The Archeology of Text

SYLLABUS VIEW, Literature 341.001 / BKS 341.001, Fall 2019, TuTh 1:30-3:20, Athenaeum  435

Weekly Schedule and Assignments  Last edited: 11/18/2019 12PM

This syllabus page contains reading and other assignments that should be completed before each class meeting for which they are scheduled.  If students are especially interested in a day's or week's topic, they usually will find links to additional resources beneath the basic assignments.  After the first few weeks, most Tuesdays will be spent discussing readings and many Thursdays will be structured like natural sciences labs, based on the writing assignments that are due for each of the three text-delivery systems we study (digital, print, and manuscript).  The labs at the end of the semester will support your independent research project, though you can begin working on it at any time before then.

Note: Assigned readings are in online full-text documents, public folder postings, photocopies, and printed texts.  Read the syllabus carefully, with an eye for typography and color, to know where assigned readings can be found.  Some reading assignments are indicated for students with particular interests (e.g., digital coding), but required readings are all indicated by

Boldface type warns you when the assignment comes from required printed textbooks, an actual DVD (vs. a web video), or in photocopied handouts you should get in the preceding class.  An underscored title in black indicates readings that are located on Canvas.  Hyperlinks to online readings are underscored in blue text.  Words in italics, unless they are book or periodical titles per MLA style, are general discussion topics, but don't let them keep you from bringing up other issues.

        Because all class meetings will take place in the Rare Book Seminar Room (Athenaeum 435), students whould wash their hands before each class so that we will be able to handle rare materials on any given day without special preparation.  If it becomes a habit to do so before entering any rare book collection, students will have developed one of the first essential traits of the rare book researcher.  Special Collections staff ask that students enter ATH435 through its "back" door, the one facing the current periodical shelves and the Library stacks.  (You can enter through the front door when working on your own in SC&A--just sign in.)  Please put backpacks against the wall and do not bring food or drink into the classroom.  Students can bring to the classroom paper notebooks, laptop or tablet computers, cellphones set to "buzz" or "Airplane Mode," and use only pencils--no pens, please.  Also, even if students arrive in haste or distracted from another course, they should please take a moment on the way into the collection to slow down.  Haste and inattention are the enemies of fragile old documents.  If students prepare to treat us all with care, they will be ready to treat the books with care.  As often as necessary during the semester, we should refresh our memory about good behavior with old books by reading this web page.

Week 1

Thursday, 8/22: Course introduction; syllabus and web-site review; reading assignments in various textual media (original print, photocopy, scanned PDF, digital versions of print on GoucherLearn, "born digital" on the Internet); graded work (writing on digital, print and MS texts, your "cadaver book" description, and the independent research project); sharing our interests as researchers.  What brings you to this course?  What do you hope to learn to do?  What textual media do you think you will want to research independently?  Review of "seeing vs. reading" skills. 

Week 2 Texts, Archives, and Research Today--The Nature of the Problem

Tuesday, 8/27:  Hard Choices Ahead!  Logistics, economics, cultural change and modern technology vs. the survival of print media, especially in academia.  Digital texts compete with print texts for readers' attention, and for library acquisition dollars.  Digital texts take up far less space than print texts, but digital texts may not display as well for readers as print texts, and loss of any link in the networked chain of access will prevent reading, whereas print texts are theoretically readable even at night in a power blackout.  Access to digital texts is initially cheaper to acquire, but it usually doesn not mean "ownership" of the text, but rather more like a "rental of access" that must be renewed by subscription before every reading.  One way to test things that might go wrong in the shift from print to digital text is to compare the previous solution libraries offered to reduce storage and text acquisition costs:microfilm. What was "microfilm" and how did it affect pre-digital attempts to solve archival storage space problems?  What will happen to "news" when newspapers go out of business?  What can real newspapers tell the researcher that digital images cannot?   What will the flood of digital text mean for current and future writers, readers, and researchers?

            Nicholson Baker, "Deadline" (in Writing Material, 9-34);  "Education publisher Pearson to phase out printed textbooks," BBC, 16 July 2019; David Yaffe-Bellany and Jacob Stern, "Yale students aren't ready to close the book on the school's libraries just yet," The Washington Post, "Higher Education," 4/21/19; and

            Marlene Manoff, "The Symbolic Meaning of Libraries in a Digital Age," Libraries and the Academy 1:4 (2001) 371-81; Note: Baker's New Yorker article and his 2001 book, Double Fold, made some charges against librarians relevant to Manoff's article but which Manoff does not rebut directly.  Could you use her thinking about how non-librarians tend to view libraries to help explain Baker's profound and exasperated fury about microfilm replacing print collections?  Before the digital text era, microfilming was libraries' and readers' previous encounter with modern technology designed to reduce storage costs and space use.  Users still had to physically come to the libraries to use microfilms stored there, and usually only one copy of each microfilmed text was available for use at one time.  What costs have we come to accept in exchange for the speed and convenience of access to digital text in preference to print text?

(Yaffe-Bellany and Stern's, and Manoff's articles are the first of several of this syllabus' readings hyperlinked above through commercial pay-per-view news outlets or JSTOR, both of which require penetration of some sort of "firewall" for permission to read them.  Consider firewall permission to be a general requirement for any scholarly articles hyperlinked to this syllabus, but it also can be a problematic part of the digital texts we are studying.  If you are working on campus, you should have no trouble opening JSTOR articles.  Commercial news site articles also are available on Canvas if you cannot read them online.  If you are working on a JSTOR article from outside the Goucher firewall, go to the Information Technology page and download the Cisco Anyconnect Secure Mobility Client VPN [usually just called "the VPN" or Virtual Private Network].  If you are having trouble getting past the firewall, I have placed a PDF copy of Manoff in the "General Discussion" folder in Canvas.  If you cannot get into Canvas, ask another student or IT for help.  If you would rather have had a printed copy handed to you in class, please consult the college administration which frowns upon large-scale photocopying.  Note that the college administration actively encourages faculty to assign digital texts from databases like JSTOR to cut costs associated with print text production.  If you are interested in any aspect of this issue as a cost of reliance on digital text that students now must bear, you might develop it into a topic for your first short paper (due on the weekend following Week 6.)

