EN214: 19th c. U.S. Women Writers
Professor Carr
Handout designed by Kathy Davis '98.

The Archive Assignment: HTML Homework

Find four websites:

1. A scholarly site
2. A non-scholarly site
3. A well-designed site
4. A poorly-designed site

DUE: Friday, October 30

SURFING AND SEARCHING

Before designing your own site, you'll want to consider two sorts of questions. First, how does one distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly sites? Second, what makes a site well-designed (whether it is scholarly or not)? The purpose of this homework assignment is to let you practice your surfing, searching, and saving skills while thinking through the issues above. After compiling student responses, we'll be in a good position to discuss website design. Some of the tasks below may seem like busywork, but please don't skip any of them as a working knowledge of all of these processes will be crucial to the creation of your own site and/or help you use the internet more expertly in other academic work.

QUESTIONS TO ANSWER WHILE SURFING

1. What is the URL of this site?
2. Who is the author of this site?
3. What gives this site and/or author its authority? How can you tell?
4. Does the site have content? Is it original?
5. How is the site organized? Is it easy to load? Easy to navigate?

I have provided here a few URLs (web addresses) that I found when conducting a search on the topic of "Nineteenth Century Women's Literature". They are set up below as links, meaning that you can click on them and go to the sites. Choose one and explore it while thinking about the questions above.

• The World Wide-Web Virtual Library. University of Virginia Electronic Text Center and the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange.
• UGA Women's Studies Research Directory. Area of research interest related to gender, sexuality, and/or topics associated with women's studies.
• Nineteenth-Century Women Writers Web.
• The 19th Century American Women Writers Web
• The Brown University Women Writers Project. A "state of the art electronic textbase of women's writing in English before 1830." Emphasis on British writing.
• The Victorian Women Writers Project. Restricted to British women writers. Extensive links.

URL's like the ones above will get you where you want to be on the Web, but what happens when you want to cite a site (no pun intended)? We need a way to document our finds and the information we get there in a formal way. Just like any formal citation, we need to include all the basic information that allows our readers to find cited texts for themselves, but this information is often hard to locate, if not entirely absent on a website. This is one way to determine a "good" cite from a "bad" one...is a citation included and easy to find, or is the site and information within it completely unciteable? These will be questions to keep in mind when passing judgment on the sites we explore.

Many more scholarly organizations are beginning to formalize the citation of internet resources, but generally the standard MLA guidelines can always be used. These call for citations of electronic texts to include the following:

Material from Electronic Journals, Electronic Newsletters, and Electronic Conferences:

1. Name of the author (if given)
2. Title of the article or document (in quotation marks)
3. Title of the journal, newsletter or conference (underlined)
4. Volume number, issue number, or other identifying number
5. Year or date of publication (in parenthesis)
6. Number of pages or paragraphs (if given) or n.pag. (which stands for "no pagination") (in italics)
7. Publication medium (Online)
8. Name of the computer network (e.g., Internet)
9. Date of Access
10. OPTIONAL, but highly desirable. Electronic address (URL).

Example:

Readings, Bill. "Translatio and Compative Literature: The Terror of European Humanism." Surfaces. 1.11 (Dec. 1991): 19 pp. Online. Internet. 2 Feb. 1992. Available FTP: harfang.cc.umontreal.ca.

An Electronic Text:

1. Name of the author (if any)
2. Title of the text (underlined)
3. Publication information for the printed source
4. Publication medium (Online)
5. Name of the repository of the electronic text (e.g., Oxford Text Archive)
6. Name of the computer network
7. Date of Access
8. OPTIONAL, but highly desirable. Electronic address.

Examples:

Octavian. Ed. Frances McSparran. Early English Text Soc. 289. London: Oxford UP, 1986. Online. U of Virginia Lib. Internet. 6 Apr. 1994. Available FTP: etext.virginia.edu.

A Few notes on SEARCHING

Bucknell's Netscape is configured so that you get a random search engine when conducting a 'Net Search' (clicking on the button named this). Some of these search engines are Lycos, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Web Crawler. With these, you can plug in a keyword or phrase (such as Nineteenth Century Women Authors) and find many sites on the web that deal with this subject.

Using search engines is easy, and crucial to our next mission: identifying 'good' and 'bad' sites on the web. This assignment is more fun than anything else, and a great opportunity to practice your new surfing skills, so take your time! You will want to save the sites you find as you go, because sometimes retracing your steps is like finding a needle in a haystack. Saving will be a lot easier if you designate a disk specifically for your web work.

One last piece of advice before you go searching, always remember that the search engine you get at first is RANDOMLY assigned and if you aren't getting any good hits, choosing a new engine is as easy as pushing a new button!

Okay, go to it. You can begin searching on any topic that interests you, but remember to notice whether the sites you find are SCHOLARLY or NONSCHOLARLY. Scholarly sites are backed by solid research, while nonscholarly ones are just random postings and opinions. Also, begin thinking about whether you think the sites 'good' or 'bad' in terms of design. There are no right or wrong answers to this; it is a personal opinion, but notice such things as whether the site would be easy to document, whether it is designed attractively, and how long it takes to load.