Case Studies & Testimonials

'Literature Online (LION): A Virtuous Beast in the Electronic Jungle'

Ewald Mengel and Carmen Müller

First published in English Via Various Media (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999), 343-355. Excerpts reproduced with kind permission of the authors. Précis and editorial notes supplied by the editors of Literature Online. The numbering of the footnotes differs from that in the print version.

1. Situation Report: Electronic Literature on the Internet

[The article begins with an account of the defensive reaction of the printing profession to the emergence of electronic media; to counter this, the authors assert that 'electronic texts are not intended to replace books, and that their virtual form of existence necessarily implies that they have different functions'. Scholars have also been somewhat resistant to the use of electronic media: usage so far has been largely limited to a small number of scholars applying 'stylometry and statistical methods of determining authorship, on the one hand, and thematic methods and approaches, on the other'. These applications have often tended to 'limit rather than extend one's insights into the nature of literature'.]

While computers have been used for quite a while in literary text analysis, electronic texts on the internet are a fairly recent achievement.¹ [. . .] The most important problem [. . .] consists in the fact that the majority of the texts which can be loaded on the screen are unreliable from a philological point of view. In his article "History and Philosophy of the Project Gutenberg", Michael Hart, for example, points out: "We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release etexts that are 99.9% correct in the eyes of the general reader."² Since philologists hold that it is important to find out whether Shakespeare's sentences have a colon or a semicolon in them, Project Gutenberg texts as yet do not seem to be a scholarly hunting ground.

[. . .]

2. LION

LION, Chadwyck-Healey's commercially available collection of literary texts on the world wide web, is a virtuous beast in the electronic jungle.³ It is the most comprehensive, philologically reliable database of electronic texts which the internet presently has to offer. In marked contrast to many other electronic text archives, its target group is not the general reader but academic scholars, teachers and students of literature. It [. . .] promises to be an electronic paradise for the academic scholar and critic.

[An extensive description of the contents and features of Literature Online follows. The contents of the service have changed dramatically since this article was published, and users wishing an overview of the current service should consult the Content and Editorial Policy pages.]

There can be no doubt that the various and manifold possibilities of LION described so far are impressive. However, for the philological analysis of literary texts, the scholarly reliability of the available material is of utmost importance. From an editorial point of view, Chadwyck-Healey has taken special care to ensure that this demand is fulfilled, knowing that only the careful electronic reproduction of reliable editions can guarantee world-wide academic acceptance. Generally speaking, Chadwyck-Healey has made special efforts to secure the copyright for first-choice editions wherever they were available. In those cases in which the copyright could not be obtained, other - though not greatly inferior - choices became necessary. Every once in a while, the user may find an occasional typing error, resulting from the simple fact that all the material had to be keyed in manually. However, occasional typing errors may also be found in first-class editions and do not affect the work with the databases in a serious way. In comparison to the printed version, moreover, electronic texts on the internet have the great advantage that they can be continuously revised and re-edited.

3. Two Examples

[The authors give two examples of the use of Literature Online in literary scholarship. The first is an analysis of the fictionalisation of female self-confidence in eighteenth-century English fiction. While literary scholars agree that nineteenth-century English fiction offers many examples of female self-confidence, the assumption is that eighteenth-century novels generally portray women according to conventional models of feminine submissiveness. Literature Online offers the opportunity of testing this assumption by expanding the scope of the survey from canonical authors to less well-known novelists and neglected female writers.
Initial research shows that fiction of the period is full of representations of conventional femininity: there are numerous instances of the keywords 'bashfulness' and 'shyness', for example. Taking their cue from Joseph Highmore's painting, Pamela and Mr. B in the Summer House (which appears on the brochures for the Chadwyck-Healey collection Eighteenth-Century Fiction), in which Pamela is pictured looking demurely at the ground, the authors search for instances of 'cast-down eyes' and related expressions. A wide ranges of results are found by using a combination of truncation and proximity searches ('eyes fby cast down', 'she look* fby down'), searching for opposites ('she looked him in the eye', 'bold-face'), including poetry as well as fiction in the search, and searching for related concepts such as 'modesty', 'blushing', 'forwardness', 'fortitude' and so on. One conclusion is that the gesture of lowering the gaze is used to signify thoughtfulness or melancholy in male characters, but shyness and humility in women. In conjunction with contextual sources such as conduct books, Literature Online can be used to develop 'a grammar of the body language of female self-confidence (or the lack of it) in novels from the eighteenth century'.]

Searching for female self-confidence in this way finally produces a list of passages from various novels which can then be analyzed more closely. Since the hits which LION comes up with show the search terms only within a very limited context of about 10 words, it is necessary to read through whole chapters and even novels to interpret the selected texts correctly. The fact that the texts exist in machine-readable form does not imply that the act of reading becomes superfluous. Also, the interpretation of the text still remains to be done. All the computer can do is make the search for relevant passages much easier and quicker; we can include greater numbers of texts into our analysis; we can also consider hitherto obscure or unknown texts that have been reproduced in electronic form. In this way, the new medium may be said to influence our approaches and methods of research, since it allows us to ask questions which have not been asked before and which probably would not be asked if the texts did not exist in a machine-readable form.

[. . .]

