Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature

Stuart D Lee and Paul Groves, (Oxford University)

This paper will describe the JTAP project entitled 'Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature'. It will briefly look at the deliverables of the project, including four web-based tutorialson the poetry of the First World War, and a digital archive of primary source material centering on the poet Wilfred Owen. However, rather than just providing a project report as such, these two papers will look at the issues involved relating to preservation, dissemination, digitisation, and copyright.

Web-Based Tutorials

One of the deliverables of the project is to present a web-based supplement to a traditional course on World War One poetry. The tutorials presented will consist of:

1. An Introduction to World War Poetry - a brief outline of the genre including poems and biographies of Owen, Sassoon, Brooke, Thomas, and Rosenberg; plus information on Women poets and Soldiers' songs.
2. Isaac Rosenberg's 'Break of Day in the Trenches' - a tutorial exploring the close reading of a poem and how knowledge of its social and historical context alters the reader's perception of the piece.
3. Manuscript Study of 'Dulce et Decorum est' - allows the user to see the four surviving manuscripts which retain the poem (two at the British Library and two at the English Faculty in Oxford) and provides them with a web interface to create their own edition.
4. An Interactive Concordance to the Poems of Wilfred Owen - prompts users to explore Owen's use of certain images and literary devices.

In constructing these tutorials the project has had to look seriously at design issues. For example, when should a linear approach be adopted as opposed to a more fragmented hypertext environment, or a more task-orientated interface. Similarly, the feedback from the two and a half year-old tutorial on 'Break of Day in the Trenches' indicates that most users welcome some form of interaction, and an opportunity to see the comments of other users. How can this be effectively initiated with the tutorials noted above? As well as the web-based tutorials the project has also had to look at the relative effectiveness of such teaching environments as e-mail lists, MUDs, and MOOs. Are these of use in the teaching of literature?

Digital Archive

A major part of the project will be the creation of a digital archive of primary source material based around the poet Wilfred Owen. This will be drawn from collections held at the English Faculty Library in Oxford, the British Library, and the University of Texas in Austin. The creation of such an archive involves issues of digitisiation, preservation, and dissemination. For example, the quality of image used for preservation (c.80MB apiece) is far too large to be delivered over the Web, yet essential for future scholars.

Images from the collections are being digitised by the special photographic units at the Bodleian and the British Library. The high-quality images are being stored on Oxford's Hierarchical File Server (which surrently has a capacity of 20 terabytes), but 'working quality' copies (in JPEG format) will be available via the Web. Searching of the archive will be viaan SGML-aware search engine which will interrogate transcriptions of the manuscripts. The interface for the user will be a Web form which will allow browsing and searching.

In addition to the problems of copyright, the project is also seeking to explore ways a user can effectively build a path through the archive to create an annotated reading list, lecture, or essay. All of these topics will be discussed in the paper.