Collaborative Web Archive Project

During the Fall term of 2005, my English 333 students dared to be my guinea pigs for an assignment 
I'd been formulating for some time. As a graduate student at Michigan, I took a Shakespeare class from
Carla Mazzio that included, as part of the coursework leading up to our final research paper, 
an archival project geared toward invigorating our sense of adventure and discovery. Carla asked us 
to choose a play and a topic, then compile an "archive" of primary and secondary materials that would 
be of use to our project. We went to the library, ILL-ed many microfilms, made many copies, and in the 
process probably killed a few dozen trees; we then distributed our archives to our peers, who 
read through them, and we presented our topics via the materials we'd collected. The experience 
was wonderful, all around, and I wanted to draw on this experience for the undergraduate classroom.


Because performance genres require, perhaps more than novels or poems, that we try to see the text 
as a living and lived collection of events, performed by bodies in space and time, I thought that an 
archive of this kind would really capture something important about the study of theater. I asked my 
students to compile, on their own, an archive of primary and secondary sources useful in their planned 
research project; they then presented this preliminary work online. The goal behind using the web 
was twofold: first, I wanted my students to imagine the theatrical moment as something that embraced 
a variety of representational modes, something that the web makes vibrantly possible. Second, I 
hoped that this kind of project would encourage my students to see their work as part of a larger 
scholarly process of information building, information sharing, and community. To that end, I 
supplemented the individual component of the assignment with a collaborative component, grouping 
my students according to their interests as expressed in their final essays and individual
archives. In these groups, they drew on my comments and what they'd learned from the individual 
archive experience to create a collaborative web project. This collaborative web project would 
include, crucially, a 5-6 page introductory essay linking their work together. Finally, they 
were to cull key materials from their individual archives into a focused, critical, and 
collaborative intervention in scholarship. Students had generally free rein to determine the 
exact parameters of this intervention, but I encouraged them throughout to capitalize fully 
on the hypertextual nature of the web. This resulted in strong annotations of critical work, 
summaries of their own, links between their essays and the materials they used, and some interesting 
uses of two of the most powerful new scholarly technologies available: EEBO and ECCO.

In general, I was very pleased with my students' work. Many really interpreted the spirit of 
the assignment well and came up with innovative ways to interact with primary source material 
of a long-gone age. Yet, if I have the opportunity to try this experiment again, I will 
definitely make an even more deliberate attempt to provide my students with templates, 
hands-on experience, and strong rationales for the project itself. Many students were 
initially intimidated by the idea of the project, though by the end of the course, all were 
amazed by their work.

Feel free to visit "Theatrical Self-Consciousness in Restoration Drama," an exceptionally well-done
collaborative project. I have also compiled all student projects online.