Scavenger Hunt Report 4
Jump to Question 1, Question
2, Question 4, Question 5,
Question 6.
- Find 3 recent dissertations written in the area upon which you plan to
focus; give me the author, title, year, and institution. Now see if you can
find any published work by these authors: use at least 2 databases for this
purpose, and tell me if your results differed.
- I found three appropriate dissertations through the UBC Library link to
Dissertation Abstracts by searching for (medieval and york) not (new), and browsing the 24 hits. I
made note of useful Subject headings (literature, medieval and theater) for
future searches. Having chosen these three dissertation writers:
- Hill Vasquez, Heather Lee. "The Possibilities of Performance:
Mediatory Styles in Middle English Religious Drama (Audience
Participation)." University of Washington, 1997.
- Yates, Kimberley Mae. "The Critical Heritage of the York Cycle
(Mystery Plays)." University of Toronto, 1997.
- Huth, Jennifer Mary. "'For I Have Tools To Truss': Women, Work,
and Professionalism in Late Medieval Literature (Geoffrey Chaucer,
Margery Kempe)." University of Texas at Austin, 1996.
- I turned to the online MLA database
and ArticleFirst.
Unfortunately, my authors were too recent. MLA only confirmed the
dissertation information, and ArticleFirst had an article in Chatelaine
("Annie, get you lip gloss"), written by a Heather Hill, but there
was nothing to suggest the author of this article was the person I was looking for. As a
last resort, I tried Metacrawler. I found Heather Hill-Vasquez’s old
teaching homepage at the Washington State University Department of English
Site,
but no information on her current location (or publications). I found a
Kimberly Yates working for a computer company in California, but there was
no way to confirm that this was the same Kimberly Yates. I did, however,
find Dr. Jennifer Huth’s homepage
at the St. Stephen’s Episcopal School (a boarding school for grades 6 to
12), where she has designed a webskills training site (called
WebTrainer). She does not list any
personal information or publications.
- I went back to Dissertation Abstracts and chose a
few
earlier
dissertations, and then used MLA and ArticleFirst to find other
publication information. I found that, in general, MLA returned more
responses, but that, occasionally, ArticleFirst took a wider approach.
For example, I found book reviews in ArticleFirst, but not in MLA.
ArticleFirst, of course, does not list publications in books, but it
does handily indicate which libraries hold the journals I might be
looking for.
- Gusick, Barbara Irene. "Christ As A Worker In The Towneley Cycle
(Drama)." Loyola University of Chicago, 1996. MLA told me that
Barbara was publishing bits of her thesis as she wrote it. She published
"Time and Unredemption: Perceptions of Christ's Work in the
Towneley Lazarus," (Fifteenth Century Studies. 22, 19-41)
in 1996, and "Christ as a Worker in the Towneley
Conspiracy," (Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the
Illinois Medieval Association. 9, 1-8) in 1992. ArticleFirst only
lists the later article. A quick search shows that ArticleFirst does not cover Essays
in Medieval Studies
at all.
- Tiner, Elza Cheryl. "'Inventio', 'Dispositio', And 'Elocutio' In
The York Trial Plays." University of Toronto, 1987. MLA records
confirms her focus on the York Play, listing two articles on that topic
in 1986 and 1992. ArticleFirst, however, shows a slight shift in her
interests by listing
her review of William Purcell’s "Ars Poetriae: Rhetorical and Grammatical
Invention at the Margins of Literacy" (Rhetorica. Volume 15, Number 1) in 1997.
- Epp, Garrett Peter Jantz. "The Imitation of the Word: The York
Cycle and the Poetics of Realism." University of Toronto, 1989.
Garrett has been more prolific than the other two, and more wide
ranging. MLA gives six articles and chapters that deal with various
aspects of staging, medieval drama, and sexuality. Four of these
articles were published 1996 or later, and the other two were published
1991 and 1989. Perhaps my thesis work with him in 1995-6 inspired him?
*grin* ArticleFirst adds two recent reviews to his list of work, but
oddly does not list his more recent articles.
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- Find electronic texts for 2 authors in your field of interest. Are there
multiple sources for the same text? What can you tell about the origin and/
or reliability of the texts you've found?
- I started with a search for the York Plays in Metacrawler, which me to
Luminarium’s list of online medieval play texts.
Luminarium linked to copies at the University of Michigan Corpus of Middle English
Prose and Verse
and the Electronic Text Centre at the University of Virginia.
Both copies are based on a file from the Oxford Text Archive,
which is in turn based on Richard Beadle’s 1982 print edition. The University of
Virginia copy, however, notes that the original electronic file incorporates
the corrections that Beadle made to the text during development of the
concordance, and that the file has been further amended to correct
typographical errors. At the end of my search I checked Project Gutenberg,
but the project no longer has a copy of the Plays.
