Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The John Milton Reading Room and the Future of Digital Pedagogy

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Digital Milton

  • 238 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the editorial and pedagogical implications of the only born-digital edition of Milton’s works, The John Milton Reading Room, edited by Thomas H. Luxon. The project was developed to respond to a particular teaching problem: how to make Milton’s varied allusions accessible for undergraduates. The site’s hyperlinked design encourages a dynamic interaction between reader and text, in which readers, as the site’s users, can click easily from Milton’s works to free online editions of the works Milton alludes to, pursuing individualized paths of discovery. Zukerman argues that the site’s design reveals how born-digital editions not only empower reader-users to make their own paths through a text, but also model for students a process of inquiry that makes for successful scholarship.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 159.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Thomas H. Luxon in discussion with the author, 31 May 2017. An earlier discussion took place at a roundtable on “Milton and the Digital Humanities” at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting, 31 March 2017. All further references to “Luxon discussion” refer to the May 31 conversation, unless otherwise noted.

  2. 2.

    Luxon discussion.

  3. 3.

    The field-changing computer language BASIC was invented at Dartmouth College in 1964; BASIC “went on to be the most widely used computer language in the world,…bringing computer technology to general audiences” (Susan Knapp, “Back to BASICs 40 years later,” Vox of Dartmouth [2004], <http://www.dartmouth.edu/~vox/0304/0503/basic.html>. Accessed 3 August 2017). See also Trustees of Dartmouth College, “Basic at 50: Basic Begins at Dartmouth,” Dartmouth College (2014), <http://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html>. Accessed 3 August 2017.

  4. 4.

    Jordan Craig and Graeson McMahon designed a 2014 update in the Neukom DALI Lab at Dartmouth. Luxon provides a full list of contributors on the Milton Reading Room site: Thomas H. Luxon, “About The Milton Reading Room,” The John Milton Reading Room (1997–), <https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/contents/about_mrr.shtml>. Accessed 4 August 2017.

  5. 5.

    Thomas H. Luxon, “The John Milton Reading Room: Teaching Paradise Lost with an Online Edition,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost, 2nd ed., ed. Peter C. Herman (New York: Modern Language Association, 2012), 190.

  6. 6.

    Luxon discussion.

  7. 7.

    John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The John Milton Reading Room, ed. Thomas H. Luxon (1997–), <http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/>. Accessed 4 August, 2017. All citations of Milton’s works are from this edition.

  8. 8.

    Patrick Sahle, About: A Catalogue of: Digital Scholarly Editions, v. 3.0, Snapshot 2008ff (2008), <http://www.digitale-edition.de/vlet-about.html>. Accessed 3 August 2017. See also Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 16.

  9. 9.

    Sahle, About, qtd in Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing, 16.

  10. 10.

    Terje Hillesund and Claire Bélisle, “What Digital Remediation Does to Critical Editions and Reading Practices,” in Digital Critical Editions, ed. Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle, and Philippe Régnier (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 114–154 (114).

  11. 11.

    Odd Einar Haugen and Daniel Apollon, “The Digital Turn in Textual Scholarship: Historical and Typological Perspectives,” in Apollon, Bélisle, and Régnier, Digital Critical, 35–57 (55).

  12. 12.

    Apollon, Bélisle, and Régnier, “Introduction: As Texts Become Digital,” Digital Critical Editions, 4. Elena Pierazzo points to Espen Aarseth’s classic Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) for a similar assessment: Aarseth “examines the characteristics of cyber texts and cyber literature, and concludes that their most important, defining characteristic is the engagement and the interactivity required by the user/reader and her/his effort in achieving the ultimate goal of reading the text” (Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly, 33). Pierazzo adds that Edward Vanhoutte has argued “the same for digital scholarly editions” (33). See also Edward Vanhoutte, “Defining Electronic Editions: A Historical and Functional Perspective,” in Text and Genre in Reconstruction. Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions, ed. Willard McCarty (Cambridge: Open Book Publisher, 2010), 99–110.

  13. 13.

    For a detailed discussion of the role of pedagogy in the digital humanities, see Brett Hirsch, ed., Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012). Hirsch notes an “almost systematic relegation of the word ‘teaching’ (or its synonyms) to the status of afterthought” in digital humanities scholarship; he seeks to “move pedagogy…out of marginalization and exclusion, to the fore of the digital humanities” (5–6).

  14. 14.

    John Creaser, “Editorial Problems in Milton [Part 1],” Review of English Studies 34 (1983): 279–303 (279), cited in John Creaser, “Editing Lycidas: The Authority of Minutiae,” Milton Quarterly 44, no. 2 (May 2010): 73–121 (79).