       To prepare for a lab experience comparing digital images with real newspaper pages, see these digitally scanned images of the London Gazette for January 21-24 and October 1-4, 1688.  What do the digital surrogates conceal from you that handling the actual broadsheets might reveal?  Those images are relatively clear images of the real printed leaves.  Bad digital images, like bad microfilm images, can be illegible.  For an example, click on this link to view out this "bad microfilm" picture of Shoeless Joe Jackson, of "Chicago Black Sox" and Field of Dreams fame.  Could you positively identify anyone in the picture?  Is GoogleBooks any better than the C20 microfilmers?  For more examples of the way digitized text can resemble badly microfilmed text, visit The Art of Google Books for some examples of what digitization is doing to print.  

If you are interested in researching library "collection management" issues, consult Manoff's bibliography, and click here for some additional possible paths for research.

Thursday 8/29: "Code 'em up solid, so they won't come down"   We will study the alphabetical and typographic "codes" of print and manuscript books in later weeks, but now we must become aware of the complex layers of code required to produce the simplest text on a computer screen or smartphone.  How are digital documents made and read--computing codes and mechanisms from the "standalone word processor" era to the present day?  How do computers store and recall text for us?  What are the layers of digital code, file architecture, and other software and hardware that are required to operate digital media?  How do they compare with the apparatus needed to produce and read text in manuscript and print media? 

Week 3:  Research in Digital Texts: Digital Text Construction, History, and Future

Monday 9/2: LABOR DAY HOLIDAY  To prepare for this week's classes on digital texts and archives, spend some time thinking about where you get your "news" (i.e., recently researched facts and interpretation of facts), and where you go for authoritative "olds," the news about the past.  Do you use wild Web sites that Google or some other search engine hands you, or have you developed a relationship with some persons or organizations whose reporting quality you trust?  How do you test news sources for their reliability--or do you test them at all?  What digital literacy technologies do you currently use to access new and old information and interpretation of the facts?  How do those sources and technologies affect your reading and writing?  Consider both academic and private uses of literacy in your memoir.  Because you will have a long holiday weekend to think about this, you will have time to ask your parents and others where they go for facts and wisdom, and what tools they use to acquire it.  Come prepared to help the class develop a picture of how digital literacy has overtaken print and manuscript literacy, and how the three literacies currently co-exist for each of you.

Tuesday 9/3: Internet History and Internet Connectivity--"I knew the Internet in 1983 when she was a 300-baud baby with under five hundred host computers!"  How are digital documents stored, retrieved, and archived on networks linked to the Internet?  Networks, packet-switching, and the history of the Internet and World-Wide-Web.  

Without the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the chain of transmission which determines how packets are routed from your device (computer, smartphone, tablet) to storage servers which supply the digital code which creates the screen you are  viewing, you could not read ANYTHING online.

Thursday 9/5: The Darknet--"Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!"  [NOTE: Students surely know that some Web sites contain disturbing, illegal, and dangerous content.  We have to discuss them as part of the course's digital text unit, but students are not required to search for them.  Students who choose to explore the Darknet should do so carefully, and at their  own risk.  Ask me about individual sites for guidance.  If you don't know what a TOR browser is, please do not even think of going beyond the readings linked below.  Fowler and Albergotti are reporting recent instances in which the Darknet and "5G" or Fifth Generation Internet of Things devices are creating "texts" and delivering "texts" we did not intend or desire.  In effect, the Darknet is coming to you.]


Resources for Students Wishing to Specialize in "Darknet" Digital Text Research

Week 4:  Research in Archives of Digital Texts: Digital Text Construction, History, and Future

Tuesday 9/10: "I can feel my mind going, Dave!"  What non-malicious factors affect our actual abilities to read digital texts, and the ordinary survival of digital documents under the best of circumstances?  What must be done to preserve digital information?  How does online reading, especially hypertext reading, affect readers' experience of the text?  How does reading on screen differ from reading print or manuscript text?  Rothenberg will challenge our sense of what makes digital texts durable enough so that we can even read them.  Then we can turn to the special problems and advantages experienced by readers of digital texts. Be prepare to discuss Bolter's optimistic forecast of the "dialogic" hypertextual world he imagined in 1991 and Birkets' expectation that crucial kinds of reading quality will be lost when all reading is on-screen.  Students interested in cognitive studies may wish to turn from Bolter's theoretical predictions to look at Ralf Schneider's review of research in cognitive studies for what it can tell us about readers' actual experiences of digital hypertext reading and reading in standard printed texts (see the "Resources" link below).  Test Bolter's 1991 and Birkets' 1995 predictions on your own experience.  Have they come true, totally, partially, or not at all? 

        Rothenberg is conceptually pre-Internet, imagining a digital text "ecology" wherein all readers of digital text stored their own texts on their own disks, CDs, or flash drives, and read them using their own copies of software programs on their own computers.  Even in 1999, there were no "smartphones" on which to read text.  For a post-Rothenberg idea of Internet-based digital text's most catastrophic vulnerability, read this Web page and watch the three-minute NASA video: The "Carrington Event": September 1-2, 1859;  NASA X-Class: A Guide to Solar Flares.  Keep in mind that all computers connected to the Internet, the nodes and routers of the 'Net, itself, and all cellphones and cellphone towers, contain integrated circuits that combine hundreds of millions of transistors  operating at very tiny voltages to make digital text (and everything else) work.  An electromagnetic pulse, whether generated by a military device (nuclear weapon, high voltage microwave weapon, vircator) or by a coronal mass ejection, may overload the circuits of many or all such devices even if they are on the side of the Earth facing away from the CME event.  Satellites are peculiarly vulnerable to coronal mass ejections from the largest solar flares.  No little transistors = no 'Net.  No 'Net = no digital books, cloud-stored music or movies, cat videos, or 341 online syllabi.

Thursday 9/12: Digital Text Lab Day #1  You have a short paper due a week from Sunday.  Bring laptops to prepare to write the first paper about how the text stored on the Web we have been using actually works.  I would be happy to help students follow some line of investigation they invent on they own, or pick some of the projects below.  Some general questions guide my suggested topics: How does online reading, especially hypertext reading, affect readers' experience of the text?  What challenges do digital surrogates pose for print literature and the future of the book?  