- The second text I searched for was Gower’s Confessio
Amantis. I
found a
copy at Virginia
which is based on the G.C. Macaulay print version. There are two copies
available by order from the Oxford Text Archive, one compiled by J.D.
Burnley and one compiled anonymously. It may be the second file that was
the origin of the Online Medieval and Classical Library’s version
at Berkeley SunSITE. The Berkeley version was "based upon a previous
e-text of unknown origin" and edited to bring it in line with Macauley’s
edition. There is a third copy at Project Gutenberg,
which is actually the same text used at the Berkeley site (same editor and
date). In this case, the Berkeley/Gutenberg copy is probably more reliable
and useful that the Virginia text, since there is evidence that it has been
proofed, and since the Berkeley/Gutenberg copy retains the initial latin
passages of Macauley’s version, where Virginia’s does not.
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- Skipped this question!
- Visit 3 literary magazines (broadly defined: they can be creative,
academic, alternative, cultural-studies, etc.; actually, anything which
could legitimately be called a "zine" will do) and give me the
title of an item from each.
- I used the link to Ezines on the 500 Resources pages, and chose the literary section for my first two
zines. I used Yahoo to search for my third choice by name, because it’s
one that I like a lot.
- Outsider Ink - An e-zine for short
fiction, poetry, and photography, this site focuses on marginalized
subjects. This is an attractive, simply designed site, with a dash of
pretension. It reminds me a bit of the 70’s beat-poet scene, with people
taking themselves a wee bit too seriously. Nonetheless, the writing is fun
and sometimes a little risqué. One current story is Robert Klein Engler’s
The Theft of a Pencil. Phallic imagery intended.
- Young People's Press Online - This site is "a national news
service for youth" that caters to the 14-24 crowd. The site is hip
without being busy, and doesn’t push advertising, despite the fact that it
is sponsored by Levi Strauss & Co.(Canada) Inc. The articles are written
by the same age group that the site is aimed at. One article currently
online is House Hunting, by Afrodite Balogh-Tyszko.
- INKSPOT - is
a "comprehensive writing resource and community." The site
publishes regular articles about writing and publishing, and distributes a
newsletter with tips and resources for the budding writer. One current
article is an interview with Edith Tarbescu on writing children’s books.
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- Visit 3 mainstream magazines; give me a main headline from each.
- I used the Sympatico Newspapers and Magazines on the Web link
on the 500 Resources page and browsed through the mainstream magazines
listed there. I found:
- Time Magazine (and related publications).
This is a wonderful site to explore – lots of information and lots to do.
There is a Time For Kids section, which is highly interactive, with
amusingly 'clean' news. I like the fact that you can search the archives to look for old articles.
One headline for Thursday, November 4, was "I Can See Clearly Now, the
Clouds of Toxic Black Smoke Are Gone."
- The Atlantic Monthly.
They’ve clearly made a distinction between the online and print versions
of this magazine. Going to the homepage gave me headlines for the online
section, with web-only features such as the Poetry Pages Soundings.
The Soundings regularly introduce a poem (currently Shakespeare’s Sonnet
116) and provide RealAudio files of various people reading that poem. A bit
of hunting got me to articles from the print edition. These are clearly
meant as samples, and clicking on an article also brings up a "Free
Trial Offer." One article in the November issue is "Fame: The
Power and Cost of a Fantasy" by Sue Erikson Bloland.
- Cosmopolitan. Oh why not? It’s mainstream,
isn’t it? The homepage uses the same bright colours and scantily-clad
wish-you-were-me models that the magazine does, and the site does an even
harder sell than the Atlantic Monthly. You can do the Cosmo quiz online
(apparently I'm a ‘Grounded
Girlfriend’), but if you want to read "Give Him the Sex of His
Dreams: The amazing Middle Eastern technique that will actually double his
pleasure" – one of many headlines splashed across the homepage –
you’ll have to rush down to the store for your own paper copy.
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- Get 3 reviews of a current book that's of interest to you. Try to
represent a range of types of sources.
- I went searching for reviews of Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths
& Stories of the Wild Women Archetype by Clarissa P. Estes. I tried
the bookstores first, and found a review from Kirkus Reviews, as well as
several customer responses at Amazon.com.
Barnes and Noble
had the publisher's blurb and a review from publisher's weekly.
Next I looked for online representatives of the standard book review
sources. Apparently Women Who Run With the Wolves isn’t quality
literature, since the Boston Book
Review only provides, "comment from preeminent writers, scholars and intellectuals
on today's most important books," and I didn't find any reviews of
Estes's book there. The New York Review of Books
didn't cover my book either, but that may be because the site is designed more as
a teaser to encourage subscription. I finally found my third review at the
LA Times in the archives
of their book review
section. A review from 1992 was actually what I was
looking for, but I had to go
through a long registration process before I could access the record. These
archives are free until December.
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