." Since putting the material in HTML form is NOT required of the students, these students have not been disadvantaged.
Working in a conventional classroom, however, with only some students capable of accessing the Net and without any means of displaying what is on the site except paper printouts, I have not been able to incorporate even a facsimile of many of the activities I propose for a class with access to the web. For instance, students cannot post and discuss work in progress; students cannot directly incorporate web materials in their work, and--most seriously--it is very difficult for them to spot links between their own materials and those of other students. Thus far, therefore, the student links have mostly been between their own work and the chronology and between texts and pictures.
I also anticipate developing a number of real-time activities using the web materials. For instance, students might use the web information to decide on a cast for an imaginary performance of a particular play at Drury Lane or Covent Garden during the period. They would have to know which actors were active and who had played either those particular roles or roles like them. Or they could work together to develop an estimate of the cost of a new production, based on new library research in which they would collaboratively decide what bills had to be paid and work individually to make an estimate of each particular item--convenience of collaborative learning with individual responsibilities is one of the major advantages of the electronic classroom. An interesting task would be to improvise in their own words a scene from one of the plays--again working collaboratively. Because the scene would be written, not spoken, students who are not actors and who are dealing with plays whose language is not current could succeed at this exercise, common in actors' workshops but not in literary classrooms.
STAGE 3: DEVELOPING THE SITE WITH STUDENTS AND TEACHERS FROM OTHER INSTITUTIONS
In the second semester of the academic year 1997-98 I would plan to
teach an undergraduate course in eighteenth-century theater using the network.
At this point I will actively involve teachers and students in other institutions
who are participating. Obviously at this point e-mail discussions and possibly
discussions in MOO spaces will be encouraged among students as well as
teachers. Explorers--Teachers and others who do not participate as builders--will
already be able to enjoy many of these benefits of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary
perspectives and access to new primary materials. Also of value to them
to wil be a genuine student perspective on the persons, plays, places,
topics, and bibliography items represented on the site. Even as explorers,
students can create new contributions, both articles and links, and critique
the "published" student work; or they can simply utilize the rich background
provided through the site. Feedback from explorers as well as co-builders
will be sought.
2. Institutional Context
The University of Florida provides unique and valuable assets for developing
this project. One is an unusually complete electronic environment for teaching
students to contribute to the project as well as preparing professional
contributions. Our "Networked Writing Environment", which is UNIX-based,
gives students in five electronic classrooms (capacity: 30 students each)
full access to the state library system, to e-mail, to the Internet, to
a MOO, and to tools for editing graphics. (It does not include sound capabilities
and it presently provides only one scanner for use by all the classes.)
Another major asset is that the University of Florida houses the Florida
Center for Library Automation, which has as one of its major tasks the
provision of electronic versions of library tools and printed texts. A
third is the research collection of the university, including the Belknap
collection of theatrical ephemera, which is focused on a somewhat later
period than that of the course, but allows students invaluable experience
of rare materials such as playbills. Moreover, the University of Florida
has a long-standing tradition of excellence in eighteenth-century studies,
which has contributed to the existence of a strong collection of books
and journals in the field. Finally, because the university developed itself
as a major research institution in the twentieth century , rather than
the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the library made a virtue of necessity
and acquired in microform what in print would have been a priceless collection--virtually
every microform text available for literary and historical scholarship
related to the period 1660-1800, literally thousands of reels, including
those listed in the appendix cited above.
Thus digitized versions of many primary sources could be created from materials here at Florida. Moreover, there are faculty members in history and in theater arts, as well as English, who specialize in the period and will serve as formal or informal consultants for the project.
3. The content of the site is outlined in the narrative of the project and in the syllabus included in appendix 2, although new categories have been and will be added to it, e.g., cast lists for particular performances; other data in list or tabular form; a student "prompt book" for a scene from a play. The most important category of content not mentioned in the trial syllabus is the new primary sources to be provided. The following student- and faculty-contributed items items are listed here as well as in the syllabus for the convenience of the reader:
Material of the course to be taught with the aid of this site could
vary widely. Those teaching a two-semester course in English drama 1660-1800
might choose to include some or most of the following:
But many users (such as those using the site for a unit within a
survey course in drama or eighteenth-century literature in general) would
choose only a few--perhaps only one--of the plays represented here, while
graduate courses or a year-long course or one focused on a particular writer
or type of play might include additional plays. My plan would be to include
ultimately as many different plays as possible.
4. Project staff and participants
Project Director: Patricia B. Craddock
Technical Associate (digital imaging and image mapping): TBA
Graduate Research Assistant (principal duties: verifying data submitted
by undergraduates, scanning and supervising scansion of primary materials;
location and recommendation of additional materials): TBA
Consultant for Computer Resources: Michael Conlon, Director of Academic
Computing, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UF.
Consultant for WWW Eighteenth-Century Materials and Courses: Jack Lynch,
Pennsylvania State University
Off-campus co-builder participants, i.e., faculty members choosing to
have their students function as "co-builders," would be recruited via the
C18-L on the Internet and announcements in the newsletters of ASECS (American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) and other appropriate professional
organizations. Student participants at the University of Florida would
be those who chose to enroll in the courses.
Advisory Board: (tentative and incomplete)
University of Florida:
English: Melvyn New
History: Jay Tribby
Theater: Ralf Remshardt
Library: John Van Hook
Also:
Paula Backscheider, Pepperell Eminent Scholar in English, Auburn University
David Jordan, Professor and Chair, History, Illinois at Chicago
Susan Staves, Professor and Chair, English, Brandeis University
5. Evaluation
Evaluators will be asked to consider the following points:
In all these instances, "value" should be interpreted to include not only intrinsic quality, but also novelty (does this duplicate or overlap existing resources) and utility, and relation to ideals of pedagogy (is this something students should learn and is it a good way for them to learn it?).
The evaluations should come from at least the following people: members of the Advisory Board, participant faculty, and participant students. For the latter, especially, a questionnaire allowing short answers or even numerical ones would probably be necessary. From faculty members, the above questions would serve as a loose guide for an evaluation statement. It would be possible also to solicit an impressionistic response to the same questions from members of the C18-L, an active eighteenth-century studies list based at Pennsylvania State University (currently between 600-700 individuals); such responses would give perspective to the responses from participants.
6. Distribution. Obviously a web-site distributes itself, though it must be announced and advertised (most of the web-search engines, especially those organized topically, encourage providers of new sites to report them). In addition, however, the material (except for links to other websites) can be made available in CD-ROM format for both Windows and Mac environments (this capability is available on campus). An important feature of the distribution via either Web or CD will be the solicitation and facilitating of participation by faculty and students in other institutions.
2. Teaching materials developed so far:
scanner
incorporate video and film excerpts?
permissions, especially for visual materials
image mapping of map of London, + others?
photographs artifacts
transfer from microform?
Travel to research collections and photographic sites.