Electronic Scholarly Editing in the University Classroom: an Approach to Project-based Learning

Abstract

This paper describes a project-based senior undergraduate course in electronic scholarly editing at the University of Saskatchewan. Students used HTML to prepare and publish on the World Wide Web electronic documentary editions of two seventeenth-century books: the anonymous 'Eighth Liberal Science: or a New-found Art and Order of Drinking '[1650], and Edward Whitaker's 'Directions for Brewing Malt Liquors' [1700]. The course offered students the benefits of project-based pedagogy—collaboration, original research, independent decision making, and preparation of a concrete product with real-world usefulness. The paper also describes the editions produced by the class, with particular emphasis on the textual issues that emerged, and the students' technological and editorial resolution of those issues. It concludes with a discussion of the benefits of project-based pedagogy in the undergraduate humanities classroom.

Keywords

• electronic, documentary, editing, scholarly, edition, Whitaker, project, project-based, pedagogy, digital, textual, scholarship, learning, classroom, HTML