WEB PROJECT:
patterns of textual communication in early modern Europe

general goals and description

instructions

teams

schedule

GENERAL GOALS & DESCRIPTION

The goal of this assignment is two-fold:

(1) To enable you to look more closely at the actors and institutions of early modern literary culture. In the process, the assignment will help you to synthesize what you have learned throughout the semester.

We have been using the concept of communication through texts as a lens on the larger issues of early modern European history. The other assignments deal either with the Renaissance or with the Reformation (but not both). This one allows you to put things together, and at the same time, to deepen your knowledge of a given aspect of the communication circuit without a great deal of extra research.

Working in teams will encourage you to test your ideas in consultation with classmates. Each member of the group can benefit from the specialized knowledge of the others while also exchanging views on common readings. Working in teams will therefore also enable you to keep the work load within limits.

Finally, the experience of collaboration can serve as a corrective to the modern emphasis on the individual creator of art or scholarship. As you will have noted, collective enterprise—in guilds, in artists' studios, &c.—was commonplace in the early modern era.

(2) The World Wide Web is arguably becoming the principal system of communication and information storage for our age. Just as writing an essay gives you a better understanding of the historical books and articles that you read, so, too, having to design your own web page should give you greater insight into the principles that underlie digital media and the Web.

As you know or will see, the Web has its own philosophy or aesthetic, which differs from that of recent print formats. (One hesitates to say, "traditional" formats, for as you by now know, practices varied widely. Not all texts were written so as to be read in linear fashion, and the intimate combination of image and text was something that many pre-modern readers would have taken for granted.)

Ideally, your study of print culture and your experience with working on the Web should inform one another. Questions to ponder as you work:

To what extent is it appropriate to speak of a series of comparable "media revolutions": e.g., writing, printing, digital media? What has the Web done to our (traditional) concepts of such activities as authorship, publishing, and reading?

• Consider the relative effort and time required for artisanal versus high-tech procedures. Just think of hand-setting metal type vs. word-processing. Our book-arts workshops have already given you a good many insights.

• Ditto for reproduction of images (but are "reproduced" images comparable to the originals or one another across media? review the essay on "Prints and the Definitive Image," by Charles Talbot).

• Both printing and digital media have been hailed as democratizing inventions.

For example, it is said that, thanks to the Web, everyone can now become an author as well as a publisher in one's own right. How true is this? That is, it is "easy" to build a web page—if one has access to education, technology, an Internet service provider, etc. And then, if you build it, will they come? What about the relation between author and reader? Compare principles of marketing and distribution, too. And who ultimately controls access to texts and technology?

Summary: Using one media revolution to study another should lead you to a better understanding of both, and in turn, of past and present alike.

INSTRUCTIONS

Basic Task and Structure

Your task is to communicate, in a manner as rigorous and yet engaging as possible, the essence of literary culture in the early modern era.

The site will have three principal sections, corresponding to phases in the movement of ideas through society, from author to reader:

(I) Production: authorship; generation of ideas and texts (Note: This could include the recovery, collecting, and editing of older texts, such as the Bible and the Classics.)

(II) Reproduction/mediation: physical reproduction and distribution: printing, publishing, sales, censorship, &c.

(III) Consumption: readership implies not just passive "consumption" of a pre-packaged message, and instead, "appropriation" (not everyone will read the same text the same way); includes institutions such as libraries, schools, &c.

Naturally, this is a gross oversimplification;in point of fact, the process was not monolithic or unidirectional. But as long as we remind ourselves and our audience of its limitations, that is fine: Review Lotte Hellinga's discussion of the circuit of communication in her essay on manuscript and print (from our first session on print culture.)

One team of students will be responsible for each section. You will work on this project primarily in the context of your own team, but we will periodically meet as a class to discuss our progress.

Specific tasks are discussed below, in relation to the schedule of work.

REMINDER/CAUTION: Web pages "work" differently than printed pages. Refer to these tips and guidelines as you work.

TEAMS

SCHEDULE

13 November

Discuss preliminary results in class

You should by then have completed the following steps:

(1) Determine the isssue:

How do you plan to define or frame your topic?
What specific subjects will you need to cover?

(2) Find materials (texts and images):

Hint: You should already start to delegate labor: divide the tasks among the members of your group.

(a) Start by going through all the readings listed in the syllabus, and see what is relevant (there should be a great deal). Hint: In some cases, e.g., texts having to do with printing, the connection will be obvious. But there are plenty of equally valuable, less readily apparent resources. For example, if you are studying either authorship or reading, you may turn to the prefaces of works we have read (consider Machiavelli, Luther, etc.). Similarly, the theological disputes of the age (from Protestant-Catholic tensions to the debate over burning the Talmud) can tell us a great deal about reading in the broadest sense.

(b) Next, determine what is lacking and develop a strategy for finding it. Perhaps the footnotes or bibliographies of the above texts will give you some pointers. The consider in addition, the databases and books available in the Library (See the resource page of the course web site; and don't forget to examine the many titles on reserve at the Circulation Desk.)

(c) You needn't worry about design specifics at this point, but do consider the general need to arrange things in a hierarchical manner, moving from most general to most specific. At the least, you should have some idea of the number of subsections.

REMINDER: Start with the tips and guidelines for web design.

22 November:

Brief review of progress in class:

You should by now have:

• at least a good deal the desired content
• a working plan of the site structure (It will almost certainly change in the particulars, but at least you'll know that it's changing.)

(a) REMINDER: Refer to tips and guidelines for web design.
(b) Another good planning aid: Review the Hampshire Library guide to use of the Web. Examine the criteria for evaluation of web sources: Can your site meet these standards??

Note: Determine whether you have the technical skills you need. If you need help, be sure to consult the instructor or reference librarian, and above all, web manager.

At this time, you will also be working intensively on your research papers and book projects. Now is also the time to think about how they fit together. Decide which web page offer the best "match" for your research topic. Then think about how you might distill the results of your work into a paragraph or so. Finally, consult with the relevant web team in order to find out how you can actually incorporate your results into the page.

(You may just decide that each site will have a link to "research" or "case studies," etc.—and that is fine—but material from the two sources should be as closely integrated as possible.

6 December:

By now, you should have built the site. You can continue to make little changes up to the end of the semester, but we need to be ready to preview at least a working model today.