        Before students choose the line of investigation they will follow in this lab, they should see 9/24, the due date for the first paper, and the following links for instructions for the First written assignment due by noon in my Inbox as a MS-Word or Rich Text Format (.rtf) document attached to an email, or a URL in an email that directs me to some web-writing (using standard academic English and MLA format, of course).  Click here for possible topics and specific instructions.  For writing tips and my chief hopes for these papers, which students can treat as an evaluative rubric, click here.  Our goal is for the labs in this course to enable students to prepare to write the papers.  Plan well and the paper will serve our curiosity, and help all students to do well in the course.  Talk with me about  developing papers so that I can help focus their evolving theses and locate good research sources.

        If students already have paper ideas, they should discuss them briefly with me before plunging into research during the lab class.  If students are still looking for paper ideas, they can consult  Resources for Students Writing Paper #1 on Digital Texts, Networks, Reading and Writing, Part I

Week 5:  Research in Archives of Digital Texts: Digital Journalism as Research "Bedrock"; Digital Text Archive Construction, History, and Future

Tuesday 9/17: "All the news that fits in bytes"  The printing press and mass literacy predate by only a few hundred years the unexpected return (after Athens' fall in 400 BCE) of democratic governments, in which informed citizens vote on and otherwise affect their laws and government policies (wars, trade, crisis aid, etc.).  Democratic governments' quality of life depends, fundamentally, upon the quality of information available to each citizen, and that information (since the early 1600s) was provided by journalists reporting the "news," literally the new things that had happened or had recently been discovered.  Think about why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids any law restricting the freedom of the press.  But the Founders made no provisions for the quality of reporting we get from our press. How will digital journalism affect the future of news, newspapers, reporting and reporters?  How has Wikipedia become so many people's online "library," and what makes Google the "librarian" or "curator" controlling our access to the World-Wide-Web? What do we pay for our dependency upon it and other search engines whose designs are even more commercially motivated? 

§  Read Michael Massing, "Digital Journalism: How Good Is It?" and "Digital Journalism: The Next Generation"; [first 2 parts of a 3-part article] in The New York Review of Books, June 4, 25, available at  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/digital-journalism-how-good-is-it/ and  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/25/digital-journalism-next-generation/;

§  and Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,"  Science 333: 6043 (5 August 2011) 776-8 (available from this hyperlink), and visit this Web page for two ways Google search results may be manipulated.

§  Web page re: Massing and Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner.

Thursday 9/19:  Digital Text Lab Day #2: The first short paper is due this coming Sunday (or sooner if you choose).  Bring a laptop to learn more about how the Web we have been using actually works.  I would be happy to help students follow some line of investigation they invent on their own, or pick some of the projects below.  Some general questions guide my suggested topics: Who is the Internet's "Librarian" or "Curator"?  Is it Google?  What happens when pages and sites change, or even disappear?  How do changes from print to digital text archives affect the design and operations of "bricks and mortar" sites like the Goucher Library? Remember, plan research to help create Paper 1.  You must use at least some scholarly or scholarly-quality secondary sources to support your thinking.  Students can follow one of the lines of investigation linked  below, or continue the one they began last week.  Talk with me about the developing paper so that I can help focus its evolving thesis and locate good research sources.

Resources for Students Writing Paper #1 on Digital Text, Networks, Reading and Writing, Part II

Sunday, 9/22:  First written assignment due by noon in my Inbox as a MS-Word or Rich Text Format (.rtf) document attached to an email, or a URL in an email that directs me to some web-writing (using standard academic English and MLA format, of course).  Click here for possible topics and specific instructions.  For writing tips and my chief hopes for these papers, which can be treated as an evaluative rubric, click here.

Week 6:  Print Text Construction: the Print Shop, Type Fonts, and Paper   

Tuesday 9/24: Hand-press printed books (ca. 1450-1800) created the world digital text now lives in.  How are hand-press books printed and bound?  How do bibliographers describe hand-press books, what kinds of books were first printed, and how did they make the type fonts with which the books were printed? Before class begins--chose one of the available "cadaver books."  (Each student will study at least one book as a medical anatomy student studies a cadaver, though without taking it apart, of course.  [Some are already damaged, but learning to work with old damaged books is good training.])

§  Over the weekend before class, go to the Library circulation desk, get and watch the LIT/BKS 341 reserve copy of The Rare Book School's two-part DVD, The Anatomy of a Book: Part I: Format in the Hand-Press Period and The Making of a Renaissance Book (running time for both, approximately one hour). 

§  Before watching the DVD, go to Canvas and open the "Goucher Watermark Eng BKS Countermark Chainline Sheet" Word file in the Hand-Press Book Leaf Lab Forum.  Print at least four pages of paper with watermarks and countermarks on them to practice bindery folding and format detection.  If you print extra sheets, you can take one or more of the folded sheets through the cutting and sewing process to produce a fully assembled quire of leaves.

§  Before class, read Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapters 1 & 2 ("Introduction" and "Analytical Bibliography") 1-35.  This is not a lot of "reading," just some intense "seeing."  Williams and Abbott's discussion of type fonts as evidence (19-20) has no illustrations, but typography is a supremely visual science.   We will explore type fonts in our next class.

§  Look at and think about the physical operations recorded in images on Sanders, "Inking, Paper Registration, and Pulling: Hand Press Printing, c. 1460-1800", and watch this three-minute video in which paper-mounting and lever-pulling parts of the whole process are slowly demonstrated.  Then skim the Chronological Table of Printed Book Production (National Diet Library, Japan), and the Harry Ransom Center's selected images from The Gutenberg Bible (circa 1454) (U. Texas, Austin). After the front cover image, the remaining first set of images are blanks.  Jump to "2" to see Gutenberg's printed pages, beautifully painted by illuminators who also painted manuscript books in the same fashion.  The point is to familiarize our eyes with an older type font and page layout--don't try to read the whole Gutenberg Bible!  You can begin to join our discussion of early printed books just by looking at the typography and page layout of only a few pages, or even one page.

§  Examine two images of the hand-press book production system in the Print Cycle (hand-drawn by Paul Needham, Librarian of the Scheide Library, Princeton) and  The Print Cycle in a "Dance of Death" engraving.  These illustrate a hand-press print shop  in operation.  Can you identify what each of the living print shop workers are doing as part of the printing process?.

