Electronic Databases Explained
Dr. Kristen Poole
What is "literary research"?
To some people outside of the field, "literary research" might sound like an oxymoron. Isn't the study of literature just about the expression of emotions?
Well, yes and mostly no. Certainly Shakespeare created characters through his rich language, and part of what makes these characters so enthralling is the delicate and perceptive detail that imbues them with emotion. And certainly audiences have their own strong emotional reactions to Shakespeare's plays and characters. So in a way, literary study is always about emotion.
The role of the literary scholar, however, is not to emote or to simply fabricate interpretations. Rather, literary scholarship could be said to have two aims. First, scholars work to provide a better understanding of texts in their historical contexts. Literary study is historical study. What was the culture of a particular historical time and place, and how did that culture shape a particular text? Or, conversely, how did a particular text shape its culture? Scholars consider textual production – that is, the writing of literature – to be inextricably connected to historical conditions. A fuller understanding of a text (whether it is a poem, a play, a film, a newspaper article, etc.) requires a fuller understanding of history, which is a subject that can be studied infinitely. So a considerable amount of literary research is historical investigation. This requires the researcher to learn from other scholars, to study original documents, and to use this new knowledge to interpret a text in a way that sheds new light on its significance.
Second, scholars engage in conversation with other scholars, past and present. In an older model of scholarship, the creation of knowledge was understood to be like the building of a brick wall; the job of the scholar was to see where a brick was missing and to fill in the gap. This model presumes that knowledge about something (say, what there is to know about Shakespeare's Henry V) could someday be complete. Few scholars today adhere to this concept of knowledge. Instead, we understand that knowledge is always evolving because the questions we ask are always shifting. Fundamentally, the questions scholars investigate are of interest because they reflect the values and concerns of their present moment, and that moment is always in flux. The conversation is always in motion, because society is always in motion; questions that were interesting to scholars, say, 40 years ago are not necessarily of interest today. With knowledge creation understood as a creative enterprise, the process of ongoing scholarly conversation becomes just as important as the product of factual knowledge.
Literary research, then, both discovers new historical factual knowledge and builds upon the interpretive work of others. It is thus important for the researcher to have extensive access to primary (archival) documents and the published work of other scholars. Research is the search for these materials, the learning of them, and the production of new information and interpretation.
This research is made possible by access to scholarly databases, which are primarily available through the universities that subscribe to them. Here are the three primary online databases that we used through the University of Delaware library:
1) The Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography. The MLA is the professional organization for scholars of language and literature. The bibliography lists every book, journal article, and dissertation written on a particular literary topic. Researchers use Boolean search fields to find relevant sources, and can often download articles directly from academic journals.
2) The Historical Abstracts (HA) Bibliography. This database works in the same way as the MLA bibliography, except that it covers sources pertinent to historical research.
3) Early English Books Online (EEBO). This database contains digitized images of practically every page of every book published in English between 1475 and 1700. It is essentially an online library of all early English books, and titles or pages can be downloaded as PDF's. More information can be found at http://eebo.chadwyck.com/about/about.htm.
These were the primary databases we used to do our research, in addition to Shakespeare's texts and working with the original archival sources available to us in UD's Special Collections. A complete list of our sources can be found in the site bibliography.
To some people outside of the field, "literary research" might sound like an oxymoron. Isn't the study of literature just about the expression of emotions?
Well, yes and mostly no. Certainly Shakespeare created characters through his rich language, and part of what makes these characters so enthralling is the delicate and perceptive detail that imbues them with emotion. And certainly audiences have their own strong emotional reactions to Shakespeare's plays and characters. So in a way, literary study is always about emotion.
The role of the literary scholar, however, is not to emote or to simply fabricate interpretations. Rather, literary scholarship could be said to have two aims. First, scholars work to provide a better understanding of texts in their historical contexts. Literary study is historical study. What was the culture of a particular historical time and place, and how did that culture shape a particular text? Or, conversely, how did a particular text shape its culture? Scholars consider textual production – that is, the writing of literature – to be inextricably connected to historical conditions. A fuller understanding of a text (whether it is a poem, a play, a film, a newspaper article, etc.) requires a fuller understanding of history, which is a subject that can be studied infinitely. So a considerable amount of literary research is historical investigation. This requires the researcher to learn from other scholars, to study original documents, and to use this new knowledge to interpret a text in a way that sheds new light on its significance.
Second, scholars engage in conversation with other scholars, past and present. In an older model of scholarship, the creation of knowledge was understood to be like the building of a brick wall; the job of the scholar was to see where a brick was missing and to fill in the gap. This model presumes that knowledge about something (say, what there is to know about Shakespeare's Henry V) could someday be complete. Few scholars today adhere to this concept of knowledge. Instead, we understand that knowledge is always evolving because the questions we ask are always shifting. Fundamentally, the questions scholars investigate are of interest because they reflect the values and concerns of their present moment, and that moment is always in flux. The conversation is always in motion, because society is always in motion; questions that were interesting to scholars, say, 40 years ago are not necessarily of interest today. With knowledge creation understood as a creative enterprise, the process of ongoing scholarly conversation becomes just as important as the product of factual knowledge.
Literary research, then, both discovers new historical factual knowledge and builds upon the interpretive work of others. It is thus important for the researcher to have extensive access to primary (archival) documents and the published work of other scholars. Research is the search for these materials, the learning of them, and the production of new information and interpretation.
This research is made possible by access to scholarly databases, which are primarily available through the universities that subscribe to them. Here are the three primary online databases that we used through the University of Delaware library:
1) The Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography. The MLA is the professional organization for scholars of language and literature. The bibliography lists every book, journal article, and dissertation written on a particular literary topic. Researchers use Boolean search fields to find relevant sources, and can often download articles directly from academic journals.
2) The Historical Abstracts (HA) Bibliography. This database works in the same way as the MLA bibliography, except that it covers sources pertinent to historical research.
3) Early English Books Online (EEBO). This database contains digitized images of practically every page of every book published in English between 1475 and 1700. It is essentially an online library of all early English books, and titles or pages can be downloaded as PDF's. More information can be found at http://eebo.chadwyck.com/about/about.htm.
These were the primary databases we used to do our research, in addition to Shakespeare's texts and working with the original archival sources available to us in UD's Special Collections. A complete list of our sources can be found in the site bibliography.