BA(Hons) students contribute to international research project

25 September 2014

MoEML-logo-

Professor Tom Bishop (English, Drama and Writing Studies) is giving a small group of BA(Hons) students the opportunity to contribute to a major international research project run by Canada’s Victoria University.

The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) project is using new technologies to create an interactive online map of Elizabethan London. MoEML was born in 1999 as a student-faculty research partnership, and is attracting attention for its Pedagogical Partnership initiative, which calls for academics across the world to submit articles about aspects of London in the early days of its prominence as a major European city.

Two of Tom Bishop’s postgraduate courses (ENGLISH 783 and DRAMA 727) this year offer eight students from English and Drama the chance to contribute to this peer-reviewed publication project. Tom is delighted to be able to give this cohort an opportunity to gain valuable real-life experience in research methods and to begin building their publication CVs while they are still students. "It's an exciting venture, because none of us has done precisely this sort of study before. We have to keep adjusting the scope and contours of our work to match the material we find — just as researchers always do in a new area."

Janelle Jenstad, associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, is the Project Director for MoEML. She explains that the University of Auckland students will be contributing to the Encyclopedia section of the site, which is extensive. The map already has 1000 marked London locations: streets, sites, topographical features, playhouses and neighbourhoods. Janelle explains “Most of those locations have a skeletal entry – geo-coordinates, variant names and spellings, literary references, a few sentences about location and significance – but only 100 have fully developed scholarly articles.”

Janelle is very pleased to have established a partnership with the University of Auckland’s English academics to help build the number of full entries. “Tom is an internationally respected Shakespearean who can guarantee the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the research,” she says. “He’ll oversee the students’ collaborative writing and ensure that they produce a piece that scholars and students can feel confident in citing.”

The University of Auckland group has been allocated the task of researching and developing the articles around “the Theatre”, believed to be the first permanent custom-built theatre building in post-Roman London. (Previously, most theatrical performances took place in modified inn-yards, halls or other temporary performance spaces.) Few performance records exist for the Theatre, but luckily for the students (if not for the company of the time), there were legal battles over the leases for the land where the building stood, and litigation records survive.

Each student has been allocated an aspect of the Theatre’s history, and given six weeks to draft a 1,000 word entry on their topic. One class member, charged with confirming the precise location of the original Theatre building, is petitioning to have its existing map marker moved, after his research unearthed evidence that the current location given on the site is incorrect.

Student Anya Banerjee, who is researching the plays that were staged at The Theatre, says “What is special about this course is the theatrical excavation students participate in. Contemporary adaptations uproot the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe from their historical contexts in order to universalise them for a modern audience. We dig up evidence about these plays in a way that explores and preserves the realities of production between 1570 and 1620.”

Anya is looking forward to contributing to the MoEML site as part of the course, saying that she is “excited to be part of a project that makes information traditionally relegated to obscure academic forums readily accessible to the world. Contributing to the MoEML encyclopaedia will be a great way to compare my research and methodology with scholars internationally.”

Janelle Jenstad is likewise excited about the students’ contributions. She says that although MoEML has always been a collaborative venture, “working with students is particularly energizing and humbling. Students bring passion, commitment, and new ideas to the project.” As the Project Director, Janelle begins by training each group of student researchers; however, as the technology progresses, she finds students often end up training her. It’s another aspect she celebrates. “MoEML has given me opportunities to learn many new technologies, think about information in new ways, struggle with the conventions and challenges of other disciplines – but the most exciting aspect of that learning has been watching students become the experts and having the privilege of learning from them.”

Janelle describes the pedagogical Partnership as “a win-win-win collaboration. MoEML benefits by gaining new content and attracting new users from a broader geographical area; Tom and our other Pedagogical Partners win because they can tap into a ready-made Research-Based-Learning opportunity; and students benefit because their work is published in a peer-reviewed, open-access venue that attracts about 150,000 visits per month from around the world.”

She goes on to say that “our pedagogical partners have all commented on how excited their students are to be contributing to a real Digital Humanities project. Students have few outlets for their scholarship, which means a lot of excellent, publicly-funded research happening in university environments never reaches the public sphere. With the advent of digital tools and resources, the goodwill of scholars like Tom, and the willingness of MoEML to see the value of student research, we can extend the Research-Based-Learning model into classrooms around the world and capture student work that would otherwise not be read by anyone other than the course instructor.”

Janelle points out that the project benefits the public by providing an open access resource with wide appeal to everyone “from genealogists to readers of historical fiction.” And the project serves as an exemplar for the scholarly community, “by modelling new forms of knowledge mobilization, by documenting our encoding and editorial practices far more rigorously than many projects, by building new tools, by developing new ways of giving credit to all project contributors from paid research assistants to senior advisors, and by making available carefully curated editions of important early modern texts.”

Visit the Map of Early Modern London website.