By Kelly Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett, adapted from an assignment by Jaime Goodrich 1
This activity was inspired by and developed from Jaime Goodrich’s editorial glossing assignment for ENG 5030 – Topics in Women’s Studies (Fall 2020) at Wayne State University, which was used for the digital critical edition Kelly co-edited with Jaime, The Poetry of Gertrude More: Piety and Poetry in a Benedictine Convent.
Co-Editors Kelly Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett can guest-lecture in your classroom to introduce your students to the website, to eighteenth-century periodicals, Charlotte Lennox, and The Lady’s Museum. We are looking for beta-testers who are interested in teaching and learning with The Lady’s Museum. As this is a community-based website, we are eager for students to gain hands-on experience with the site by participating in our glossing activity. If you are interested in scheduling a guest lecture with us, please contact us. Let us know if you are interested the option for students to obtain potential publication to the site to gain professionalization and experience, by publishing a critical introduction, annotations, or an introductory headnote. Or, pitch another idea. We are happy to discuss your pedagogical needs.
This activity is suggested for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
Check out our student testimonials page to learn students’ experience with the below glossing assignment, which we performed first as a class activity then a take-home group assignment/discussion board post in Victoria Burke’s Winter 2022 Book History class and which assisted us in publishing the Trifler – Abridged reading for our course reader.
How-to Videos
Process Overview lecture (20 minutes)
How to Annotate in Google Docs (3 minutes)
Gloss an Article for LadysMusem.com
DOWNLOAD THIS ASSIGNMENT/ACTIVITY
Audience and goal
The goal of ladysmuseum.com is to familiarize a diverse audience (non-specialists, undergraduate students, scholars) with a reliable, accessible edition of Charlotte Lennox’s influential early magazine, The Lady’s Museum. This edition will maintain the textual authority of the periodical and supply a basis for adding it to the literary canon.
Base texts
As a class and in teams, we will edit Lennox’s periodical, using the first edition as our base text, allowing us to preserve each article’s textual integrity and to facilitate scholarly comparisons of the differences between the original-text images (scanned by Eighteenth-Century Collections Online and Google Books, and transposed by the ECCO Text Creation Partnership) and our modernized (for students) edition and, later, our unmodernized edition (for scholars).
NOTE: Contact the editors for more information or assistance.
Modernization
The class will provide one edition of each assigned section: a modernized version of it, which updates the spelling and the punctuation of the original text. These modernized versions, however, will not be translations; we will preserve the words themselves, glossing them whenever they are too archaic for modern readers to understand them at a glance. Thus, eighteenth-century words will remain–and will be glossed, defined in an explanatory note.
Glosses
Mouse-over annotations will offer ladysmuseum.com users brief definitions or translations of unusual words or phrases, including eighteenth-century cultural references and quotations. Students will use the Oxford English Dictionary (accessible through your university library; or if not, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, which is freely accessible online), to inform the website’s student users on the usage of the word when The Lady’s Museum was initially published, 1760-1761. To inform the website users on the significance and most-likely meanings of eighteenth-century phrases or nouns (persons, places, things, or ideas) that are unclear to the non-specialist reader, students will consult and cite their library’s resources. Students will then format these annotations as footnotes in their team’s assigned Google Doc (as shown in Figure 1 below) so that the Lady’s Museum Project co-editors can easily identify where the mouse-over glosses will need to go in the final edition.
Format & page setup
Using the “Suggesting” mode/feature in Google Docs (as shown in Figures 2 below), start editing–modernizing–the text as noted above. This way, any words modernized will be easy for the class to quickly identify.
Any glosses will appear as follows:
Word to be glossed in the body of the document.1
1 “Definition of word” (Oxford English Dictionary, “Entry-title,” definition number).
1 “Definition of Word” (Johnson’s Dictionary Online, “Entry-title”).
Figures
Figure 1. How to add footnotes to gloss in Google Docs
Figure 2. How to enter/ensure “Suggesting” mode in Google Docs
Examples
Here is an example of a Lady’s Museum article that Karenza Sutton-Bennett glossed. This is how Ladysmuseum.com annotated articles will look, how to format the dictionary (Johnson’s Dictionary Online and Oxford English Dictionary) citations, and what types of words and phrases will need annotations. For eighteenth-century cultural references—such as persons, places, or ideas—that would enhance nonspecialist readers’ understanding of the text, we suggest using an online encyclopedia through your institution’s library site then citing that in the footnote in parentheses.
Turning-in your glossed article
Follow instructions provided by your instructor. If your instructor requests you to turn in a Microsoft Word file, then you would select File: Download from the top-left dropdown menu in Google Docs, then select Microsoft Word (.docx). Upload to your course site.