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CERES Harvest II.iii
3.9.97

Merry, merry, merry, cheary, cheary, cheary,
Trowle the blacke bowle to me:
Hey derry, derry, with a poupe and a lerrie,
Ile trowle it againe to thee:
Hookie, bookie, we haue shorne and we haue bound,
And we haue brought haruest home to towne.

Please select from the index or scroll through below.

• Introduction
• Electronic Resources
• News From the Net
• Review of Chadwyck-Healey

INTRODUCTION

CAMBRIDGE ENGLISH FACULTY WEBSITE
Well, we could hardly fail to mention this could we? All Colin Burrow's own work, it will soon include all course reading lists online - accessible only from within cam.ac.uk - and already contains information on the Faculty's teaching staff, under- and post-graduate courses, and a cute 'House of Fame' history of Cambridge critics, all of which is accessible to anyone who wants to know. Long overdue. Find it at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/.

INTERNET LIBRARY OF EARLY JOURNALS
The ULs of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford are engaged in the ILEJ project, which aims to provide Internet access to pages and indexes of the following: Notes and Queries 1849-69, Blackwood's Magazine 1843- 63, The Builder 1843-63, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1758-78, Gentleman's Magazine 1731-1831, The Annual Register 1758-78. Full-text searching will be possible for some titles, although most pages will be available as scanned images. Notes and Queries is the first journal available: twelve volumes 1849-55 are already up and running, with the rest to follow soon. For information and participation details, e-mail Thaddeus Lapinski at tsl@bodley.ox.ac.uk or visit the project website: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/.

HOBY'S CASTIGLIONE HTML TEXT
Richard Bear at the University of Oregon has produced a neat but unspectacular HTML edition of Hoby's 1561 translation of The Courtier. Only the title page is there in facsimile but the rest (taken from Raleigh's 1900 edition) is all present and (apparently) correct. Links help you navigate from section to section, but this is not a multi-media project by any means. URL: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/courtier/courtier.html.

GLOBE WEBSITES
Not surprisingly the Globe Project has spawned a good website based at Reading. It includes a Virtual Reality tour of the Globe (which means some Quicktime movie clips), and an archive of material on staging, with information on performance at the Globe in both its incarnations. URL: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/globe/.

There's an American Globe website which offers less specifically Globe- ish content and links to lots of acting and teaching on-line resources. Its URL is http://www.shakespeare.uiuc.edu. This will take you to the low-graphics version. If you have a good Internet connection (i.e. not a modem) and an up-to-date browser (Netscape or Explorer version 3) then you could go for the 'High Bandwith' option which has more graphics and frames etc. The URL for going straight there is http://www.shakespeare.uiuc.edu/frametop.html.

ARDEN WEBSITE
Details about the Arden CD-ROM and a brief history of the Arden Shakespeare from its website at http://www.ardenshakespeare.com/.

VIRTUAL DREAM
A very ambitious project indeed to produce a VR performance of MSND live on the Internet, using spanking new VRML techniques (whatever they might be). The project is looking for participants to help in the performance. There's a website with details and the working script at http://www.shoc.com/vrmldream/.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY AND FELLOWSHIPS
The Library is currently advertising its fellowships for the period May 1998 to April 1999. They have a value of up to $2,000 each and are meant to help defray expenses in travelling to and residing in Princeton during the tenure of the Fellowship. The length of the Fellowship will depend on the applicant's research proposal, but is normally one month. For application forms and info contact mgruscil@princeton.edu. The PUL's homepage with catalogues, etc. is at http://infoshare1.princeton.edu:2003/.

DANTE RESOURCES
Otfried Lieberknecht has a Homepage for Dante Studies: http://members.aol.com/lieberk/welcome.html. And let's not forget about Dante Alighieri - A Guide to Online Resources: http://orb.rhodes.edu/encyclop/culture/lit/Italian/Danindex.html.

