Here's a copy of the assignment, in case you lost the attachment I sent. I'll also put it over there in the sidebar.
What challenges are you encountering?
What confusion do you have about the expectations for this assignment?
Questions or curiosity about the C18 texts you've been finding?
Difficulty or fun with ECCO?
Questions about how to go about choosing a text?
You can click here for an answer to the question many of you doubtless have by now: Why did C18 writers sometimes write "f" instead of "s"? (Short answer: they didn't). A longer and more technical explanation is available here.
Deadline is open until the proposal is due (Friday, March 18). Posts before Saturday midnight will count for Week 8 blogging. Posts after Saturday midnight will count towards Week 9.
13 comments:
After KW's warning on Friday, I decided to spend some time with ECCO tonight even though I had more pressing deadlines; I wanted to know what I was getting into. I had an easy time getting into the site. For my search, I used a test idea: While working on a restoration comedy, I had a theater Professor who was aware of the differences between eras in matters such as dress and manners. It was his contention that women don't know how to wear long dresses anymore and so he gave us some pointers for the show. For a long time since, I've wanted to know more about such everyday stuff so, tonight, I searched on ECCO. Well, after one hour, I rescued myself so I could get to my other work. It was hard because I was having a blast.
WARING: As we have been advised, ECCO can be a time vacuum.
After a comment concerning physics in class on Friday, I decided to focus my search on scientific knowledge of the 18th century, attempting to learn more about what institutions the field belonged to and what we can say has changed between the Enlightenment era and the modern era. I realize now that science had rather different institutions, and what you could publish in a scientific document then is a bit different than what you can publish now. One difficulty I ran into was that few documents actually focus on the science itself, and instead relate it to historical background or economics (as is the case with the geography document I am now using for my proposal). But besides that initial difficulty, I am now cruising along the database, and should have a proposal ready soon.
So I found using the basic search was completely unhelpful, and reading the title page's roller coaster font sizes over and over again starts an eye headache, and mentally translating all those "f"s to "s"s takes a little getting used to, but once I switched to a more advanced search and got used to the formal "s", the researching got a bit better.
On a more technical note, can we use the first person when writing our proposals for friday? Such as, "I want to write on blah-blah for this reason..." or something similar? Or do we need to stick to a more tone, such as including the universal "one"?
**So in the first paragraph I was obviously referring to ECCO.
My last sentence in the second paragraph I meant to ask if we need to use a more formal tone.
First-person is fine in your proposals!
At first, I had trouble searching for material using an advanced search option. I would get a lot of the same articles that were not of any interest to me. I spent a lot of time using different key words and phrases to help define my search.
I could not figure out how to make the text of the article large enough to read but not too big as to where I had scroll in several directions to read the article. I was hoping to make the article the size of my screen so I could minimize the amount of scrolling when reading it.
Can we write the paper on a specific chapter in the article? For example, if I found an article about theater but only wanted to use the chapter about plays, then would this be acceptable?
An excerpt from a longer work is fine!
Some people find it easier to read the ECCO texts by saving the relevant text to a PDF file and then reading it in Adobe or Preview. You can do this by clicking the "print" icon in ECCO, which will give you a window where you can type in the page range you want to download (careful though--it goes by "image" number, not "page" number).
Hope this helps!
Ugh I have been searching ECCO for three days now trying to find something that is not 500 pages and of any interest to me with zero luck! I have never been so frusterated. At this point, I just want to find something that is short and not written in some weird font that I can't read.
I had some difficulty finding what I wanted. At first I wanted to search for dueling, but I could not see any writings that where about things that I wish to read. I wanted it to be more about honor or the act of dueling with swords, but the only short works I could find where not very interesting. One of the problems of I did face was that when I was looking instead for pirates or other works some of the writing was to difficult to read. I kind of got confused while I was reading about some works because I did not find them interesting. Basically it was difficult to even find something I really wanted to read. In the end by going through many works I found one I sort of enjoyed reading. I am reading about pirates =)
I have come across a few issues. First, reading eighteenth-century text is different than today’s society where as we would use the letter “s” it is replaced by the letter “f”. I found it difficult to understand what I was actually reading because I was reading and changing the words around, mentally. However, I found it easier when I actually wrote out the text and changed the letters. Secondly, doing the basic search wasn't helpful at all however playing around with the database for a while I came across a variety of different texts that I found interesting. I knew when I was reading the guidelines I quickly became interested in women fashions during the 18th century. However, given that was a really broad topic, I wanted to find something I was interested in reading but was less broad but still discussed something about fashion. Hence, I found a text discussing military fashion during the 18th century.
Overwhelmed is the word that I think I am looking for to describe my experience with the ECCO search. First off, I was trying to search the website using the Browse link on the main page. When I was taken to the next page, I tried using some of the key terms that KW gave us on the link for the paper. Repeatedly I put in different key words, and selected the subject tab at the top of the page and I continued to get nothing. I felt that I was doing something wrong even though I was following the given steps. After I gave up for a while, I went back to the main ECCO page and went to the simple search and had better luck. There are some many documents that come up with every key word you may put it. One thing that I want to know if is the info that comes up count as single pages or just small portions? The pages that come up have the word highlighted in the text or things of that nature, but Im still search for the most interesting paper. I appreciate the variety of information that comes up, but it does overwhelm you.
Well, after having spent a considerable number of hours browsing the gigantic library of various literature we call ECCO, I come away with two thoughts. The first is that there is ACTUALLY so much stuff! When I first started browsing I didn't really know what I was interested in so I just clicked the search button with nothing entered for the topic or whatnot. As expected, there were like a buh-jillion entries. I skimmed through the titles and opened new tabs for pieces that interested me. After getting through about 4 pages of stuff, I realized that the search was organized by author and that all the stuff that I've been looking at must be a little misrepresentative of the database. Not discouraged by this, I began to narrow my search.
One of the things I did was choose to look at only literature, like books and poems. After looking at a few of them I feel like a lot of the stuff written back then is not really that good or interesting. I remember looking at a poem on women and love and hoping that it was going to be some like juicy, though reserved, piece of literature. As I read through some of it, hoping that after each page the next would be more interesting, I got the feeling that the author was just some dude trying to make some money by selling a book with an attractive title. I was kind of reading through it quickly, keeping in mind that I didn't want to spend years looking at all this stuff, so I may not have been able to appreciate the texts I read to their fullest.
As a history major, I have to deal with these old text databases all the time for research and I have to say, ECCO is one of the better ones. For a class last year I had to use this database that specializes in early modern English writings that was just abominably organized by comparison. That being said, some of the scans are of a fairly disappointing quality.
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