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Legacy 19.1 (2002) 115-120



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Digitizing the Past:
Using Electronic Texts in Scholarship and the Classroom

Scott Ellis
Emory University


As we contemplate the future of publishing in the academy, particularly as it relates to the many texts written by women that are currently unavailable in print, discussions often turn to the supplementary possibilities of electronic texts. We could circumvent the inherent difficulties of the traditional publishing formats, proponents suggest, by using the electronic medium to produce and distribute texts that are out of print, have never been republished, or need updated editions. Many projects are already underway that demonstrate the scholarly and pedagogical potential that electronic texts could have in the humanities, and such projects can serve as valuable indices to the creation and use of digital documents. 1

One question that often emerges, however, is exactly how we might utilize these texts in our own research or in the classroom, a procedural question that forces us to reexamine our exclusive use (and love) of the "printed" word alongside practical concerns such as our ability to access digital documents and our use of them in "non-wired" classrooms. Since digitized documents take many forms—diaries, travel narratives, short stories, novels, periodical essays, etc.—and may or may not have been previously published, we should continue to explore the various scholarly and pedagogical approaches to such texts and discuss how we might tap into their potential. Through round-table discussions and panel presentation such as those at the SSAWW conference, scholars, whose experience with digital materials ranges from novice to expert, have begun to discuss their experiences and strategies using online documents. With such prominent online collections as Voices from the Gaps, Women's Travel Writing, the Southern Women Authors Project, and Brown University's Women Writer's Project, 2 scholars have begun to explore the supplementary or even alternative possibilities that the digital environment offers us in our exploration of women's texts.

I have been fortunate to participate closely in this exploration through my work at Emory University's Lewis H. Beck Center for Electronic Collections and Services, 3 the University's primary resource for CD-ROMS and digital databases. In particular, the Beck Center is the virtual home of the Emory Women Writers Resource Project (EWWRP), 4 a publicly accessible online collection of works by women writers from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Like many other online databases, the EWWRP offers a wide variety of texts that we hope scholars and students will find valuable in [End Page 115] their work, a goal that will foster our understanding of literary history and demonstrate the intellectual possibilities available to digitized texts.

By looking at "Gray Wolf's Daughter" and "The Sick Child" by Angel De Cora, two of the texts from our collection, I will suggest a few ways in which scholars may use electronic documents both within their own research and in the classroom. These tales are part of a small but growing collection of Native American texts in the EWWRP, documents that have infrequently been included in anthologies and an element of the project that we are in the process of developing. More important, however, I have chosen De Cora's tales because they are excellent examples of important texts that are easily accessible online, texts that have been ignored (despite their publication in a prominent literary journal), and texts that could play a substantial role in a scholar's research or class. 5

The Emory Women Writers Resource Project was formed in 1995 under the direction of Sheila Cavanagh from Emory University's Department of English and began as a project that would enable graduate and undergraduate students in a variety of disciplines the opportunity to edit texts that were previously hard to find or underutilized. The EWWRP intended to introduce students to scholarly issues inherent with many traditional research assignments and to enable students to publish their research on the web, thereby making their work accessible to a wide community of readers. In its initial stages, the project began solely with women...

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