Thursday 9/26: Hand-made paper and hand-cast printing type made mass-produced hand-printed books possible--so how were paper and type made?  How should we analyze the papers and type fonts from which early printed books were made, and what kinds of evidence do they reveal?  The Paper Museum--samples of paper from many nations and for many uses.  For convenience and speed, I have summarized Dard Hunter's 1957 summary of papermaking history on this Web page.  Just use it for reference and to give you some context for Asian vs. Islamic vs. European papermaking.  Get ready to challenge your assumptions about what "paper" is and can be.  Also, we will do a quick introduction to typography and type design.

Papyrology--

§  Paper Analysis--read Alan Stevenson, "Paper as Bibliographic Evidence," The Library 5th Series XVII:3 (September 1962) 197-204  [In photocopy from instructor], and "Watermarks Are Twins," Studies in Bibliography 4 (1951-52) 57-91.  "Watermarks" is available online at: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb/ (Use the "Browse by Volume" menu in the left frame and click on "4"--Stevenson's article is the fourth.  Why might this digital copy be preferable to a photocopy?)

§  Paper Watermark Examples--browse one or both of these sites for a few images of watermark types used in the early centuries of printing, many of which continued to be used in later papers--Briquet Online (Briquet's Les Filigranes was the first major illustrated catalog of European watermarks--this Web site is still being developed but you may find your watermark in it if you can translate a little French); WZMA - Wasserzeichen des Mittelalters (Austrian Academy of Sciences, for Central European papermakers);  Watermarks in Incunabula Printed in the Low Countries: The early paper market was based on exports from countries like France and Italy which grew large flax crops, and their low costs of production enabled them to capture the market in most places to which printing had spread.  Choose the "browse by main group" option to see examples. 

The "Bologna Stone" and standard hand-press-era paper sizes.  For more information on and illustrations of watermarks, see the English language index of Watermarks.info.   Digital "watermark" example.  1687/1689 Chaucer Edition Issue Images  Uncut Quarto Edition Sheets from Bindery Waste

If you are especially interested in paper as a key element in print and manuscript text creation, ask me for a photocopy of Edward Heawood, "Sources of Early English Paper-Supply." The Library, 4:3, 1 December 1929.  282–307; and get the Library's copy of Dard Hunter's magesterial Papermaking: the history and technique of an ancient craft.  NY: Dover, 1978. 676 H94pa

 Typography--

§  Type Font Creation--to begin training your eyes and mind to decode hand-press era type fonts, first view Stan Nelson's demonstration of cutting a punch for an individual piece of type (a "Garamond" font letter "R") (7 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eExllUeGtvc&playnext=1&list=PL1A1CE1A090522E19&feature=results_main.  

§  When Nelson's "R" matrix (L. "mother" of many pieces of type) is complete, molten lead mixed with antimony and tin will be poured into it and the resulting piece of type will look like this.

 

§  Type Font Analysis, Roman and Gothic--

·        To describe what a type font's letters look like, study this vocabulary guide appropriate to Roman types, so-called because early sixteenth-century Italian printers began to use these (to us) modern, rounded, relatively unadorned fonts that imitated the handwriting of scribes in the very early, "Carolingian" period of manuscript book making ("era of Charlemagne," ca. 700s-800s).  In the same period, manuscript scribes began to use the similarly open, easily read "Humanist" manuscript hands that came to dominate Early Modern handwriting.  So when you see these Roman types or related Humanist scribal hands, you can guess you are looking at a late 1400s or after 1500 piece of text!

·        Before Roman type like the font of this Web page, there was "Gothic" or "Black Letter" type, so-called by later readers who had become unused to reading its ornate letter forms  Gothic fonts tend to vary widely from printer to printer in the earliest, "incunable" period (ca. 1451-1551).  Click here to see Conrad Haebler's invaluable catalogue of the earliest European Gothic type fonts distinguished by the way each font made the capital letter "M."  In the first half-century of printing, almosts all printers used Gothic type fonts because those letter forms were what readers were used to seeing in manuscript books.  In fact, to pre-1600 readers, "Gothic" type seems to have been easier to read than Roman, which often was used for unusual emphasis like modern Italics.  Gothic scribal hands died out rapidly in the late 1400s, but Gothic print continued to be used for texts that were supposed to be "authoritative," such as Bibles, laws and legal books, and poetry written in the 1400s, like the collected works of Chaucer (until after the 1687 edition!).  To practice identifying a single incunable printer's Gothic font from among several similar incubnable fonts, click here.  Drag and drop characters from the table on the right on to what you believe to be an example of the same character in the text of an introduction to Aristotle's works.

        By the time you are done working with these typography exercises, your brain and eyes should have begun adapting to be able to read more early type fonts on real printed pages from before 1800.

Week 7:  Print Texts: Construction as Evidence of History 

A month from now you will need to read Emma Thoyts' The Key to the Family Deed Chest (London: 1893), also available under the title How to Decipher and Study Old Documents.  Print-on-demand copies can be ordered for under $10 from the Goucher College Bookstore today and would be available well before the assignment.  An online digital surrogate of the book is also available from the Internet Archive (see the Thursday Week 10 assignment), but you will find reading and note taking much easier with a print copy.

Tuesday 10/1: What did print do to the way we read, and how did circulation of print documents leave evidence of their use by readers?  How did manuscript punctuation conventions change when printers marked up MS copy for editions? 

§  Read Paul Duguid and John Seely Brown, "The Social Life of Documents"; and Elizabeth Eisenstein, "Some Features of Print Culture"; both in Writing Material, 104-22 and 124-33. 

§  Read Alberto Manguel, "Best Punctuation; Point of Order," The New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1999 (a short feature essay on the history of the "period" or "full stop").  [click here for a translation of the passage from Alcuin's Latin poem about punctuation "per cola et commata"]  

§  Graham Pollard, "Changes in the Style of Bookbinding, 1550-1830," The Library 5th Series, XI:2 (June 1956) 71-94.    [Photocopy from Arnie.]  Pollard will help you, with the right evidence, to be able to guess an approximate date of a book's binding by its materials and manufacture.

Also, think about the significance of the data in this spreadsheet and two tables that summarize printed book production by country and by language in the first century of print--the first era in which a mass audience of readers could enter the "imaginary worlds" produced by printers:  the lifetime press output of William Caxton, England's first printer;  Incunable Production in the Fifteenth Century (Sanders ex-Rudolph Hirsch and George Painter). 