LATIN PLACE NAMES
If you want to be the kind of person who knows that Books printed in Bratislava may tell you they are printed in Bosania, Bosonium, Bozanum, Bozonium, or indeed Brecislaburgum there are two websites providing handy quick-reference guides: http://www.lib.byu.edu/~catalog/people/rlm/latin/names.htm and http://crane.ukc.ac.uk/semls/cathlibs/towns.htm.

EARLY MODERN ENGLISH SOURCES
This site provides links for mainly historical resources. It has, amongst other things, e-texts and bibliographies on various topics. URL: http://www.quelle.org/emes/research.html.

SIDNEY-L
The SIDNEY-L e-mail discussion list is intended to serve as an online forum for scholars and students of Sir Philip Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Mary Wroth, and other members of the Sidney family and Sidney Circle. To subscribe to the list, send email to: listserv@listserv.uoguelph.ca. In the body of the mail message, type: subscribe sidney-l Your Full Name. To post to the list, send email to: sidney-l@listserv.uoguelph.ca. For more information contact the owner of the list, Gerald J. Rubio, at grubio@uoguelph.ca or visit the Sidney Newsletter and Journal homepage at http://www.uoguelph.ca/englit/sidney.

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NEWS FROM THE NET

DISCOVERING AND RECOVERING THE RELIGIOUS LYRIC
Submissions of essays invited for a 'Discovering and Recovering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric' volume, intended to explore voices that are frequently neglected, such as recusant poets and women writers. Essays are invited on Southwell, Alabaster, and Crashaw, and on less studied poets in the Anglo-Catholic tradition such as Sir John Beaumont, Henry Constable, Richard Verstegan, John Brereley [Lawrence Anderton], Patrick Cary, Henry Hawkins, and Thomas Ken; also on lesser known Anglican poets such as Henry King, Francis Quarles and others; also on the women writers of religious verse such as Aemilia Lanyer, An Collins, and Anne Wentworth; and on more familiar poets and poems of the period as long as they lead to unique critical discoveries and recoveries. Essays should be no longer than 25 double-spaced pages and should conform to the MLA Style Manual. Deadline: May 1, 1998. All submissions and inquiries may be directed to Eugene R. Cunnar ( ecunnar@nmsu.edu)or Jeffrey Johnson ( jjohnson@miseri.edu).

[Editor's Note: many CFP notices removed from original CERES mailing due to obsolescence]

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REVIEW OF CHADWYCK-HEALY'S
LITERATURE ONLINE (LION)

The following review is divided into several sections; please choose from the index or scroll through below.

• Introduction
• Reference Works
• Web Resources
• Help
• Literary Databases
• Master index
• Searching Literary Databases
• Caveat, Summary

INTRODUCTION

LION (and we do love a good acronym) is wondrous, and we are already finding it indispensable. However, it is important to know its limitations, and to realise that for all its comprehensiveness and speed, it is still a very blunt instrument where research is concerned. But it is clearly the most significant online literary resource to date, and with its clear intent of housing a comprehensive and ever-expanding range of services under one roof, it looks like it will keep the lead it already has on any rivals; it is here to stay. If your academic institution is not already thinking of subscribing, put that thought in its mind. Even if LION's usefulness to you is restricted to the most mundane of its capabilities - tracking down quotations and phrases you cannot place - it is likely to save you time, and it has not always been possible to say that about the infliction of technological developments on our working lives in the last decades. First of all, though, a guided tour.

LION has distinct URLs for the UK (http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/) and the States (http://lion.chadwyck.com/); obviously, as ever, use the one closest to you. The home page looks the same whether or not you have subscribed to the database. If you haven't, some links will be turned off, and others will take you to information about the service rather than to the service itself. If you have been granted access temporarily you may have been given a special URL and password (e.g., for reviewing purposes). But in most cases, LION lets subscribers straight in by recognising the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the computer accessing it. This may be a library computer; in the event of large-scale licenses being granted, it may be any computer within a certain domain (e.g. cam.ac.uk). [If you need to know your IP address, you can get LION to tell you what your computer is telling it by going to http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/envtest.cgi]. Multiple-user licenses will allow a limited number of concurrent users to access each database; these tend to allow more users for the more popular databases (verse) than for the less (Early English Prose Fiction), so it is just possible that access will be denied because 5 other people are also trying to get to grips with Nashe and Greene. Information about arranging trials is of course available at the home page.