  15. 15.

    Creaser, “Editing Lycidas,” 79.

  16. 16.

    Roy Flannagan, “Preface,” in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), viii.

  17. 17.

    John K. Hale, “The Problems and Opportunities of Editing ‘De Doctrina Christiana,’” Milton Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2010), 38–46 (43).

  18. 18.

    Stephen B. Dobranski, “Editing Milton: The Case against Modernisation,” The Review of English Studies, New Series, 59, no. 240 (June 2008), 392–408 (399).

  19. 19.

    Herman, Approaches, 3.

  20. 20.

    He adds, “Respondents, however, recognized that the notes of this edition are ‘badly out of date’”; Herman, Approaches, 3.

  21. 21.

    See, for example, Rebecca Niles and Michael Poston, “Re-Modeling the Edition: Creating a Corpus of Folger Digital Texts,” in Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn, ed. Laura Estill, Diana K. Jakacki, and Michael Ullyot (Toronto: Iter Press, 2016), 117–44 (120). Niles and Poston’s essay provides a useful overview of different editorial theories related to early modern texts. For an insightful discussion of the practical implications of many of these ideas, see Jeffrey Masten, “Glossing and T*pping: Editing Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Othello,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, ed. Valerie Traub, 569–85 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  22. 22.

    Dobranski, “Editing Milton,” 407.

  23. 23.

    Dobranski, “Editing Milton,” 407.

  24. 24.

    Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly, 15.

  25. 25.

    Bernice W. Kliman, Enfolded Hamlet. (1996—), <http://hamletworks.net/enfolded.html>. Accessed 5 August 2017; Jesús Tronch, “Displaying Textual and Translational Variants in a Hypertextual and Multilingual Edition of Shakespeare’s Multi-text Plays,” in Estill, Jakacki, and Ullyot, Early Modern Studies, 89–116 (89); Marina Buzzoni, “‘Uuarth Thuo the Hêlago Gêst that Barn an Ira Bôsma’: Towards a Scholarly Electronic Edition of The Hêliand,” in Medieval Texts—Contemporary Media, ed. Maria Grazia Saibene and Marina Buzzoni (Como: Ibis, 2009), 35.

  26. 26.

    Hillesund and Bélisle, “Digital Remediation,” 128.

  27. 27.

    Apollon, Bélisle, and Régnier, Digital Critical, 5.

  28. 28.

    See, for example, Kenneth M. Price, “Social Scholarly Editing,” in A New Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016): 137–49.

  29. 29.

    Niles and Poston, “Re-Modeling,” 140.

  30. 30.

    Haugen and Apollon, “Digital Turn,” 55.

  31. 31.

    See Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, eds., Text Editing, Print and the Digital World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). They write that the changing role of the editor in the digital world has “had the ambivalent effect of raising the status of editing as critical activity at the same time it has called the authoritative status of editions into question” (2).

  32. 32.

    Haugen and Apollon, “Digital Turn,” 56.

  33. 33.

    Luxon discussion.

  34. 34.

    Luxon discussion. See also Philippe Régnier, “Ongoing Challenges for Digital Critical Editions,” in Apollon, Bélisle, and Régnier, Digital Critical 58–80; Régnier makes a call for philologists to participate actively in creating “digitized text standards” so that they can be part of the conversation (76).

  35. 35.

    Luxon discussion. He chooses a particular edition based on text-specific historical criteria, then checks the text against editions held by the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth, the British Library, and Early English Books Online. In the site’s early years, Luxon would scan text from recent published editions and then retro-edit it to align with an early modern edition; for example, the base text for Paradise Lost was the unmodernized Riverside Milton, ed. Flannagan.

  36. 36.

    Creaser, “Editing Lycidas,” 80.

  37. 37.

    Dobranski writes that while “[s]tudents struggle with” many aspects of Milton’s works, including “syntax and allusions,” they eventually “become acclimated to the appearance of Milton’s writings” (“Editing Milton,” 406).

  38. 38.

    During one week at the end of May 2017, 18% of sessions were on iOS, 22% on Android, 30% on Windows, 17% on Mac, and 1.5% on Linux (Luxon discussion).

  39. 39.

    As of September 2017, the site is only searchable in original spelling; previous versions of the site were searchable in modern spelling as well, and Luxon aims to bring this capacity back (Luxon in discussion with the author, 6 September 2017).

  40. 40.

    Luxon has noted that scholars regularly pull text from the Milton Reading Room for their visual presentations at professional academic conferences, presumably because of the site’s usability and search functions (Luxon in discussion with the author, 6 September 2017).

  41. 41.