Additional Web pages if you have time--talking points from Duguid and Brown, Eisenstein, and Manguel;  Web page re: standardization of punctuation (Manguel with notes on other punctuation history specialists, Thomas and Parkes ;  Web page "quick guide" to Graham Pollard's general principles of dating by bookbinding styles 1550-1830.

 Thursday 10/3: Hand-Press Print Text Lab Day #1: When we hold an early printed book in our hands, what are we really holding, how and by whom was it made, and how might it relate to other versions of itself?

§  Read Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 3  ("Descriptive Bibliography" 36-56);  Quick Guide to Arcane "Desbib" Vocabulary and Format Detection and full Descriptive Bibliography Methods and Terms. 

§  Use what you have learned so far to do some formal "desbib" on your cadaver book.  Post your initial results to the Canvas Forum.  Note that, if you have a known print edition, you can consult your book's entry in  the ESTC if the book was printed in the United Kingdom (including American colonies), or WorldCat or the Karlsrhue University catalogs if the book was printed somewhere in Europe, including Russia.  These resources may help you identify the proper edition, but be careful!  Many similar editions of popular titles exist because printers copied the successful editions of other printers, and also reissued editions of their own "best-sellers."  Printers sometimes issued folio editions first, in small press runs, and if those sold out, reset the text in smaller formats (quarto, octavo, etc.) to sell "down-market" to buyers who could not afford fancy folio editions.  Only careful scrutiny of what you hold in your hand will tell you which of several similar editions you are looking at.  It's also possible you have a "nondescript" print edition (way cool!) or a manuscript book, which would not be registered in those book catalogs for obvious reasons.  Williams and Abbot's Chapter 3 is a good basic introduction to "desbib" principles.  To go further, ask me for one of our copies of Philip Gaskell's New Introduction to Bibliography or Fredson Bowers' Principles of Bibliographic Description, Ronald McKerrow's Introduction to Bibliography, or other primary resources on paper, bindings, etc..  If you are working in Special Collections outside class time (good for you!), you can locate them on the back corner desk in the Conservation Lab near one or more of the 341 book trucks.  Please feel free to use them there as you work with your cadaver books and independent research projects.

Resources for Students Interested in Specializing in Print Library Design, Librarianship, and Related Topics


Friday, 10/4--Earle Havens, JHU Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts:  James Work Garrett Library Tour:  Please meet at the lower entrance of the Athenaeum promptly at 1:30 for our departure  for Evergreen Mansion (4545 N. Charles Street, between Loyola and the College of Notre Dame, both of which were built on the former grounds of the Garrett estate).  The first hour will be a tour of  Evergreen, a "Gilded Age" nineteenth-century mansion, and its associated art collections (a collection of Impressionist paintings, a private theater decorated by Leon Bakst, Japanese netsuke collection, etc.).  The house tour will conclude with the last two of its three libraries (Juvenalia, Diplomatica,and Rare Books and MSS).  We will examine some of the incunabula and early modern printed books from the collection.  We should be back on campus by 4:30.  If you need to return before 4:30, you may want to drive yourself or arrange other transportation.

Week 8:  Print Text Archival Research Methods-the Edition, and the Book, and the Library 

Tuesday 10/8: When we hold a book in our hands, what are we really holding, how and by whom was it made, and how might it relate to other versions of itself? 

§  Read Williams and Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, Chapter 4 ("A Text and Its Embodiments," 57-70), and Chapter 5, "Textual Criticism" (71-89). Some terms and illustrations for Williams and Abbot on "Textual Criticism" and "Editorial Procedures."  Quick, 1-paragraph explanations of "manuscript," an "edition" of a manuscript, and an "impression" of an edition.  Click here for a Web page explaining "stereotypes" or "cliches" as terms describing a C19 power-press invention to speed the reproduction of editions previously set with individual pieces of type.

Below you will find two first edition vs. subsequent edition versions of the same literary text by famous authors, plus a manuscript vs. print edition comparison of an author's typical manuscript style.  Compare them, along with the photocopied version of Hemingway's opening stories for the 1925 and 1930 editions of In Our Time and think about the circumstances that produced these two substantively different "embodiments" of the authors' texts.  Readers of all four might say "I have read Dickenson/Hemingway," but depending on which version they read, they would be interpreting quite different works of literature.

 

Two famous English literary manuscripts of a poem you all know (Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales")--

Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Huntington Library, San Marino, CA--Chaucer starts on "page 9" [leaf 4r]); Hengwyrt Manuscript of Canterbury tales, the oldest surviving version (MS Peniarth 392D, National Library of Wales, starting on "page 15" [leaf 1r of the new fancy binding--they first show you the old binding and the music leaf and 2-stanza Latin poem that used to be bound before Chaucer started]).  Both MSS may have been copied by the same scribe, Adam Pinkhurst, but they look rather different from one another.  What factors might contribute to the layout and scribal copying of a manuscript of several hundred leaves, i.e., one that could not be thought to be undertaken on the spur of the moment by an individual acting on her/his own?  Also, what do you suppose happened to the Hengwyrt Manuscript's upper outside corner?  [Hint: it affects every leaf in this big vellum manuscript.]

§  Read this visual representation of various types of library organization ranging from Medieval manuscript to early print to digital media work spaces which which was created to accompany the ACADIA 1998 International Design Competition for a Library for the Digital Age.   Examine each library organization and be prepared to discuss how each reflects the kinds of texts and readers these libraries served.  Compare especially "open stacks" and "closed stacks" libraries, and note where the library staff are located with respect to the readers in each type.  What constraints did the library builders work under and how has the modern library adapted previous libraries' information storage architecture?        

§  If you are interested in text libraries as a concept, follow these links to see images of some great libraries: James Wilson Bright (JHU Professor of English), which you have direct access to in Goucher's Special Collections since its purchase in the 1920s; John Work Garrett Library at Evergreen, and Thomas Jefferson's Library (recreated) at Library of Congress Jefferson Building

[Fall Break--No Classes, Thursday October 10 to Sunday October 13]

Week 9: Start Hand-Press Book Leaf Lab--All Week!

Tuesday 10/15: Hand-Press Book Leaf Lab--hands-on analysis of leaves from a very old, hand-press printed book.  Bring laptops and smart phones and digital cameras and clean hands and no food or drink.  The tables will be crowded with equipment and fragile artifacts.  If you have not yet posted basic desbib for your cadaver book on Canvas, do so before class (format, page height, title page image and written description, basic page or folio [leaf] count).  Success in this lab will depend upon the skills that required.

The Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory--introduction.   See this page for some Introductory tips.  Each student will be assigned one of the laboratory book leaves.  For each leaf, we want to know: what is it?; how should we describe it?; and how do our pages relate to one another?  (Refresh your memory about good behavior with old books by reading this web page.)  Bring the results of our research to next week's first class.   When we are not in Special Collections, we still can work with our book leaves' digital images to extract as much information as they can reveal, and plan what we will try to learn from the leaves, themselves, when we have hands-on access to them.  Remember to share what we learn with ou colleagues by posting our findings on the Hand-Press Book Leaf Lab Forum on Canvas. 

Thursday 10/17:  The Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory:  Gathering evidence of our individual leaves and starting to share evidence with groups working on other leaves.  Read discussion forum postings by other students to begin putting your leaf's contents in context.  How would you begin to identify the text, author, printer, and edition of the book which originally contained your leaf? What do we know?  What don't we know?   How do your pages relate to one another?  How do they relate to other copies of this edition, and to other editions of this text, in the libraries of the world?  Library Home Page link to WorldCat.Com  English Short Title Catalog (SSTC)  ABEBooks.com   MeasuringWorth.com   Click here for some tips. 

Week 10:  Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory (Conclusion) / Manuscript Books (Introduction)

Tuesday 10/22: The Hand-Press Book Leaf Laboratory:   Putting All the Evidence Together.  What is the name of our text, according to standard bibliographic descriptions, and how do we know that?  What evidence exists in our book leaves to enable us to guess which printers might have created this edition, and what evidence can we use to eliminate as many as possible until we have a "most likely printer"?  Is there any "smoking gun" or incontrovertible evidence that identifies our edition and printer?  Some Terms and Attributes to Consider when Buying Old Books
   Some Possibly Relevant Digital Images for the Hand Press Book Lab 

        Also, look ahead to 11/2 for the Second written assignment on the hand-press book lab is due by noon in my Inbox as a MS-Word or Rich Text Format (.rtf) document attached to an email.  Click here for specific instructions.  For writing tips and my chief hopes for these papers, which can be treated as an evaluative rubric, click here.  As in the case of the digital text paper, these lab sessions are designed to enable you to write the paper.  Talk with me about the book leaves and plans to write about it.

Thursday 10/24: How is manuscript text created and what kinds of character shapes do manuscript readers and writers recognize?  What is the relationship between manuscript and early printed books in the first centuries of printing?  (Also review the first parts of Williams and Abbott, Chapter 4 "The Text and its Embodiments" for manuscripts produced as precursors to print editions.)  This is our introduction to manuscript technology.

§  Read Dennis Baron, "Pencils and Pixels" (first part, to "Telephone"), 35-45, Naomi Baron, "Art and Science of Handwriting," 54-61, both in Writing Materiall.

Portions of the second edition (1865) of Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, and the print edition (1820) of Keats, "Ode to Psyche" in print editions.

Click here for a paragraph of some issues to consider as we cross the technological frontier from hand-press printed books to manuscript documents and books.  Click here to sample some standardized lessons teaching the Palmer Method of cursive handwriting, a standard K-12 instruction strategy in America until the late twentieth century.  Examples of famous C19-20 American "penmen" or teachers of "business writing hands," "engrossing (copperplate) hands," and ornamental flourishes:  The Penmen.  Printable lined and half-lined page for handwriting practice.   Plumbago Mine graphite, Borrowdale, England  (Note the proximity of Borrowdale, the famous source of pencil "lead," to the birthplace and muse of one of England's greatest poets.)  Click here for two typical late medieval and Renaissance Chaucer portraits that show the poet holding a "penner."

[NOTE: in the second hour of class, roughly from 2:20-3:20, Tara Olivero will introduce us to the Special Collections of the Library, materials you might use for your Independent Research Project starting in Week 14.  Once we know how to use the printed rare books in Special Collections, we will be able to take advantage of them with greater confidence for the rest of the semester.   Please do not miss this class!]

Week 11:  Manuscript Texts--Manuscript Lab 1--before Tuesday's class, read "Paleography students' stages of development in the first weeks of training" (online--click here). 

Tuesday, 10/29: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1, introduction.   What do we know?  What don't we know?     Bring laptops to class.  As always, we must wash our hands before class and don't bring food or drink to this one.  After class, collaborative groups should spend some time with the digital image of the digital images of the recto and verso of the assigned leaves.  Most groups should be able to read it within ten minutes, especially if they read together and use the largest image (click on the first one).  Transcribe it bit by bit, and post updated versions of the transcription to the appropriate Canvas discussion forum, taking time to read other groups' transcriptions as they come in.  When we have deciphered some of the text, can we determine what it is and (in some sense) "who wrote it"?  If students are interested, this manuscript also can be part of an independent research project or the third writing assignment.  Keeping in mind what Williams and Abbott told us in "A Text and its Embodiments," we will discuss the document as a source of evidence which hand-written documents contain that most printed documents do not.  What version of the text are we reading, who might have made the document, who did not make the document, and what was it used for?  How should such a document be described so that other scholars would recognize it?  Our goal is to describe it, decipher it, identify it, and finally to understand its existence in terms of what we mean when we use the term "Author."  What kind of "author" wrote that MS? Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1. 

Thursday, 10/31:  First Hour: Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1. (conclusion). What do we know?  What don't we know?    Bring laptops to class.  As always, we must wash our hands before class and don't bring food or drink to this lab class.  

Second Hour: Parchment Museum--Read Christopher Clarkson, "Rediscovering Parchment: The Nature of the Beast."  The Paper Conservator.  16 (1992) 5-16 [In photocopied course packet from instructor]  Note that only pages 5-7 are text--the rest contain images illustrating parchment manuscript features.   Also, read this Web page about some thoughts to consider about the transition backward from print to manuscript texts.

Terms of art for describing manuscript text and illumination.


Students interested in parchment as a book-making material should click here for two additional readings that are available.

Saturday 11/2: Second written assignment on the hand-press book lab is due by noon in my Inbox as a MS-Word or Rich Text Format (.rtf) document attached to an email.  Click here for specific instructions.  For writing tips and my chief hopes for these papers, which can be treated as an evaluative rubric, click here.

