By Scott Nowka
English Department

Scott Nowka, English Department

“So why does every letter ’s’ look like a lower-case ‘f’?”

This is the question that always precedes one of the most exciting types of discussions we have in my undergraduate or graduate classes. What does it mean? That my students have ventured out beyond the annotated, comfortably modernized, and silently emended editions of eighteenth-century works I have asked them to purchase and that they are reading actual primary sources from the period—thanks to our access to a database called Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). The question itself refers to the fact that early- to mid-eighteenth-century British printers still maintained a convention dating from Roman manuscripts in which the letter “s,” when in the middle of a word, includes a line through it making it appear like a lower case “f.” (For this reason, the phrase “legal cases” appears at first glance to say “legal cafes.”)

But this bit of antiquarian knowledge is not what makes the discussion that ensues interesting. Once we are able to advance beyond this detail, we move on to the fact that my students have made original connections about the content of what we are reading—without the aid of a footnote or of an editor’s preface.

What helps make teaching moments like these possible is the recent explosion of, and Salem State’s even more recent access to, a vast array of electronic databases, ECCO being just one. Electronic databases have long been a part of my research, but I have come to find that they are an invaluable teaching tool in both undergraduate and graduate courses. Student research using these tools encourages critical thinking skills and fosters student investment in the material under examination. At the same time, these tools bring new responsibilities to the instructor using them and, I would argue, to the entire college community.

Classroom Applications

I encourage my students to use a number of electronic databases. My composition students learn how to access and take advantage of the Oxford English Dictionary Online, and new English majors learn how to access databases of literary criticism such as the MLA International Bibliography and JSTOR, whose name is derived from journal storage. All these databases and many more are available free to all Salem State library patrons. The database that I have employed more than any other for student assignments and research, however, is ECCO. This database allows students full-text search capability of “every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom” published from 1701 to 1800, according to the database site.

The advantage of such a wide array of historical texts is the opportunity for contextualization. Students in my British literature survey course, for example, are asked to look at works such as Jonathan’s Swift’s “The Ladies Dressing Room”—a poem which revels in describing the messy details of a woman preparing herself for the day—and see them in relation to other treatments of women in writing from the same time period. The results are often surprising to my students. Some see Swift’s poem as frankly misogynistic at first. But when they are given the opportunity to read articles such as “On Women Who Paint” or “A Dissection of a Beau’s Head and a Coquette’s Heart” from the popular periodical The Spectator, published around the same time, many come to appreciate how Swift can be actually more generous toward women than his contemporaries. Moreover, the importance of understanding chronology in making causal arguments about how contemporary writings influenced literary works provides many of my students an opportunity for a kind of critical thinking that simply does not come about in a course that emphasizes reading literature alone.

The assignment for my graduate students is more ambitious, of course. For any given reading in my course on the origins of the British novel, a student will present a packet of materials and an oral report to the class meant to help everyone better understand a relevant concept for that day’s reading. In a presentation on eighteenth-century understandings of slavery in relationship to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, or the role of servants in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a student would be asked to compose an essay on the topic supported with a bibliography of secondary sources as well as primary sources found on ECCO. While the secondary sources provide my students with a sense of what the current scholarship suggests about, say, masculinity in a sentimental novel such as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, often the more enlightening evidence comes from the historical sources they discover on their own—such as Henry Lemoine’s Modern Manhood, a treatise on boxing from the same time period.

Such research, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, often allows students their very first chance to move beyond the pre-packaged opinions of scholarship and criticism and to begin drawing conclusions for themselves. This is a great opportunity for students to discover subjects of inquiry that interest them as well as a new method for pursuing them that involves a more sophisticated research methodology than just reading the work at hand.

Responsibilities

These assignments have led to interesting undergraduate and graduate projects, as well as more sustained research. For example, the research for a five-minute oral presentation on a work by the female author Eliza Haywood eventually grew to become the basis for a conference paper that will be presented this May by Jen Dulong at the Statewide Undergraduate Research Conference at University of Massachusetts Amherst. At the same time, such tools come with costs. Implementing the use of student research into electronic databases in the classroom takes planning and support. There are pitfalls to be avoided.

Dr. Stephen Gregg’s 2007 article “Using Eighteenth-Century Collections Online as a Learning and Teaching Resource” notes that while there are a number of positive reasons for using this database even in the first-year classroom, students found the sheer number of works included in the database “quite daunting.” For this reason it is important to remember that simply introducing our students to such resources and expecting them to use them productively is about as logical as sending them off to a classic research library—they would have no idea what to do when they got there.

For any electronic database, class time must be devoted to introducing students to how to access and use the database, as well as to the “ins and outs” of searching a database. This last point, often so hard to teach well to new college students, can be bypassed by creating a list of selected works from the database that you would prefer the students to use. I have done this in my British literature survey course, choosing works that seem to have provocative connections to the works we have read and putting .pdf copies of these pieces on our Blackboard site. At the same time, I always encourage students to experiment with the database itself, hoping that they will find topics and interests that I could never anticipate.

A different sort of responsibility brought about by the use of electronic databases, and the point that I would like to end on, is that the very fact that our library currently owns access to them puts a new demand on all of us. Salem State College, like many state schools, has never had the money for the library collection that our faculty want and our students deserve. And, like many state schools, our library has begun shifting its acquisitions budget away from purchasing print items to purchasing access to books and journals. There are of course very good reasons for this. In many ways this is more cost effective and electronic databases require no space to house.

But if these electronic resources are going to replace part of our print collections, we cannot treat them like our print collections. Unlike the print books and journals that we are no longer investing as much money in, our holdings now depend at least in part upon use. If we buy a book series, theoretically we have it forever, regardless of how infrequently it is actually used. And while I of course realize that a library does eventually cull its collections of some of the least checked-out items, this is still quite different from the current decisions libraries are being forced to make. Due to budget cuts, librarians are being asked to cut access to databases that have only been recently acquired, on the basis of limited usage.

For this reason, I think it is incumbent upon all of us to make more active scholarly and pedagogical use of the electronic databases that we have encouraged the library to acquire. It is not enough to mention on your syllabus that we have access to Lexis-Nexis Academic or the Dictionary of National Biography. Perhaps our most engaged students will take this cue and investigate, but the lion’s share will not. As a result, the very tools that we have decided to purchase instead of print materials may not be renewed—thus doubly impoverishing our library holdings, as well as our opportunities for faculty and student research.

This article is part of ASpect’s May 2009 issue, Undergraduate Research.