Blog Posts for Weeks
7 and 8: An OED/ECCO Assignment
In Weeks 7 and 8, instead of your usual blog postings, you
are assigned to use digital databases to look up words in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Detailed
instructions of how this assignment must be completed follow below. You only
need to do this assignment once—that is, you can do it in either Week 7 or Week
8 as a replacement for your usual blog posting. Successfully completing this
assignment will give you EXTRA CREDIT by counting as two blog posts.
THE ASSIGNMENT:
The Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, is the dictionary of
all dictionaries. If Samuel Johnson's milestone 1755 work was the first
authoritative dictionary of the English language, then the gargantuan group
effort that created the OED in the late nineteenth century is arguably the
greatest collective scholarly effort of all time – the work of three decades
and of an entire nation. The OED not only provides definitions of words; it
also provides you a history of the word's usage through quoted examples. Any
dictionary can tell you what a word means now; the OED can tell you what a word
like "nice" meant in the 16th, 18th, and 20th centuries. As you can
imagine, this makes the OED a useful tool for reading literature in its
historical context.
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, or ECCO, is a
full-text searchable database of books published from 1700-1800 (including
reprints of books published earlier). The books have been scanned, meaning you
can see exactly what the pages looked like when they were published. What is
even more amazing: not only can you search by title and author, but you can
also search the entire text of every book in the database for a word or phrase.
Both the OED and ECCO are available online through the
library. ECCO is available for a brief trial period and, for this reason, I
have designed this assignment, which makes clear the possibilities it offers.
For this assignment, I'd like you to learn two things: (1)
how to use the OED and ECCO; and (2) how to use these databases to
contextualize literary work with the evidence collected from these sources.
THE PROCESS:
- Choose a word or phrase in any work we've read thus far that seems particularly odd or laden with meaning. For example, reading Gulliver's Travels, you might have been struck by how many times Swift uses the phrase "rational creature" in Part 4. Since this part of the book is directly commenting on the benefits and dangers of reason, this would seem to be a good choice for further exploration. If you are having trouble picking a word or phrase, choose several possibilities and then search the entire work for other instances of the word or words. Electronic versions of most texts can be found through Literature Online (also available through the library homepage; good for individual poems) and Project Gutenberg (a free online site; good for novels).
- Look up the word or words in the OED. To get to the OED, go to the Library homepage; go to "Find articles and databases" and type in "OED" into the search box. If off campus, enter your user name and password, and search away! Note: to look up a word in the OED, type the word in the search space in upper right-hand corner of your screen. Read through all the applicable definitions.
- Consider the various meanings of your word or words, and make note of the different uses from the examples provided by the OED. Does the word appear to have a complicated history? to have changed meanings? to be changing in the 17th or 18th centuries?
- Access ECCO via the Trial Link here:
- Do a full-text search of ECCO for your word or combination of words to figure out how it was being used at the time the author was writing and what kind of books it appears in. With the Swift example, I might begin by searching for "rational creature" in the full text, which yields 5112 hits. Since that is too many, I would then choose "advanced search" and limit the search by date, perhaps between 1720 and 1730. This gives me 237 hits, which I could narrow further by date, but scrolling down through the list I quickly discover that the majority of the texts are devotional or sermons (which is pretty interesting—what does this indicate about Swift's use of the phrase?). I might then check a couple of these to see how the phrase is being used, and transcribe a few examples to use for your blog posting.
- Go back to the passage in the text, and consider how the various definitions and historical usage of the word or phrase informs your interpretation. Write your blog post arguing for a specific interpretation of the passage based on what you discovered in your research. If you are working with a word that reappears multiples times, you should choose one passage to focus on but can refer to other instances to make your case.
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