    See, for example, History Department, Hanover Historical Texts Collection, Hanover College (1995–), <http://history.hanover.edu/project.php#early>. Accessed 5 August, 2017.

  42. 42.

    See, for example, Gregory R. Crane, ed., Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University (1995—), <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/>. Accessed 5 August, 2017.

  43. 43.

    Internet Shakespeare Editions, University of Victoria (1999—), <http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/>. Accessed 5 August, 2017.

  44. 44.

    Luxon discussion.

  45. 45.

    Luxon discussion.

  46. 46.

    On the affordances and risks of reliance on Wikipedia, see Islam Issa’s Chap. 8 in this volume.

  47. 47.

    Luxon writes, “Students, even before they encounter Milton’s challenge to their moral fitness as readers, feel disqualified by the barrage of erudition Milton mounts” (“Online Edition,” 189).

  48. 48.

    Luxon, “Online Edition,” 189. On a personal note, I took Luxon’s introductory Milton course in the spring of 2003, as a first-year undergraduate. The course inspired me to become an English major because of the way it welcomed me into the world of scholarship.

  49. 49.

    Luxon discussion.

  50. 50.

    Luxon asserts that laptops and the Internet “radically changed how I teach” (Luxon discussion). See also Paul Fyfe, “Mid-Sized Digital Pedagogy,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 104–38. Fyfe claims that “mid-sized digital pedagogy” can bridge what Fyfe sees as a “wide[ning]” gap between “massive online encounters” and a “renewed emphasis on the intimate concentration of the classroom” (104).

  51. 51.

    Luxon, “Online Edition,” 190.

  52. 52.

    See <https://web.hypothes.is/>

  53. 53.

    Luxon discussion.

  54. 54.

    Luxon discussion. On the potentials of creating a student-led scholarly community, see David Ainsworth’s Chap. 9 in this volume.

  55. 55.

    Luxon allows student research assistants to pursue projects related to their interests, and as he adds more material to the site, he follows student leads on which material to prioritize (Luxon discussion). Letting student interest shape the site has created certain inconsistencies: for example, some translations of the Latin and Italian poems that appear on the Milton Reading Room are original translations by student research assistants—these translations are in prose to capture the original meaning, and checked against other translations—while others come from seventeenth-century editions (Luxon in discussion with the author, 6 September 2017). These and other inconsistencies may smooth out as the site continues to develop over time; as an ongoing project, the site is always changing.

  56. 56.

    Luxon oversees all material that appears on the site in all its stages of development; his editorial framework related to translation and scholarly intervention may be worthy of further attention and theorization.

  57. 57.

    This assessment is based on my own experiences as a research assistant (from 2004–05) as well as email messages I received from seven former Milton Reading Room research assistants between May and July 2017.

  58. 58.

    Amar Dhand, email message to author, 7 June 2017. Dhand adds, “I subsequently became a social science researcher, and my work includes qualitative data analysis.” For Meredith Westgate Russo, it “helped me confidently navigate both earlier work in advertising, coordinating elaborate websites and understanding how to communicate with their designers, as well as in my current career teaching undergraduates, and finally in maintaining my own website as a writer” (email message to author, 9 June 2017).

  59. 59.

    Katherine Lynch, email message to author, 13 June 2017.

  60. 60.

    Lynch, email message. Other former research assistants who have gone into education fields have expressed similar ideas.

  61. 61.

    Lynch, email message.

  62. 62.

    Luxon discussion; Luxon, Thomas H. “University and College Server Requests for Pages from the MRR for Two-Week Period in March 2016: 254 Institutions Worldwide” (personal document, 2016).

  63. 63.

    Trustees of Dartmouth College, “Digital Humanities: The John Milton Reading Room,” Dartmouth College, <http://digitalhumanities.dartmouth.edu/projects/the-john-milton-reading-room/>. Accessed 7 October 2017.

  64. 64.

    Luxon in discussion with the author, 6 September 2017.

Works Cited

  • Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  • Apollon, Daniel, Claire Bélisle, and Philippe Régnier, eds. Digital Critical Editions. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Buzzoni, Marina. “‘Uuarth Thuo the Hêlago Gêst that Barn an Ira Bôsma’: Towards a Scholarly Electronic Edition of The Hêliand,” in Medieval Texts—Contemporary Media, edited by Maria Grazia Saibene and Marina Buzzoni. Como: Ibis, 2009. 35–79.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crane, Gregory R. ed. 1995–. Perseus Digital Library. Tufts University. <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/>. Accessed 4 August 2017.