As well as recognising your computer, LION will recognise your browser software; sort of. There are two versions of Literature Online. One uses 'frames', which means that some areas of the page remain intact when you download some new stuff. This protocol has speed advantages, but it is also governed by a more complicated logic. Where traditionally each page you saw had a separate URL, so that your browser knew what it was showing you, with frames this is not the case. So if you try to use the back/forward buttons on your browser, you may find that things get rather muddling (see below). The frames version of LION is optimised to run with Netscape Navigator version 3.0 or higher, which uses Java scripts to reinstate an intuitive back/forward option presented within the page rather than via your browser's toolbar. Internet Explorer 3 also has frames capability, so if you access LION with this software you will get the frames version, but the back/forward option may not work. As usual, you are most likely to have problems with older browsers and non-Windows 95 machines. We have not experimented with every configuration of hardware and software, but in many cases problems arising from the frames version of LION can be avoided by going to the non-frames version, whither you will be sent automatically if LION recognises that you have a non-frames-aware browser such as Netscape Navigator 1.2. Follow the links, or go straight to http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/noframes/home/home. In essence this is exactly the same as the frames version, except that LION's own buttons are on the left instead of the right, and the whole is painted a more lurid orange. Some procedures have more stages to them, but the non-frames version is in no way less powerful or flexible. You may also find it faster, for complicated reasons involving caches which you don't want to know about.

REFERENCE WORKS

• Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature: ABELL aims to list monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world. The bibliography consists of 69 volumes beginning in 1920 and issued annually in printed volumes. It is not in practice as up to date as BIDS/First Search, but it is very full.
• Bibliography of American Literature: BAL contains nearly 40,000 records of the literary works of approximately 300 American writers from the period of the Revolution to 1930.
• The King James Bible - 'Authorized' Version: The King James - 'Authorized' Version is included to provide a single Bible for reference purposes. Boxes on the search form (fill in any or all) allow searching by keyword, testament, and book, and a 'Go to' option can take you direct to any specified point. The full text is hypertexted with, e.g., concordance notes. Perhaps an accident, but certainly a blessing; the choice of the AV means that this will be very useful for tracing allusions and quotations direct, without getting sent to other people's allusions and quotations.
• Periodicals Contents Index--Literature: An index to over 800,000 periodical articles in the field of literature from 1857 to present day. The focus is upon journals produced in the twentieth century, but those beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth are published from their inception. Perhaps that might be extended one day to include major C19 journals which didn't outlive their queen. Nevertheless, very nice, this, as it makes far more likely the noticing (and less likely the duplicating) of all that fantastic Victorian scholarship so often buried in the Proceedings of the Bognor Philological Society and Antiquaries Club. Very good also for reviews of things literary from past decades. Past scholarship becomes as noisy as present, almost, and the balance of accessibility and retrieval is redressed somewhat.
• Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged: America's premier lexicographical work; the 1993 edition is published here in electronic form for the first time. A dictionary of the English language containing 450,000 vocabulary entries. Searching is done by filling in any or all of boxes Headword, Keyword, Etymology Keyword, Author/Quotation Keyword, Part of Speech. This would be even more useful if it were the UK's premier lexicographical work. But we don't wave flags.

WEB RESOURCES

MASTER INDEX

The browse option will give you a list of every word which occurs in a title/author field in the whole database, with the number of occurences, so you can browse the entire lexicon if you have the patience. By using ctrl and then clicking you can select any number of these, to arrange a multiple author search, or a title search like:
"arcades" OR "arcadi" OR "arcadia" OR "arcadian" OR "arcadians" OR "arcadias" OR "arcadie" OR "arcady" OR "arcadye"
This is how LION displays an ideal search by the way, for clarity's sake, though of course you would get the same results from:
arcades or arcadi or arcadia or arcadian or arcadians or arcadias or arcadie or arcady or arcadye
The software will show you 50 entries at a time unless you tell it to show more (up to 99). This is worth adjusting on some occasions, so as to avoid multiple pages of search results which can get in the way of a quick browse back and forth.

