Shakespeare Fans discussion
Literary Criticism & Bard
>
Definitions of Secondary Literature
date
newest »
newest »
Mod
http://www.thelandofmacbeth.com/criti...
"Bard Web"
http://www.bardweb.net/
Timeline of Shakespeare criticism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline...
definition and function ( in information processing: Primary and secondary literature )
...and indexes of various types, which aid in identifying and locating relevant information in primary literature, have been in use since the 16th century and led to the development of what is termed secondary literature during the 19th century. The purpose of secondary literature is to “filter” the primary information sources, usually by subject area, and provide the indicators to...
AND:
Secondary literature means "books about books" - in the context of English studies, the term refers to works of criticism, either about a single author or a group of authors, and to surveys of a particular period or genre. Not all secondary literature is equally valuable or authoritative, and one of the expectations of university-level work is that you evaluate your sources critically. This means, among other things, only including direct quotations when they are contextualized by your framing comments.
Making properly critical use of secondary literature involves judging just how relevant a particular source is to the argument you're making - a piece of criticism published fifty years ago is unlikely to correspond to the current state of the academic field in Romantic studies, for example, but might be a valuable piece of evidence if you were writing about the cultural climate of the 1950s. Review articles, which offer a review of the literature in a field, can be a very helpful source of guidance about the significance and relevance of particular items of secondary literature.
One essential question to ask when evaluating the worth of a piece of secondary literature is whether it has been through a peer review process, where its argument is examined by other people - this is the major difference between print-based publication, and most forms of web-based publication
And:
From Digital to Dialogic Shakespeare
In the 1990s, scholarly discussion of "digital Shakespeare" revolved primarily around the electronic reproduction of print materials. One has only to think of such sites as the now-defunct "Enfolded Hamlet," MIT's Complete Works of Shakespeare, or Matty Farrow's "Moby-Shakespeare" to conclude that the Web primarily has offered virtual readers increased access to Shakespeare's texts, either as cheap, accessible web documents or as searchable databases. During the same time period, teachers and scholars demonstrated some interest in web-based or stand-alone (laserdisc, CD ROM) supplements to enrich the study of Shakespeare, whether through clips from films and performances, background materials, image banks, or professorial lectures (see Mullins for an overview). Even more ambitious attempts to create interactive spaces for experiencing Shakespeare's plays have been conducted by Peter Donaldson at MIT ("The Electronic Shakespeare Archive" (see Donaldson 1999) and Larry Friedlander at Stanford ("The Shakespeare Project" [see Friedlander 1999:]).
For better or worse, Shakespeare's place in pedagogical cyberspace has been defined by the boundaries of the digital text. By contrast, in the world at large the Internet's oldest and most crucial function has been to link up readers and writers over previously insurmountable barriers of time and space. It is therefore surprising that the Internet has not been enlisted more widely to spark and maintain communication among the dispersed and growing body of Shakespeare students. Hardy Cook's well-known discussion list, SHAKSPER, aims to be inclusive, but is unusual in that regard. The discussion lists, bulletin boards, and chat rooms made available to teachers through such for-profit ventures as Blackboard and WebCT do not, generally, encourage interactions outside the boundaries of a particular class or, at best, an institution. Several of the more elaborate online classes, such as "The Electric Shakespeare" constructed by Larry Danson at Princeton and Michael Best's "Shakespeare by Individual Studies" at the University of Victoria, do envision the Web as a space where students and teachers can interact, but mostly the discussions are asynchronous and teacher-directed.
From here:
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/...