Getting Students Started on ECCO

Our SUNY experiment using ECCO (and, in other courses, NCCO) has begun.  The initial difficulty was getting students to use ECCO.  To that end, I designed the introductory exercise listed below, which resulted in thoughtful papers that often used proximity and wildcard searches.  Best of all, not only do students seem more comfortable using ECCO after completing this exercise, they also are more attuned to Radcliffe’s craft.

The assignment is designed for an undergraduate class on the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel.

I would love to hear about other successful exercises or assignments using ECCO, NCCO, or Burney, especially exercises asking students to study historical contexts.

Word Searching in ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online)

Due:                  Monday, 7 October, in class.

Length:            1 page, typed and double-spaced

1. Go to the Feinberg Library home page
2. Click on “Find Articles”
3. Click on “Databases by Subject”
4. Click on “English/Literature”
5. Click on “Eighteenth-Century Collections Online”
6. Do a title search for “Romance of the Forest” with “1792” as the date [it was published in 1791, but the earliest edition ECCO has is the 2^nd edition, published in 1792].
7. Note that each of its three volumes comes up as a different book; each volume will need to be searched for the word you select.
8. Select a word that seems important to the novel: “forest,” “romance,” “labyrinth,” “asylum,” “tears,” “door,” “hidden,” “fear,” “beauty,”
   “prayer,” “road,” “convent,” “reason,” “rational,” “imagination,” and so forth.
9. Do a word search for every occurrence of that word in each volume.  Remember that words with “s” might need false searches: “case,” for example, requires a search for “cafe.”  Consider synonyms.  Consider alternate spellings of words.
10. When necessary, look up the eighteenth-century meaning of words in the Oxford English Dictionary, also available on the Feinberg Library English Department web site.
11. Write a brief (1 page) account of the role of that word in Radcliffe’s narrative, in her construction of character, in her construction of tone, or in other key aspects of her artistry.

Searching Guidelines

Truncated searches:

*            A search for “poet*” searches for words with “poet” as the root: “poet,” “poetic,” “poetess,” “poetical,” “poets,” etc.

?            A search for “wom?n” calls up “women” and “woman”

!            A search for “nun!” calls up “nun,” “nuns,” “nunn,” “nune”

Proximity searches:

A search for “ladies n6 asylum” calls up texts with “ladies” and “asylum” within 6 words of one another.

A search for “ladies w6 asylum” calls up texts with “ladies” appearing within 6 words before “asylum”