Purpose
For this review, you will write a substantive review of an electronic scholarly edition, explaining and assessing that edition's purpose and scope according to MLA standards, and evaluating its success in achieving its goals.

Process
Choose a scholarly electronic edition for primary review and two other electronic editions for a comparative pool.

You can either find and propose a primary site based on your field of specialization. That proposal--to be submitted via email to Dr. Harris-- should outline your reasons for wishing to analyze that site.

Or you can choose a project associated with NINES.org, a consortium of scholars working on nineteenth-century American and British literatures.

To choose your primary and /or secondary sites, go to nines.org's People and Projects

• Romantic Circles
• Whitman Archive
• Rossetti Archive
• Blake Archive
• Swinburne Project
• Monuments and Dust
• Dickinson Electronic Archives
• Society for the Study of American Women Writers
• Charles Brockden Brown Project
Or the following:
• Kyle Grimes's William Hone's Every-Day Book
• Laura Mandell's Poetess Archive
• Katherine Harris' Forget-Me-Not archive, now associated with Mandell's site

Reserving your Choice
When you have chosen your primary and secondary sites, post an entry to the WIKI telling your classmates which one project you will be examining.

When you post, review the other students's reservations to verify that the site you want is still available. 

Only TWO class memberS can focus on a particular electronic project, though you may duplicate secondary sites.

Preparation for Analysis
Look carefully at the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions documents:

• Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions, including Guiding Questions for Vettors--you can choose a variety of formats in which to view this document, including html and pdf
• The sample vettors report. The link provided under "Documents" will download a pdf.

Analyzing your electronic edition
The Guiding Questions will give you a sense of what kinds of textual issues vettors look at. Certainly for the purposes of this assignment you are not expected to examine other editions of the particular text(s) of this work, but you should at the very least consider whether you can address these categories by looking at the electronic edition. Your review should include such an acknowledgement.

In addition to the standards for quality established by the MLA Guiding Questions for Vettors, consider the following questions related to the organizer's stated goals and intentions:

• What do the project organizers say their purpose is?
• How do they enact that purpose?
• What is the scope of the electronic editing project you have chosen?
• How do they handle the question/issue of permissions?
• What editorial principles do they state for their project?
• Why, for example, this text?
• What coding language are they using?
• What textual problems have they encountered? How have they solved them?

Compare the above questions/answers to those given on for the other projects in your comparative pool

• How does reviewing and examining these other examples of electronic scholarly editions affect your thinking about your primary edition?

Preparation for Writing
For a model of how to write a review, consult 3-4 reviews of scholarly books in your field. Any scholarly journal you pick up at the library should offer reviews in at least one of their yearly volumes.

If you can find reviews of scholarly editions, that would be even better, as they will address more specifically the issues you will be considering.

As you read the reviews, notice the conventions that the writers use in outlining their task.

• How do they introduce their task?
• How do they structure their esssay?
• Do there seems to be accepted "locations" for different conventional aspects of the review?
• How (and where) do they offer praise?
• How (and where) do they offer criticism?

Your review should be a coherent essay, not simply a series of answers to the analysis questions.

Typically, reviews are no longer than 1000 words, so we'll follow this standard.  Bring a paper copy, drop a copy into the assignments folder and post to the Scholarly Editions Wiki prior to class on October 9th.