Week 12:  Parchment Manuscripts and Early Manuscript "Hands" and Documents--Manuscript Laboratory, Part 1a (whole class collaboration), and Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2 (collaborative groups).

Tuesday 11/5: Manuscript Lab, Part 1a.  This parchment manuscript is written in a much older script than the document used for Manuscript Laboratory Part 1.  Review some of the available online and print resources for the study of English "indentures," scribal documents produced for a variety of legal functions between medieval and modern times.   For basic paleography, explore English Handwriting 1500-1700:  Andrew Zurcher's site is often recommended as the best online teach-yourself program to learn to decipher Early Modern manuscript hands.  Early Modern hands tend to be tougher than Medieval hands because it became fashionable to personalize your script, and the proliferation of literacy led to variants in the construction of letter forms, so there were many ways to represent all the letters of the alphabet.  Each writer used her/his own, so once you learn your author's hand, you can read it reliably, but until you become familiar with the typical variants, it can seem pretty hard.  As always, practice makes good, if not perfect.  Click here for Arnie's suggested "multi-window" strategy for using Zurcher's tools and exemplary texts to teach your eye to read Early Modern English hands.   We will work together to examine this document.  What are its parts and what is it intended to do?  Who is mentioned in it and when and where did they live?  Can we discover more about them?  As in our previous laboratories, our goal is to describe the document, decipher it, identify it, and finally to understand its existence in terms of what we mean when we use the term "Author."  What kind of "author" wrote that MS?  Especially because you will find more than one hand in the same manuscript, you will have differing answers for different hands, much like when teachers write comments in the margins of your papers. 

§  Read Emma [Cope] Thoyts,  The Key to the Family Deed Chest : How to Decipher and Study Old Documents: Being a Guide to the Reading of Ancient Manuscripts.  London: Elliott Stock, 1893, chapters I (1, "Hints to Beginners,"1-13), IV (4, "Old Deeds," 41-51 [VII in 1909 edition), V (5, "Law Technicalities," 52-69 [VIII in 1909 edition]),  the one-page chart of Arabic numerals on page 79 [112 in 1909 edition], IX (9, "Old Letters," 132-7 [XVI n 1909 edition] ), and XII (12, "Abbreviations, etc.," 138-43 [XVII in 1909 edition]).  You can purchase print copies of Thoyts online in advance of this assignment, or you can read her online at this URL: http://archive.org/stream/keytofamilydeedc00thoy#page/n5/mode/2up  The book is a small (19 cm.) octavo, and most "pages" average only 150 words.

§  Click here for our first examples of Early Modern MS hands, which we will read together in class before starting MS Lab 1a.

Thursday, 11/7:  Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2  You will study one of six parchment manuscripts in teams of two and three.  These are older examples of the same type of document that we studied in MS Lab 1a, so its parts and function should be very similar, but the scribal hands are more difficult because the documents are older.  But first, make sure you record the most basic information about your document, as you should for any book or manuscript you are studying: Indenture MS Reading Lab Basics  Then, use Zurcher's "hand alphabets" to help you decipher it.  Click here for Arnie's suggested "multi-window" strategy for using Zurcher's tools and exemplary texts to teach your eye to read Early Modern English hands.    As before, our goal is to describe it, decipher it, identify it, and finally to understand its existence in terms its means of production and the people/places/things it served. What kind of "author" wrote that MS?  Who and what is named in it, and why was it written?  Especially because you will find more than one hand in the same manuscript, you will have differing answers for different hands, much like when teachers write comments in the margins of your papers.

Week 13: Early Modern Manuscript Documents (conclusion) / Medieval Manuscript Documents--Scribes, Scripts, Scribal Hands, and Manuscript Libraries

Tuesday 11/12:  Laboratory, Part 2  What do we know and what don't we know?  Sharing our final conclusions about the documents in MS Lab 2.  For a recent news item about a similar document's current legal force, see David De Jong, "Yale to Be Paid Interest on Dutch Water Authority Bond of 1648," Bloomberg.com, 16 September 2015.

Thursday 11/14: Topic 1--How do medieval manuscript books relate to early printed books, and how were manuscript books made? 

§  Read Johannes Trithemius, From In Praise of Scribes (De laude scriptorum), in Writing Material, pp. 469-75; Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (N.Y.: Dover, 1980), “Introduction,” “The Scribes,” “The Patron Demon of Calligraphy,” “The Scripts,” (1-75), and "carolignian minuscule: eighth to mid-twelfth century" (125-130, paying special attention to the diagrams of letter formations on Figure 24, p. 133).

Drogin Aids: Scribal Manuscript Book Production  Illuminated MS leaves for descriptive vocabulary practice

Topic 2--How were medieval manuscript books stored, organized, retrieved for use, and protected from destruction  

§  View Web images from St. Walburga Cathedral Chained Lectern Library, Zutphen, Netherlands (1563)--scroll down for images from the Malatestiana Chained Lectern Library (1447-1452), Cesena, Italy; Hereford Cathedral Chained Shelf Library.

§  Read Christopher de Hamel, Cutting Up Manuscripts for Pleasure and Profit (The 1995 Sol  M. Malkan Lecture on Bibliography) (Charlottesville, VA: Book Arts Press, 1995, rpt. March 2006) [photocopy]. 

Students who are specifically interested in medieval manuscripts, their preservation and destruction, should click here for more online links.

Week 14: Medieval manuscript books and scribal hands--MS Lab 3

Tuesday 11/19:  Manuscript Lab 3--What techniques and vocabulary do scholars have for analyzing Medieval scripts?  How did Medieval scribes abbreviate and punctuate?  How did scribes form the major scripts you are likely to encounter (Carolingian minuscule [C8 to mid-C12, 1150]; early gothic [C11-12]; gothic textura quadrata [C13-15]; and gothic littera bastarda [C13 to Early Modern period, ca. 1500]? 

§  Read Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (N.Y.: Dover, 1980), "early gothic: eleventh & twelfth centuries," "gothic textura quadrata: thirteenth, fourteenth, & fifteenth centuries," "gothic textura precisus vel sine pedibus: thirteenth century and onward," and "gothic littera bastarda: thirteenth century and onward," (133-164, paying special attention to the letter formations on Figures 25, 26, 27).

