I’ve posted my thoughts about how we do research and structuring the use of library resources. The next step I want to take in teaching the research process is to create new ways of consolidating and reshaping the information my students gather when they write annotated bibliographies.
My first attempt at doing something like this, in 2004, involved a summer project with six students working on The Transatlantic 1790s. That project involved my first experience programming dynamic, database-backed websites; I frantically learned just enough PHP/MySQL to make the site work while my students wrote the content. The bibliography they compiled had some limited but useful search functions. Ever since then, I have been pondering ways to brush up my programming skills so that an enhanced form of searchable, customizable bibliographies could become a regular part of my upper-level undergraduate teaching.
The students in my Ulysses seminar are creating the raw materials for a more advanced version of this kind of bibliography. They are working this semester to compile hyperannotations–treatments of secondary works that include detailed summaries, thematic references, key source texts, and line references from Ulysses. These materials will allow their bibliographies to be collected and filtered, so researchers can find secondary and theoretical materials that deal with the Circe episode, or Irish nationalism, or Bakhtin. This collaborative bibliography can then become a skeleton upon which to build online projects (as did the Transatlantic 1790s students), and subsequent generations of students in the seminar can learn from and build on the current work. I hope that this way of compiling and displaying bibliographical information will address some of the problems I raised in my recent posts on research.
The students are doing their part. It’s up to me to create the digital environments that make the most of their work.
