Digitizing the Past: Using Electronic Texts in Scholarship and the Classroom

Digitizing the Past: Using Electronic Texts in Scholarship and the ClassroomAuthor(s): Scott EllisSource: Legacy, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2002), pp. 115-120Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679420 .

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Digitizing the Past:

Using Electronic Texts in Scholarship and the Classroom

Scott Ellis

Emory University

we contemplate the future of publishing in the academy, particularly as it relates to the

many texts written by women that are currently unavailable in print, discussions often turn to

the supplementary possibilities of electronic texts. We could circumvent the inherent diffi

culties of the traditional publishing formats,

proponents suggest, by using the electronic

medium to produce and distribute texts that are out of print, have never been republished, or need updated editions. Many projects are

already underway that demonstrate the schol

arly and pedagogical potential that electronic texts could have in the humanities, and such

projects can serve as valuable indices to the cre

ation and use of digital documents.1

One question that often emerges, however, is

exactly how we might utilize these texts in our own research or in the classroom, a procedural question that forces us to reexamine our exclu

sive use (and love) of the "printed" word along side practical concerns such as our ability to access digital documents and our use of them in "non-wired" classrooms. Since digitized doc

uments take many forms?diaries, travel nar

ratives, short stories, novels, periodical essays, etc.?and may or may not have been previously

LEGACY, VOL. 19, NO. 1, 2002, COPYRIGHT ? 2003 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS, LINCOLN, NE

published, we should continue to explore the

various scholarly and pedagogical approaches to such texts and discuss how we might tap into

their potential. Through round-table discus

sions and panel presentation such as those at

the SSAWW conference, scholars, whose expe rience with digital materials ranges from novice to expert, have begun to discuss their experi ences and strategies using online documents.

With such prominent online collections as

Voices from the Gaps, Women's Travel Writing, the Southern Women Authors Project, and Brown University's Women Writer's Project,2 scholars have begun to explore the supplemen tary or even alternative possibilities that the

digital environment offers us in our explo ration of women's texts.

I have been fortunate to participate closely in this exploration through my work at Emory University's Lewis H. Beck Center for Elec tronic Collections and Services,3 the Univer

sity's primary resource for CD-ROMS and digital databases. In particular, the Beck Center is the virtual home of the Emory Women Writ ers Resource Project (EWWRP),4 a publicly accessible online collection of works by women

writers from the Renaissance to the twentieth

century. Like many other online databases, the EWWRP offers a wide variety of texts that we

hope scholars and students will find valuable in



their work, a goal that will foster our under

standing of literary history and demonstrate

the intellectual possibilities available to digi tized texts.

By looking at "Gray Wolf's Daughter" and

"The Sick Child" by Angel De Cora, two of the

texts from our collection, I will suggest a few

ways in which scholars may use electronic doc

uments both within their own research and in

the classroom. These tales are part of a small

but growing collection of Native American

texts in the EWWRP, documents that have

infrequently been included in anthologies and

an element of the project that we are in the

process of developing. More important, how

ever, I have chosen De Cora's tales because they are excellent examples of important texts that

are easily accessible online, texts that have been

ignored (despite their publication in a promi nent literary journal), and texts that could play a substantial role in a scholar's research or

class.5

The Emory Women Writers Resource Project was formed in 1995 under the direction of

Sheila Cavanagh from Emory University's De

partment of English and began as a project that

would enable graduate and undergraduate stu

dents in a variety of disciplines the opportunity to edit texts that were previously hard to find or

underutilized. The EWWRP intended to intro

duce students to scholarly issues inherent with

many traditional research assignments and to

enable students to publish their research on the

web, thereby making their work accessible to a

wide community of readers. In its initial stages, the project began solely with women writers

from the English Renaissance, as graduate stu

dents from the English Department created an

edited version of four texts or text sets that had

been previously difficult to obtain. After sub

stantial work, these students produced a critical

introduction, footnotes to the texts, timelines,

bibliographies, images, and other resources

that are relevant to our understanding of these

materials.

