Scavenger Hunt Report 3
Happy All
Hallow's Eve!
First level bullets in what follows describe my path to the
information.
Second level bullets answer the questions assigned.
Jump to:
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 5
Question 8
Just for fun!
- Where is the Edgar Allan Poe Museum? Where is Poe House? Can you find another house associated with Poe?
- The Shuttle listed several resources for Poe. My first step was to
visit the Edgar
Allan Poe National Historic Site. This site is a project of
the Independence Hall Association, which focuses on "historic
preservation and patriotic groups in the Philadelphia area." The
information is good for the time period it covers (Poe’s stay in
Philadelphia), although there is a definite patriotic bias. I found it
interesting to compare this site to the National Park Service’s official page on the Edgar Allan Poe
National Historic Site. This second site is much more objective,
spending most of its space on directions for finding the museum.
Another site from the Shuttle, The House of
Usher (a personal site that is more for entertainment than
research), gave me information on a cottage in Bronx, New York and led me
to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of
Baltimore and the Edgar Allan Poe Museum
of Richmond, Virginia. The Baltimore site about Poe House seems fairly
objective, and it gives a bibliography. This particular historic site is
run under the auspices of Baltimore City's Commission for Historical and
Architectural Preservation (CHAP), which implies a certain degree of
respectability. The Richmond Poe Museum site gives an online tour of the
museum. There is a definite romanticising of Poe that occurs in this
site. The biography, for example, ends
by saying, "In personal appearance, Poe was a quiet, shy-looking but
handsome man; he was slightly built, and was five feet, eight inches in
height. His mouth was considered beautiful. His eyes, with long dark
lashes, were hazel-gray." Other references in the biography, for
example to John Allan as Poe’s "so-called father," give a clear
indication of where the author’s sympathies lie.
- The Poe Museum is in Richmond, Virginia. Poe House is in West
Baltimore. Other Poe residences include a house in Philadelphia and a
cottage on Bainbridge Avenue in Bronx, NY.
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- Find me the text of Alexander Pope's will. Here's a whopping great hint: at least one place to look would be the Gentleman's Magazine.
- I took Metacrawler to the Serial Archive Listings for The Gentleman's
Magazine at the Online
Books Page. A link here took me (with some fiddling) to the Internet Library of Early Journals, which allowed me to search the Gentleman’s Magazine for the information I needed. The ILEJ is a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford. It scans in the journal pages and allows you to search the text. One thing it doesn’t seem to provide is text that can be copied from the site.
- Alexander Pope'’s will can be found here.
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- Find me 3 nineteenth-century paintings of Ophelia. Choose one of the artists, and find me the title and images of 2 other paintings.
- I followed the link on my own home page to the
Pre-Raphaelite
Collection, and searched for "ophelia." I found the
answers I needed, and I have always found this site to be reliable,
thorough, and stable. This is a personal site (which I know because I'’ve
used it for a long time) turned commercial, with partners from
Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Art.com, and Barewalls. As an aside, I also found an essay on the Victorian Web, "Ophelia -- Victimized Woman or Femme Fatale?" which discusses the way Ophelia is portrayed by the Pre-Raphaelites.
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- What are Margaret Atwood's favourite charities?
- The Shuttle’s link to Margaret Atwood's
homepage is incorrect, so I used Metacrawler to
get there. I was quite amused by the "From the Office" section, which reminds visitors of Atwood’s human limitations (i.e. she cannot edit every budding writer’s manuscript!).
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- What are 3 projects of the Centre for Technology and the Arts at De Montfort University? Be persistent: this is a lot harder to find than it should be!
- I used Metacrawler to get to the university. After trying Digital Projects on the main site, I browsed
through the Humanities site, and found the Centre for Technology under "Faculty Centres and Events."
- Three CTA projects are The Canterbury Tales Project (CD editions of
the
Tales), The Symphony for Cornwall (Andrew Hugill uses ‘sound-bites’ from
local schools to create a symphony), and MASTER (a European Union funded
project to create an online catalogue of medieval manuscripts in European libraries).
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Just for Fun!
Find the Spam! One of those "end of a long day" challenges. For similar activities, try the site’s other interactions. I particularly like the Anonymous Message Server.
