title: Teaching with 18thConnect
title: Teaching with 18thConnect
titleType: Other
Creators: name: Draxler, Bridget
name: Spratt, Danielle
Publisher: name: unknown
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: English language

description: Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: 18thConnect is a database of eighteenth-century texts driven by values of sharing and service. The Web site includes features typical of online communities (discussions, groups) and scholarly communities (peer review, searchable archives) and offers scholars and advanced students an opportunity to receive plaintext and TEI-encoded copies of texts from ProQuest and Gale in exchange for correcting any OCR (optical character recognition) errors in these texts. In addition to widening the circle of scholars and readers who have access to eighteenth-century texts through digital preservation and access, 18thConnect is also opening new opportunities for students to work with archival sources and create digital publications. For instance, Danielle Spratt's graduate students at California State University, Northridge created a digital scholarly edition of Sarah Fielding's  The Countess of Dellwyn, which simultaneously invited students to engage in collaborative research within the classroom community and to contribute to scholarly work within the online community. Collaborative editing turns the individual, introspective process of reading into a community practice and conversation. In this way, students develop a sense of community not only with their coeditors but also with imagined, future readers of a text. On a smaller scale, the practice of collaborative annotating has become easier with tools like CommentPress. While 18Connect's platform of creating a digital scholarly edition is best for graduate or advanced undergraduate students in English, the practice of social annotating could be integrated into any course that includes assigned readings.
description: Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: 18thConnect is a database of eighteenth-century texts driven by values of sharing and service. The Web site includes features typical of online communities (discussions, groups) and scholarly communities (peer review, searchable archives) and offers scholars and advanced students an opportunity to receive plaintext and TEI-encoded copies of texts from ProQuest and Gale in exchange for correcting any OCR (optical character recognition) errors in these texts. In addition to widening the circle of scholars and readers who have access to eighteenth-century texts through digital preservation and access, 18thConnect is also opening new opportunities for students to work with archival sources and create digital publications. For instance, Danielle Spratt's graduate students at California State University, Northridge created a digital scholarly edition of Sarah Fielding's The Countess of Dellwyn, which simultaneously invited students to engage in collaborative research within the classroom community and to contribute to scholarly work within the online community. Collaborative editing turns the individual, introspective process of reading into a community practice and conversation. In this way, students develop a sense of community not only with their coeditors but also with imagined, future readers of a text. On a smaller scale, the practice of collaborative annotating has become easier with tools like CommentPress. While 18Connect's platform of creating a digital scholarly edition is best for graduate or advanced undergraduate students in English, the practice of social annotating could be integrated into any course that includes assigned readings.