Having specified your search criteria and got some results you may wish to get back to your search box (to make some alterations) by using your browser's 'back' button. Do not be surprised if on going back to the search page you find that it is now blank again. This may not always happen, and it will happen less if you use the non-frames version of LION, or the Java back/forward facility incorporated in the frames version. But to avoid it, notice that clicking the search icon in the results page allows you to 'refine search'. This will take you straight back to the search page, with your search criteria preserved. Usually.

A summary of the stages of searching the master index...

1. Search
2. Summary of matches and the databases in which they occur. Click (i) highlighted text for the record OR (ii) piece of paper icon to its right for a contextual table of contents (most commonly the contents of the complete poems or plays or prose fiction of the author concerned). Also displayed on this page are the titles and URLs of any e-texts at other websites of which LION is aware.
3. 1. Full text record within particular database with the option now of going to the text or to the contextual table of contents
   2. Contextual table of contents, every item of which is highlighted. These are tabulated in a hierarchical way, the more indented entries being subsets of the less indented ones above them. There are some funny icons to the left of each item; the lozenge shaped one will display the same table of contents with more 'context' for that item; the other one will do it with less. This is all rather complicated and vexatious, but you'll work it out if you want to. The point of it is to enable you to select exactly the form in which you finally get your text, either, for instance, the single sonnet, or the whole sequence, or the whole volume.
   NB If at this stage (3) you click on 'refine search' it will take you not to the search you were conducting but to a page enabling you to search the particular database you are now in. Not a bug; but a pest.
4. 4. Text at last (refine search works as above)

You might want at this point to save or print your text. There are various options. You could cover some with the mouse, and copy and paste it somewhere else. You could select all the text via 'edit' on the menu bar, though with older, smaller RAMed machines there may be a limit to the amount of text the computer can paste in one go. You could do clever things with the right mouse button if you know how to do that. Note that this is another stage at which the frames version of LION may upset you. If you have a page of text in front of you and try to save it as a file, your computer may save the upper frame of icons because that was the last thing it downloaded and that is where it is. So you may need first to click on the text itself; there will be no visible effect, but your computer will now be where you are. Another question is in what form to save the text. If you save it as a file, you will have to save it as html (.html or .htm). This includes all the codes around the text telling your machine how to display it. If you try to save it as text (.txt) you will still get all the html codes. Only by copying and pasting will the text and only the text be translated into .txt. BUT, saving as html has advantages, such as preserving italics, which are lost when text becomes txt. And if you have swanky Word 97 for Windows 95, you word processor will be able to display html files anyway. Bear in mind that in some situations you will want to print off the text but will not be that fussed about keeping an electronic copy. In which case consider printing direct from your web browser, a much underused option. In the non-frames version you will get all the supporting icons and pictures, but not in the frames version, which will give you only the text part of the page (but remember to click on the text first...!)

Using Master Index you can also retrieve a number of hits by sampling (you specify the number). There is not much point to this, except for journalists and students wanting to stick a pin in the complete poems of X (in which case, better surely to browse the contents page of a real live book), or to get a representative selection of poetic sentiments on the theme of meadows or lust.