§  Before class, students should familiarize themselves with this shorter chronological survey drawn from Diane Tillotson's script tutorials from C4 through C16, organized by Drogin's and Tillotson's names for the successive eras' four main families of manuscript hands:  (Carolingian minuscule [C8 to mid-C12, 1150]; early gothic [C11-12]; gothic textura quadrata [C13-15]; and gothic littera bastarda [C13 to Early Modern period, ca. 1500].  As they study her examples of medieval manuscript hands, students should compare them with those reproduced and discussed in Drogin pp. 125-78.  Then students should test their ability to detect the letter form characteristics of each of the four hands in these examples from Hereford Cathedral, Oxford (Bodleian), Cambridge and Aberdeen University Libraries, digital images that also follow the chronological sequence seen in Tillotson and Drogin 125-78.

§  For help with scribal abbreviation and punctuation, read and view Steven Reimer,  "Manuscript Studies--Medieval and Early Modern--IV.vi. Paleography: Scribal Abbreviations" and "Punctuation."    Students who want to become more expert in identifying manuscript hands in addition to the aid of Drogin's book should attempt as many as they can of Diane Tillotson's paleography exercises using Flash 

Click on the "Manuscript Lab 3" hyperlink for for instructions and for hyperlinks to preview digital images of the actual manuscript fragments we will be analyzing.  Click here for some background context on this lab.

Click here for the conference schedule to discuss Paper 3 and/or IRP topics.


Wednesday 11/22:  Click here for the conference schedule to discuss Paper 3 and/or IRP topics.

Thursday 11/21: First Hour: Introduction to Individual Research Projects in Special Collections: James W. Bright Collection, Alberta Burke Collection, Oberdorfer Twain Collection, etc.  Plan and research individual projects on manuscript, print, or digital texts and archives.  Studies of volumes from the James Wilson Bright Collection are encouraged, of course, but students should pursue their intellectual curiosities.  Research will be independent, but I am happy to help in any way I can, and please remember the valuable expertise on hand from the Library staff.  Tara Olivero knows the collection extremely well.  Melissa Straw is an expert in analysis of the material construction of documents.  Nancy Magnuson is an experienced researcher familiar with neighboring rare book collections' holdings that might be helpful to you.

Second Hour:  After the introductory session, we will run the class as a workshop to begin working on your Indepedent Research Projects.  If we run out of space in 435, ask Tara for some work space in the main reading room where you can set up the materials you need to work with.   Be alert for opportunities to take digital images of your primary source(s) which would enable us to continue working when SC&A is closed.  Using those images, we also can astonish friends and family with the neat stuff we are discovering.  When each of the workshop classes is over, students should make sure they leave their work sites neat, taking special care to relocate any Rare Book Collection or 341 rare materials on the proper book trucks until the next workshop.  Be sure to schedule a meeting with me soon to discuss projects before getting deeply committed to a given research topic.  Click here for the conference schedule to discuss Paper 3 and/or IRP topics.

Monday 11/25, or sooner, Third written assignment is due in my inbox by noon reflecting upon and analyzing the first or second manuscript book lab, your experiences as you worked with it, and the text's relationship to its origins and to our era.  Click here for specific instructions.  For writing tips and my chief hopes for these papers, which can be treated as as an evaluative rubric, click here.

 Week 15: Individual Research Projects

Tuesday 11/26:  Individual Research Projects in Special Collections--workshop for your research: bring us problems to solve, help others solve problems.Click here for the conference schedule to discuss IRP topics.  

Wednesday 11/27 through Sunday 12/1--THANKSGIVING VACATION. 

Week 16: Individual Research Projects

Tuesday 12/3: Walters Art Museum Manuscript and Library Tour--Lynley Herbert, Curator

At 1:30, assemble at the Dorsey College Center steps ("Spanish Steps" facing the big parking lot) to meet the Goucher van for the Walters Art Museum Rare Book and Manuscript Collection for a tour of the collection in the fifth floor Reading Room.  (Refresh your memory about good behavior with old books by reading this web page.)  We should be ready to leave the Walters by 4:30 or 5:00, but students who need to leave sooner,  may want to drive themselves or arrange other transportation.

Thursday 12/5: Individual Research Projects in Special Collections--workshop for your research: bring us problems to solve, help others solve problems.

Friday 12/6 and Monday 12/9: Last Day of Classes and Reading Period--I will be in Special Collections and Archives all day on Friday and Monday to help students complete their cadaver book descriptive bibliographies and to focus their Independent Research Project preliminary reports, due Wednesday 12/13 9AM-11AM, and the written reports due the following Friday in my inbox as an email attachment.  Click here for the conference schedule to discuss IRP topics.  Email me if you want a specific presentation slot on Wednesday--see below for the schedule.  Otherwise I will set it up alphabetically.  If the format of your project requires delivery in another form (physical book, Web-based report, etc.), please make arrangements with me first.

[Week 17: Independent Research Project Reports  (TBA); Cadaver Book Descriptive Bibliography Due Monday 12/9; written IRP Reports due before Noon Friday 12/13.]

Monday, 12/9: The Cadaver Book Descriptive Bibliography is due today, but you can have until later in the week if you need the time.   If possible I will be in Special Collections and Archives all day Monday to help with last-minute report writing issues and to make it possible to deliver non-digital IRPs.

Thursday, 12/12, 12:00 Noon to 2:00 PM in ATH 435: our "Final Experience" in Literature/BKS 341.  Independent Research Project Preliminary Reports. Click here for the presentation schedule.  Students will, very briefly, show us some highlights of what they have found about the subject of their research so far.  They should be sure to make available, either online or in a printed handout, a bibliographic description of the subject text and a bibliography of works they consulted while working on it.  Because we have only one day to discuss these projects, everyone will have to be well-prepared and ready to limit their initial presentation to five to seven minutes.  A completed written version of the report will be due on Friday.  The deadline is negotiable, but I have a very real deadline for submitting final grades, after which I can no longer do it.  Please be on time.  Earlier reports would be welcome. 

By or before Friday 12/13 of Exam Week: Written version of Independent Research Project Report is due (either as MS-Word or web page or other format--please negotiate to insure that I can access and read it!).  This due date is negotiable as long as you are not a senior graduating in December. If you have time, read "The Jewel Game", an excerpt from Rudyard Kipling's Kim.  It seems to be about what we are trying to learn to do.