English 205-505
-- Electronic Literary Seminar --

1999 Preliminary Schedule

11 January: Introduction; scope of the seminar; interests of participants; nature of hypertext.

13 January: Review of the Pico editor and Unix operating system; writing HTML.

18-20 January: The Blake Archive: Team analyses of texts with multiple versions.

ASSIGNMENT #1: Oral presentations accompanied by 2-3 page written papers.
25 January: Overview of the Blake Archive; discussion.

27 January: The electronic Oxford English Dictionary as a resource for more than simple word definitions.

1-3 February: RLIN (Research Library Network) and ESTC (English Short-Title Catalogue, up to 1800).

by 3 February: ASSIGNMENT #2: contextualize a major work, non-literary or literary, within the year's (and, if necessary, adjacent years') lists of its publisher.
8 February: Using Excel (or any spread-sheet software) for statistical representations: comparative graphing of publishing information from the ESTC.
ASSIGNMENT #3: email graph-projects by 10 February.
10 February: Discussion of ASSIGNMENT #3; WWW Library Resources.

15-17 February: WWW library and text resources.

by 17 February: ASSIGNMENT #4: Search for works, archives, texts in foreign library sources (preferably using the language--even Latin--that fulfills the College or graduate school requirement): mail results to class.
22-24 February: ASSIGNMENT #5: Individual presentations on useful internet resources.

1-3 March: SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and VHTML (Virtual Hypertext Markup Language).

5-14 March: Spring Break.

15-17 March: Analytical software: concordancing, etc.

22-24 March: Hypertext fiction and poetry.

29-31 March: Hypertext theory.

5-7 April: Frankenstein: The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition.

12-14, 19-21 April: Presentation and discussion of individual research projects.