A word about LION's texts. A number of factors have the potential to vitiate the texts available on LION. For copyright reasons many of the texts on LION are less than up to date. Where possible, particularly in their earlier databases (poetry and drama) C-H have taken texts from modern editions out of copyright. This tends to mean that they are by Grosart. If this does not worry you, read Sprague's tactful remarks on the good reverend's shortcomings in his edition of Daniel's poems. Where this has not been possible, they have gone back to the original printed text. In some cases (like the excellent new Early English Prose Fiction database) they seem to have done this as a first option, so, delightfully, we get not Feuillerat's Sidney's Arcadia, but an edition of the 1593 text. Minor authors, represented sometimes in their entirety from the original texts, complete with preliminaries, are often better represented than very major ones, available only via a poor and incomplete 'collected' edition. Also, the electronic versions of original texts are usually more satisfying, and easier to navigate, than the e-texts of modern collected editions. It is much simpler to survey and sample the complete works of a writer if, say, his 20 publications are listed on screen as such - and are then available complete with publication details from the title page and preliminaries - rather than splattered across a single collected edition which doesn't give their dates and hasn't included dedications. In this medium 20 small virtual volumes are easier to work with than one big one. In general, then, expect a mish-mash of both old and modern spelling editions, and adjust your searches to allow for this. But be aware that some of the texts are riddled with errors, either because of poor typing or checking, or because scanning is rather haphazard (a poorly printed e will often be read by the character recognition software as a c, for example). In many cases, a text (and in some cases an author) is simply not there at all. Recent changes in copyright law (i.e. the extension of the copyright period) mean that while Hebel's Drayton was on the verse CD-ROM, it is not on LION. So if you are using LION for cross-sectional lexical searches of the whole of English Literature, you will need to acquire a sense of what is missing. There are pleasant surprises, however. It looks like where a text was first printed only in recent times (and a great many women's manuscript works fall under this category) C-H have in some cases been able to get hold of e-texts of (portions of) copyright editions. So some texts are well-edited, and accurately digitised. LION is in many ways most useful not for providing access to electronic versions of texts we all possess, but in allowing ready and alternative access to the sorts of texts which one can most often only read on UMI microfilms, the sort of 2 copies in the world texts like Markham's English Arcadia [imagine your reviewer's excitement!] or Gamage's Linsi-Woolsie. It is also great for containing vast amounts of lousy C18-C19 poetry and drama - and, indeed, for searching through it with no nose for quality -, and so is particularly well adapted to reception history sorts of projects (I found a frightening number of poems about Sidney at Zutphen).

The division of portions of text means that any lump of data with a title can be accessed separately. So one can go direct to a single sonnet, which will appear on a page of its own. One can then back up to its context, and display the whole run of sonnets, or whatever. At first this is really annoying. But once you start using LION not just to browse texts, but to conduct tightly specified searches, your annoyance transfers to the texts which are not so generously pieced up. Machines with less than 16MB RAM have problems displaying large files, and where the smallest portion of a novel or play is 50 or 300K, the computer will freeze up and think a lot before it finishes processing it. Not to mention the more familiar slow downloading problems. So if you are not downloading such a text to keep but just to glance at the occurrence of a word or phrase, time can be consumed. But LION is very well organised in telling you the size of every file it offers you, and in giving a reasonable amount of text surrounding each 'hit', so you can decide when to bother, and when to use LION to direct you to a place in a paper book.

Annotations are a problem. Texts, like Jonson's editions of his own works, which come already annotated have had their notes included in the databases, but these are always in separate files, one file per note. This is the most irritating feature of LION. It is simply not possible to see all the notes at once, to know what is in a note before downloading it (although its size is displayed), or, if one wishes to download a text for keeps, to include the notes in the text's file. Sometimes such annotations are essential to a text, but the software discourages one from bothering either to read them, or to download each and every one if one is compiling one's own library of e-texts (which, by the way, is fully allowed by C-H who accept that they cannot hope to keep hold of every bit of text, but know that they will remain unique in providing the facility to search them all). Why oh why cannot the software find a way of sticking the relevant notes at the bottom of the page?

So much for the digression, and for the master index. Now for ways of searching the meat of the databases...

SEARCHING LITERARY DATABASES

Each of the databases can be searched in one of three ways

1. via the master index (dealt with above)
2. via the search all literary databases option
3. individually, for the most sophisticated search options

SEARCH ALL
1. This option allows searching of the full texts (including dedicatory matter, etc.) by keyword or author; once again, fill either or both boxes either directly or by browsing and selecting; then press the search button. This is the best way to search all the literary texts in LION for occurrences of words; as noted above truncations are essential for old spelling, as are boolean operators; remember to allow for some needlessly preserved old-spelling oddities like vv for w; truncations are also good for getting a variety of word-forms from a common stem. For instance, 'Sidne* or Sydne*' will find most references to Sidneys, Sidneians, Sidneides, and the Sidneyesque.

2. Having submitted your search, you will have returned to you a 'Summary of Matches'; these are listed by database, and each entry tells you how many hits are in each database, and under how many separate entries (e.g. there may be only three hits in only one text so you will be told 3 matches and 1 entry). Click on the highlighted database names and you will enter the particular database (e.g. early prose fiction)...

3. Summary of matches within database. This page lists each entry (not each match) separately by author and title of work; it tells you how many matches are in each entry, and offers the table of contents icon; scroll down this page, and if necessary any following pages for 50+ entries (though you can again circumvent this by specifying that the search display up to 99 entries per page). Click on an interesting looking one, either the highlighted title (i), or the TOC icon (ii)...

4. (i) Context of matches. This page tells you more precisely what the hit is, and gives you a good few words of context, usually enough to determine whether or not to go further. This page will also offer a number of ways into the text: for instance, just the text, or the text plus prefatory matter, or the whole edition from which it is taken...
(ii) Contextual table of contents, which works as described above when we got there via the Master Index

5. Text. This will be flagged with icons (called 'first hit' or 'next hit') which will jump you to the point in the text at which the match(es) occur(s). It will also offer you the contextual TOC, which you may want to look at if you came direct via 4 (i).

At each of the above stages you can start a new search or refine your search. As noted in the master index section, once you have started to look at information specific to one database (stage 3 above), clicking on the search icon (the magnifying glass) may take you to a search box for that one database only. We are slightly confused by this, as it appears to work inconsistently by database, and by frames/non-frames interface. Clearly C-H should allow access to both sorts of search page from every point in such a search.

SEARCHING INDIVIDUAL DATABASES

Going back and forth is the whole problem with frames, and the reason why you may need to consider using the non-frames version - except perhaps for printing things off - even if your browser displays frames. Typically you will search all the databases at once, you will get a summary of matches, you will view the summary for a particular database, and perhaps you will look at the context of a particular entry. Very often you will not download the text, because you are really only browsing. You will then press the 'back' button on your browser to go back up to the summary of matches in order to view the entries in another database. In frames, you will probably get a blank screen; pressing 'back' again will take you back to the search page, which will be empty or will perhaps contain a search you conducted previously; to get your search results, you will have to resubmit your search. If this happens, and LION's own back/forward buttons don't work, use the non- frames version of LION, which ought to work more logically. It took us a while to work this out, because C-H don't like to trumpet their shortcomings too loudly. Even without frames you may still find your search criteria have been lost when you back up to the search page; the best way round this is to use 'refine search' to get back to this page, though, as noted above, sometimes this will give you the wrong sort of search page. Clearly, C-H need to think about making it possible to jump straight from any point in a search back to a previous one; for example (most obviously) from a full text within a particular database to the summary of matches across all the databases. The safest thing to do if you are worried about losing your search criteria is to use a clever clipboard like 'Clipmate' (available from HENSA) to keep the criteria safe, or to copy them once entered (using the browser's edit menu, which, as we are constantly observing, you must get into the habit of using to copy URLs from Harvest to your browser's address box; we worry about you...) into a dummy word processor document. It is very vexing to come up with a beautiful search term like fresh field* or freshe field* or fresh feeld* or freshe feeld* only to find it lost.

While we're on the subject of search criteria, we very much like the 'near' option. This finds two words within 10 words of each other (it doesn't matter which order you give them in). If you add a full stop and a number you can alter the range to, say, within 5 words, or 20: hand near.15 foot. By the way, LION does not allow, as does AltaVista's advanced searching, parentheses like the following, and it ought to: (fresh field* or freshe field* or fresh feeld* or freshe feeld*) near pastures new*. Because fresh field* or freshe field* or fresh feeld* or freshe feeld* near pastures new* will only match the last variant to 'pastures new*'.

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