Despite the limited number of texts, the

EWWRP attracted (and still attracts) visitors

from around the United States and the world, as readers from Singapore, Turkey, Thailand, and Luxembourg?to name just a few exam

ples?peruse the texts in the EWWRP.6

Encouraged by the success of these edited doc

uments, Cavanagh and Charles Spornick, the

director of the Beck Center, decided to expand the scope of the project, adding both edited and

unedited work of writers through the nine

teenth century both in England and the United

States. While the project initially began with

four texts/text sets, it currently has more than

seventy documents in its growing online col

lection, which holds authors ranging from

Aphra Behn to Lydia Maria Child.

Since the encompassing goal of the project is

to give all readers, both within and outside of

Emory University, access to these texts, we have

continually sought to locate and publish elec

tronically lesser-known documents that would

enlarge our understanding of women's literary

history and reintroduce them into our larger

understanding of established literary canons.

This was the original thinking behind our

engagement with the writings of Native Amer

ican women writers. About a year ago, students

and faculty members?through the initiative of

Anna Engle, the graduate student coordinator

of the EWWRP?approached us about incor

porating into our project the works of Native

American writers published in periodicals of

the nineteenth century, an addition that we

knew would broaden our scope and make

accessible another essential element of women

writers to the public. During our initial re

search, we found that with the exception of a

few notable writers?including Sarah Win

nemucca, E. Pauline Johnson, and Zitkala-Sa?

the texts of female Native American writers

were difficult to find. Infrequently antholo

gized, many of these writers suffered through a

century of relative silence, as their work

remained buried in newspapers and journals,

n6 legacy: volume 19 no. 1 2002



from American Indian publications such as

The Red Man and Twin Territories to those

with a wider circulation, such as Harpers and

the Atlantic Monthly.7 Our goal in the Beck

Center is to mine these early periodicals and

electronically publish the works of these nearly

forgotten writers for scholars and students

alike.

The texts in our small but growing Native

American collection consist of essays, stories, and poems that present a variety of cultural and

aesthetic perspectives to the reader. In the 1838 Memoir of Elizabeth Jones, a Little Indian Girl, for example, the anonymous author details the

life and premature death of Jones, a Canadian

girl whose piety, the author suggests, should be an example to everyone. A more polemical tract, an essay entitled the "Indian Question,"

written by the Omaha Susette La Flesche, con

fronts the debates concerning the status of

Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth

century and argues that they must no longer be

treated like children or animals and must be

given full citizenship:

Set aside the idea that the Indian is a child and

must be taken care of, make him understand

that he is to take care of himself as all other men

do, give him a title to his lands, throw over him

the protection of the law, make him amenable

to it, and the Indian will take care of himself.

Then there will be no more wars in trying to

settle the Indian problem, for there will be no

problem to settle. (223)

Like the other documents in our collection, these texts call for their inclusion within a variety of courses and forms of scholarship, as they use dif ferent genres to tackle prominent issues such as

cultural interaction and gender relations.

The same is true of Angel De Cora's "Gray Wolf's Daughter" and "The Sick Child." De

Cora, a Winnebago from Nebraska, was a writer and artist at the turn of the twentieth century and would eventually become an instructor at

the famous (or infamous) Carlisle Indian

school in Pennsylvania.8 At the age of twelve, she left her home reservation and attended the

Hampton Institute of Virginia, a school origi

nally limited to African Americans but opened to American Indian students in 1878. At this

school, she gained an appreciation for the arts; in 1892, she entered the Art Department at

Smith College, where she studied under the

prominent landscape painter, Dwight Tryon.

Following graduation in 1896, she continued

her training in art at the Drexel Institute in

Philadelphia, where she honed her skill as an

illustrator, a skill that was revealed in the pages of Harpers New Monthly Magazine in 1899.9

Her published illustrations in this preemi nent magazine accompanied two of her own

stories, "The Sick Child" and "Gray Wolf's

Daughter." "The Sick Child" relates the tale of a

young girl who struggles with notions of mor

tality and human complicity as she watches the

slow death of her younger sister. In "Gray Wolf's

Daughter," De Cora draws upon her own past as she portrays the moment when she leaves her

home for the Hampton Institute, depicting her own internal confusion and her family's encouragement and anxieties about the move.

Each story is less than three pages long; never

theless, they present the reader with a profound account of cultural interaction and concep tions of gender in both Winnebago and "white"

communities. Using De Cora's tales as an exam

ple, I would like to suggest three ways in which these online texts might be useful in under

standing women's narratives within their his torical context for both scholars and students alike. Short enough to feasibly print hard copies and accessible free of charge from the world wide web, these tales can easily become an

important component in one's research or

classroom.