Our second example is taken from nineteenth-century poetry. We already know that the arrival of the natural sciences such as biology, geology, or astronomy left an indelible impression on the Victorian age and resulted in a paradigm shift in the Victorians' outlook on life. Lord Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam, a longer poem from the middle of the nineteenth century, may serve as an example. Here Tennyson calls the natural sciences his 'terrible muses'.⁴ Due to the influence of biology, astronomy and geology, all the traditional assumptions about creation and man's position at the centre of it were shattered, and the idea of a dynamic and ever-changing cosmos replaced that of a definitive and final act of divine creation. Tennyson's poem bears witness to this conflict and tries to come to terms with the new facts of life. As far as Tennyson is concerned, then, the relation of science and poetry seems a worthwhile object of investigation.

What about the many other poems of the Victorian age, though? Do they also deal with the natural sciences? If yes, which role do the latter play in nineteenth-century poetry? When does the term 'science' in the modern sense appear in a poem for the first time? What are the attitudes of the poets to science in general? Working with LION allows one to answer these questions.

We select the English Poetry Database and restrict the search to the nineteenth century. The input 'science' produces 2,275 hits in 498 entries. In order to refine our search, we select the option 'title or first line'. The search engine now comes up with 61 hits in 41 entries in which the term 'science' turns up in the titles of the poems or in their first lines. Since LION allows us to differentiate between 'Early 19th century (1800-1835)', 'Mid-19th century (1835-1870)' and 'Late 19th century (1870-1900)', we can refine our search even further. The greatest number of hits (30 hits in 16 entries) can be found between 1835 and 1870, whereas there are only 15 hits (14 entries) between 1800 and 1835 and 16 hits (11 entries) between 1870 and 1900.*

Many interesting observations can be made with regard to the contents of these poems. The poets' attitudes toward science range from downright hatred or animosity⁵ to enthusiastic welcome and celebration⁶ . On the one hand, we have poets such as Frederick W. O. Ward, George Barlow, Charles Tennyson, James Rhoades, Charles Mackay, or Henry Ellison, who reject the "Cancer research"⁷ or "Wisdom's new and ghastly college"⁸ and point out that there is another form of wisdom or knowledge that cannot be found by vivisection or through the "missing link"⁹ . On the other hand, we register attempts to reconcile 'the old gospel and the new'¹⁰ and prove that they are not mutually exclusive. The most important attempt stems from Francis William Newman, who tries to overcome the conflict or gap between science and religion, experience and faith, and proves that they support each other: "For as the sailor's eye learns by practice to evade illusions,/ and his observations become sensitive, and his judgement sagacious;/ So does the eye of the soul and its sagacity improve by culture:/ And Experience strengthens Faith, until Faith grows confident,/ Discerning God's Goodness and Presence, as overruling and eternal."¹¹ All in all, the English Poetry of the nineteenth century bears witness to how deeply the Victorians' trust in mankind's position at the centre of the universe was shaken and how desperately they tried to come to terms with the new facts of life.

* Editorial note: Please note that the search results are increased dramatically if repeated in Literature Online in 2004. Literature Online now allows you to cross-search poems from English Poetry with the 20,000 poems that were added in the creation of English Poetry, Second Edition, plus works from American Poetry, African-American Poetry and Canadian Poetry. A search for 'science' in keyword would now retrieve 4,358 hits in 2,561 entries; 'science' in title or first line retrieves 122 hits in 107 entries. This can also now be refined by nationality (restricting to British still returns 81 hits from 73 entries) and by a more precise range of literary periods, such as 'Victorian Period, 1837-1901' or 'Mid-Victorian Period, 1860-1800'.

¹ Cf. also Anglistik im Internet: Proceedings of the 1996 Erfurt Conference on Computing in the Humanities, ed. Doris Feldmann, Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann and Thomas Rommel, Heidelberg: Winter, 1997.

² Article published in electronic form. See home page of Project Gutenberg http://promo.net/pg/history.html#beginningphil.

³ URL: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk.

⁴ See also my essay "Tennysons Verrat an den 'schrecklichen Musen'; In Memoriam im Leistungskurs Englisch der gymnasialen Oberstufe", Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 20, 1987, 409-425.

⁵ Cf., for example, William Allingham: "The Eyes of Modern Science do not grow/ In the head, but hind-parts, and still gaze below." Source texts: Blackberries, London: Reeves and Turner, 1890, p.23.

⁶ Cf. George Dyer: "Ode on Science": "Now see her rise serenely great,/ Dispensing golden blessings from on high,/ A sun, in more than royal state,/ Supreme she rules, amidst a cloudless sky:/ See Dulness close her eye of lead!/ See Superstition's reptiles dead!/ Sloth drag along her slimy way,/ And Ignorance retire from the day!" Source text: Poems, 2 vols., London: Longman & Rees, 1802, vol. 1, p. 49ff.

⁷ George Barlow, Sonnet XV: "The Sons of Science". Source text: The Poetical Works, 1 vols., London: Glaisher 1902-1914, vol. 10, p. 248.

⁸ Frederick William Orde Ward: "The Old Gospel and the New". Source text: 'Twixt Kiss and Lip, or Under the Sword, Vol. Ballads, &c. The Old Gospel and the New, 3rd ed., London: Garner & Co, 1890, p. 44.

⁹ Henry Ellison, "Science and Faith". Source text: Stones from the Quarry; or Moods of Mind, London: Provost and Co, 1875.

¹⁰ See footnote 8.

¹¹ Francis William Newman, "Intuition and Verification". Source text: Theism, Doctrinal and Practical, or, Didactic Religious Utterances, London: Chapman, 1858, First Book: The Theory of Religion, p. 22ff.