This digital humanities project is incorporated into the eighteenth-century seminar English 260/360 Making Gender through the Eighteenth-Century British Novel. Through this project, students  take part in the learning community of 18thConnect, which brings together eighteenth-century scholars who shape digital resources.

18thConnect houses an archive comprised of interdisciplinary texts found in the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), such as literary texts, historical documents, and philosophical and religious treatises from the long eighteenth century. This exposure allows familiarity with rare eighteenth-century texts, as well as textual conventions and themes, through a type of “lived” experience shared in reading texts. In particular, students will read texts on the issues of gender and sexuality and gain more insight into eighteenth-century culture, such as the legal definition of rape, female conduct, and mores surrounding marriage.

Through this project, groups of students in the seminar search for one text of interest in the 18thConnect database, which affords practical experience in using research methods for eighteenth-century topics through collaborative work. The group then edits their chosen text through the crowd-sourced correction tools available on the 18thConnect site introducing them to these software tools that represent new trends in literary research. In editing the texts, the students correct errors generated when the texts were scanned by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to render them into readable digital output for the ECCO database. Because of early modern fonts and other print issues in eighteenth-century texts, OCR tended to misread these earlier texts, thus creating digital material riddled with errors. In correcting the errors in these eighteenth-century texts, students experience these works as part of eighteenth-century print culture. After the text is edited, the corrected text becomes part of the 18thConnect database, and the students in the group are allowed to keep the text. In participating in the larger goal of this project to improve scholarly access to early modern text corpus, students become part of a learning community of eighteenth-century scholars.