In the classroom, we could have students

explore the correlation of "Gray Wolf's Daugh ter" and "The Sick Child" to the other essays and stories published in Harper's New Monthly

Magazine during this time. Approaching this

Scott Ellis 117



story from a historical standpoint, we could use

this electronic text as we would any printed document and incorporate it into traditional

literary discussions.10 We are all well aware of

Harper's participation in the creation of a

canon of American literature, particularly

through the editorials on realism by William

Dean Howells, but I would like to point out that

during the same year in which De Coras stories

appeared, Harpers also published Mark Twain's

"The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg," Mary E. Wilkins's "Catharine Carr," Ellen Glasgow's "A Point in Morals," Henry Cabot Lodge's expose on the Spanish-American War, the

Potawatomi chief Simon Pokagon's blistering essay, "The Massacre at Fort Dearborn," and

portions of Howells's own serialized novel, Their Silver Wedding.

As we read De Cora's tales, we could ask our

selves and our students: How do "Gray Wolf's

Daughter" and "The Sick Child" correspond with these other texts? What are the differences

between Pokagon's and De Cora's perspectives on American Indians' relationship with

another culture? Why might have Henry Mills

Alden, the editor of Harper's at the end of the

nineteenth century, included them in his peri odical? Do Wilkins, Glasgow, and De Cora pre sent differing female perspectives on their char

acters' given situations? And what is the place of

De Cora in this tradition of literary history? Second, we might investigate "Gray Wolf's

Daughter" as it relates to the work of two other

writers interested in cultural interaction and

Native American education, Francis La Flesche

and Zitkala-Sa. Born into a prominent Omaha

family, La Flesche was educated at a Presbyter ian missionary school, moved east, earned a law

degree, and by the time of his retirement in

1929, had worked for the Bureau of Indian

Affairs and had become a distinguished ethnol

ogist. In 1900, he also published a wonderful

memoir/novel entitled The Middle Five: Indian

School Boys of the Omaha Tribe. Within this

text, La Flesche recounts his early years at the

missionary school and details at length the cul

tural interaction between the Omaha children

and their educators. Interestingly, Angel De

Cora was hired to design the cover and draw the

illustrations for La Flesche's book. A short time later, De Cora used her artistic

talents in Old Indian Legends, a book written by the prominent Sioux Indian, Zitkala-Sa. An

educator, speaker, lobbyist, and founder of the

National Council of American Indians, Zitkala

Sa wrote and spoke frequently about the situa

tion of American Indians in the United States.

Less than a year after Harper's published "Gray Wolfs Daughter," the Atlantic Monthly pub lished Zitkala-Sas "School Days of an Indian

Girl," an account of the clash between Native

American and white cultures that she witnessed

during her early years of education. Within

these three documents, all published within a

two year period, we can witness Native Ameri

can authors with different backgrounds depict the homogenizing practice of white education.

While we can draw the empirical connection

between these three writers through De Cora's

work as an illustrator, we might also explore the

similarities and differences in their portrayal of

this system of education. What do these tales

tell us about cultural interaction? What rhetor ical work do their texts perform? Would they be

read differently by Native American and white

readers? Do the portrayals of education differ

according to the gender of the writer?

Finally, we could approach "Gray Wolfs

Daughter," "The Sick Child," and Angel De

Coras work as a whole as an editorial project. As I mentioned earlier, the EWWRP began ini

tially as a way for students to publish critical

editions of a text on the web, projects that have

enabled students to understand not only the

particular text they were presenting, but the

larger literary and historical circumstances in

which the author wrote as well. Furthermore, these editorial projects could correspond with

n8 legacy: volume 19 no. 1 2002



other forms of web technology, allowing stu

dents, for example, to create web pages that

would incorporate images and sound files, if

available, and link their work to other online

scholarly projects. These online assignments

give both students and scholars another avenue

in which they can explore and discuss women's

narratives, thereby strengthening our under

standing of their edited documents as well as

our understanding of the world wide web's

ability to facilitate and even increase our

knowledge of literary histories more broadly considered.

As with our other projects, we hope the

American women writers in our collection

and the many other online collections will

enable an interrelation between pedagogy and

scholarship through the improved access to

these documents. With the wide accessibility

given to these texts, we hope to gain a greater

understanding of the history of women's nar

ratives and demonstrate the role that technol

ogy may play in future conceptions of literary canons.

