Case Studies from the Public Domain
Book used: Victorian Anthology
Teaching Textual Analysis Using Hypothes.is
When Professor Danahay teaches his third-year course on Victorian Gothic literature in face-to-face class meetings, he projects selections from the texts onto a screen for close textual analysis. Close reading and the use of quotations to document the source of an interpretation of a text are fundamental to his and other English courses. The texts that Professor Danahay assigns in the Victorian Gothic course are in the public domain and available from sites like Project Gutenberg. Like Montgomery et al. in Ways of Reading, Danahay guides his students through the process of analysis by asking them questions about the text to have them reflect on the process of reading, understanding and then analyzing the language used by the author.
Danahay expects the students to quote and discuss key terms, symbols and images in their papers following the model of class discussion. In his grading rubric handout, he emphasizes that understanding what is said or happens in a text is the first stage in analysis but expects them to move beyond this initial stage and provide their own analysis to receive a passing grade; he phrases this as the difference between “why” as opposed to “what” in their papers. In class, Danahay asks, “Why does a writer use certain words or symbols, or why does a certain event happen in a text?” Danahay had to modify this approach when courses went completely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Hypothes.is tool allowed Danahay to incorporate textual analysis into synchronous online meetings. Danahay collaborated with the Public Domain Core Collection project to assemble an anthology of Victorian works in the public domain in Pressbooks (https://pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca/victoriananthology/). Danahay used selections from the assigned texts for each synchronous online meeting of the course. The first half of the class meeting featured a general discussion of the themes in the text and images for that week after a short introductory PowerPoint presentation on the historical and cultural context. The texts were Victorian Gothic horror stories that embodied in their “monsters” deep-seated but largely unacknowledged fears of racial and class others (see for instance, Danahay’s “Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies”). For the second half of the meeting, students accessed the PressBook site using the Hypthoses.is tool via the Learning Management System (LMS). The students then started annotating the language of the text, discussing their interpretations with other students and with Danahay as they analyzed the author’s language in detail. These annotation exercises were not graded but were part of their overall participation mark which also included posting in the LMS forum for that week.
Hypothes.is proved highly successful in teaching the students how to focus on the language in a text and carry out an analysis of the significance. For ins