The MLA recommended Text Encoding Initiative's scholarly electronic texts, the Gutenburg Project of online public domain texts, handheld e-book readers, online journals, and thousands of web-based projects: the choice is bewildering. Can you use electronic texts in your courses? Will your students be happy? Or is assigning an e-text unleashing a nightmare for all? This session will look at the useable and the useless in current e-texts and explore ways to take advantage of the good while avoiding the bad.

Good/Bad: a reasonable distinction?

 - Nuremburg Chron.'s TOC
 - hypertext?
 - Promotion; the permanent future tense;
 - first content of new media. . .

What's different about etext?

Navigation--new rules/no rules:
 - bookbinding as creative restraint
 - pagination, TOCs
 - sequential argumentation vs. synchronic access

Searchable
 - Voyager
 - On-Line Books
 - UVA
 - MOA
 - UVM

Countable (Crunchable)
 - TactWeb
 - Shakespeare class

Storable
 - what about link rot
 - archiving

Digital Convergence
- video, audio, hyperlinks

Conversations
- email, web, preprints

What encourages the use of etexts? What discourages it?

Appropriate Use

 - Gutenberg
 - Bailey/Howe reserves
 - Eastgate

"I would confess that there are many things I did not know that I learned by writing." (Augustine, de trinitate 3.1)

- course web site (Psych, Eng)
 - email, lists, newsgroups
 - papers, portfolios, real things
 - who

So what is etext?

 - MLA Guidelines
 - Text Encoding Initiative
 - Model Editions Partnership
 - Brown
 - Women's Travel Writing
 - Rocket eBook
 - Hope's Electronic Text Wish List
 - some of the technologies that make it go

 

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Hope Greenberg, created 29 February 2000