NOTES

1. The Emily Dickinson Electronic Archives Project

<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/> and

the ongoing digitization of Charles Brockden Brown's

works?web page forthcoming?are just two exam

ples of focused scholarly projects that reflect the

potentiality of electronic formats. Moreover, larger

databases of electronic texts, such as those available

from the University of Virginia <http://etext.lib.

virginia.edu/>, combined with the work of scholars

who have placed a handful of texts online, offer schol

ars and students an ever growing worldwide library of

accessible documents.

2. Voices from the Gaps, University of Minnesota, 20

March 2001 <http://voices.cla.umn.edu>; Women's

Travel Writing, 1830-1930, University of Minnesota, 20

March 2001 <http://etrc.lib.umn.edu/womtrav.htm>;

Southern Women Authors Project, University of Texas

at Austin, 20 March 2001 <http://www.cwrl.utexas.

edu/~swap/>\ Women Writers Project, Brown Univer

sity, 20 March 2001 <http://www.wwp.brown.edu/

wwp_home.htmb>.

3. Lewis H. Beck Center, Emory University, 20

March 2001 <http://chaucer.library.emory.edu>.

4. Emory Women Writers Resource Project,

Emory University, 15 March 2001 <http://chaucer.

library, emory. edu/wwrp>.

5. Other digital resources, including the volumi

nous collection at the University of Virginia, offer an

electronic version.

6. This geographically extensive use of the data

base accords with that of other online projects.

According to their website, for example, the Univer

sity of Virginia's Electronic Text Center, one of the

most prominent electronic text collections in the

United States, receives "130,643 accesses per day from

nineteen thousand unique hosts; (circa thirty-eight

thousand individuals daily from seventy-five differ

ent countries)." 25 March 2001 <http://etext.lib.

Virginia, edu/kwikfact. htmt>.

7. This problem has been partially alleviated

through the wonderful anthology of American

Indian women writers edited by Karen Kilcup, Native

American Womens Writing c. 1800-1924: An Anthol

ogy (New York: Blackwell, 2000). 8. Her Indian name was Hinook-Mahiwi

Kilinaka.

9. For biographical information, see McAnulty.

10. Since Harpers Magazine is currently undergo

ing full digitization, one could also access all of the

following works online in the future. For more infor

mation on the Harpers online project, see

<http://harpers, chadwyck. com>.

WORKS CITED

De Cora, Angel (Hinook-Mahiwi-Kilinaka). "Gray

Wolf's Daughter." Harpers New Monthly Magazine

99 (1899): 860-62. The Lewis H. Beck Center for Electronic Collections and Services. 1999. Emory U

10 March 2001 <http://chaucer.library.emory.edu/

cgi- bin/sgmbhtml/wwrp.pl>.

Scott Ellis 119



-. "The Sick Child." Harper's New Monthly

Magazine 98 (1899): 446-48. The Lewis H. Beck Center for Electronic Collections and Services.

1999. Emory U. 10 March 2001 <http://chancer.

Iihrary.em0ry.edu/cgi-hin/sgml2htmllwwrp.pl>.

La Flesche, Francis. The Middle Five: Indian School Boys

of the Omah Tribe. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1978. La Flesche, Susette (Bright Eyes). "The Indian Ques

tion." The Lewis H. Beck Center for Electronic Col

lections and Services. 1999. Emory U. 10 March 2001

<http://chaucer. library, emory. edu/cgi-bin/sgmh html/

wwrp.pb>.

McAnulty, Sarah. "Angel DeCora: American Indian

Artist and Educator." Nebraska History 57 (1976): H3-99.

Memoir of Elizabeth Jones, a Little Indian Girl The

Lewis H. Beck Center for Electronic Collections

and Services. 1999. Emory U. 10 March 2001

<http://chaucer.library.emory.edu/cgi-bin/

sgmh html/wwrp.pl>.

Zitkala-Sa. Old Indian Legends. Boston: Ginn, 1901.

-. "School Days of an Indian Girl." Atlantic

Monthly 85 (1900): 185-94.

120 legacy: volume 19 no. 1 2002



Digitizing the Past: Using Electronic Texts in Scholarship and the Classroom

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