  • Creaser, John. “Editing Lycidas: The Authority of Minutiae.” Milton Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2010): 73–121.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Editorial Problems in Milton [part 1].” Review of English Studies 34 (1983): 279–303.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dhand, Amar. Email message to author, 7 June 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dobranski, Stephen B. “Editing Milton: The Case against Modernisation,” The Review of English Studies, New Series, 59, no. 240 (June 2008): 392–408.

    Google Scholar 

  • Estill, Laura, Diane K. Jakacki, and Michael Ullyot, eds. Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn. Toronto: Iter Press, 2016.

    Google Scholar 

  • Flannagan, Roy, ed. The Riverside Milton. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fyfe, Paul. “Mid-Sized Digital Pedagogy,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 104–38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hale, John K. “The Problems and Opportunities of Editing ‘De Doctrina Christiana’.” Milton Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2010): 38–46.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haugen, Odd Einar and Daniel Apollon. “The Digital Turn in Textual Scholarship: Historical and Typological Perspectives.” In Digital Critical, edited by Apollon, Bélisle, and Régnier. 35–57.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herman, Peter C., ed. Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hillesund, Terje and Claire Bélisle. “What Digital Remediation Does to Critical Editions and Reading Practices.” In Digital Critical, edited by Apollon, Bélisle, and Régnier. 114–54.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirsch, Brett, ed. Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • History Department. 1995–. Hanover Historical Texts Collection. Hanover College. <http://history.hanover.edu/project.php#early>. Accessed 4 August 2017.

  • Internet Shakespeare Editions. 1999–. University of Victoria. <http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/>. Accessed 4 August 2017.

  • Kliman, Bernice W. 1996–. Enfolded Hamlet. <http://hamletworks.net/enfolded.html>. Accessed 4 August 2017.

  • Knapp, Susan. 2004. “Back to BASICs 40 Years Later.” Vox of Dartmouth. <http://www.dartmouth.edu/~vox/0304/0503/basic.html>. Accessed 3 August 2017.

  • Luxon, Thomas H. “The John Milton Reading Room: Teaching Paradise Lost with an Online Edition.” In Approaches, edited by Herman, 189–91.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. in discussion with the author, 31 May 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. in discussion with the author, 6 September 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. ed. 1997–. The John Milton Reading Room. <http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/>. Accessed 3 August 2017.

  • ———. “University and College Server Requests for Pages from the MRR for Two-Week Period in March 2016: 254 Institutions Worldwide.” Personal Document, 2016.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lynch, Katherine E. Email message to author, 13 June 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Masten, Jeffrey. “Glossing and T*pping: Editing Sexuality, Race, and Gender in Othello,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 569–85.

    Google Scholar 

  • Niles, Rebecca and Michael Poston. “Re-Modeling the Edition: Creating a Corpus of Folger Digital Texts.” In Early Modern Studies, edited by Estill, Jakacki, and Ullyot. 117–44.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pierazzo, Elena. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Price, Kenneth M. “Social Scholarly Editing,” in A New Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. 137–49.

    Google Scholar 

  • Régnier, Philippe. “Ongoing Challenges for Digital Critical Editions.” In Digital Critical, edited by Apollon, Bélisle, and Régnier. 58–80.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russo, Meredith Westgate. Email message to author, June 9, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sahle, Patrick. 2008. About: A Catalogue of: Digital Scholarly Editions, v. 3.0, Snapshot 2008ff. <http://www.digitale-edition.de/vlet-about.html>. Accessed 3 August 2017.

  • Tronch, Jesús. “Displaying Textual and Translational Variants in a Hypertextual and Multilingual Edition of Shakespeare’s Multi-text Plays.” In Early Modern Studies, edited by Estill, Jakacki, and Ullyot. 89–116.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trustees of Dartmouth College. 2014. “Basic at 50: Basic Begins at Dartmouth.” Dartmouth College. <http://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html>. Accessed 3 August 2017.

  • ———. 2017. “Digital Humanities: The John Milton Reading Room.” Dartmouth College. <http://digitalhumanities.dartmouth.edu/projects/the-john-milton-reading-room/>. Accessed 7 October 2017.

  • Vanhoutte, Edward. “Defining Electronic Editions: A Historical and Functional Perspective,” in Text and Genre in Reconstruction. Effects of Digitalizationon Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions, edited by Willard McCarty. Cambridge: Open Book Publisher, 2010. 99–110.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. West Point, USA

    Cordelia Zukerman

Authors
  1. Cordelia Zukerman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

    David Currell

  2. Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Islam Issa

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Zukerman, C. (2018). The John Milton Reading Room and the Future of Digital Pedagogy. In: Currell, D., Issa, I. (eds) Digital Milton. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90478-8_2

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation