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How I Made This /
Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature in English
- Tonya Howe
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Description: In this “How I Made This” session, I will share the motivations, goals, and methodology behind the creation of Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature in English, funded in 2018-19 by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities. This project was developed in collaboration between faculty at Marymount University and The University of Virginia. Our primary motivations were as follows: First, to provide a collection of reliably edited and annotated digital study editions for classroom use, thereby responding in part to the proliferation of unreliable etexts that students often turn to uncritically instead of purchasing sometimes costly textbooks. Second, to address issues of digital and informational literacy that make it difficult for students to assess the reliability of etexts by incorporating students as co-creators. And third, to develop an open, scalable application and sharable dataset that imagines a new and more customizable model for Open Educational Resources--to address both student cost and the planned obsolescence built into many approaches to textbook publication. We developed the application in eXist-db, an open- access and open-source native XML database platform, and the data itself was created using Level 4 TEI markup. In this walkthrough, I will provide an overview of the platform itself (frontend and backend), discuss the process of construction (both the application and the XML), and describe some pathways to enable student participation in the development of the digital editions. One of my goals in this session is to inspire future collaborators and users of Literature in Context, especially important as we seek new sources of funding, as we together move into a pst-COVID educational frontier that will benefit from thoughtfully constructed OER, and as we teach the next generation of digitally literate citizens.