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Engaging Students with the MLA International Bibliography: The Scholarly Conversation Project

This project aims to help students understand how to use the MLA International Bibliography to analyze and track changes in the scholarly conversation over time. Through capturing and examining subject terms assigned to articles in a specific journal, students will gain insights into the evolution and trends within the field of literary studies. The project encourages students to pose questions for further research and engage in the scholarly conversation.

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Engaging Students with the MLA International Bibliography: The Scholarly Conversation Project

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  1. Engaging Students with the MLA International Bibliography: The Scholarly Conversation Project MLA 2019, Chicago Julie Frick Wade Associate Editor, MLA International Bibliography

  2. https://style.mla.org

  3. Objectives Students will • understand how serial publications are presented in databases and how to read them chronologically, • capture theMLA International Bibliography‘s indexing metadata to perform an initial survey of a field of scholarly output, • articulate the differences between a discipline-specific database and a general one, • gather evidence that may be used to draw conclusions about the ways that the “literary conversation” has changed over the last sixty years.

  4. Project Summary • Students work in groups of three to five. • They select a journal from a list of titles in the field of literary studies that have been published for at least sixty years. • They capture and examine the subject terms assigned to the articles in one issue per decade for the last sixty years. • Twist: capture and analyze subject metadata by decade. • They present their discoveries and pose questions with potential for further research.

  5. American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography • Published since 1929 • Full text from Vol. 1, Issue 1 forward available in MLA International Bibliography with Full Text

  6. Some Observations • The journal published 201 articles from 1930 to 1939, 175 from 1940 to 1949, 231 from 1950 to 1959. What might have caused the dip in the 1940s? • Emily Dickinson is the only woman writer to make the top 50 from 1930 to 1979. In the 1980s, she’s joined by Willa Cather.

  7. Author Names in Top 50 1930s 1990s Melville, Herman James, Henry, Jr. Faulkner, William Clemens, Samuel Stowe, Harriet Beecher Cather, Willa Chopin, Kate Jacobs, Harriet Ann Morrison, Toni Thoreau, Henry David Eliot, T. S. Harper, Frances Ellen Poe, Edgar Allan Whitman, Walt Melville, Herman Emerson, Ralph Waldo Hawthorne, Nathaniel Clemens, Samuel Cooper, James Fenimore Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Irving, Washington Taylor, Bayard Boker, George Henry Crane, Stephen Dickinson, Emily Freneau, Philip Horace Howells, William Dean

  8. Questions to Engage Students: • How do you think the journal defines what it studies? (A current description of the scope for each journal can be found in the MLA Directory of Periodicals.) • How has that definition changed over the last sixty years? • How has the focus of the articles changed?

  9. Questions to Engage Students: • Are there types of articles that appear now that wouldn’t have appeared fifty years ago? • Are there types of articles that appeared fifty years ago that wouldn’t appear now?

  10. Questions to Engage Students: • What do you need to know before you can draw conclusions about why changes have occurred? • How has the way the MLA International Bibliography applies subject terms changed over time? How might that affect the results of your study?

  11. Engaging Students:Ideas for Further Research • Who or what is left out? • How can we dig deeper? • What do we find if we compare with other journals in the field of American literature? • What do we find when we compare with more general literature journals, published contemporaneously?

  12. Engaging Students with theMLA International Bibliography:The Scholarly Conversation Project • Understand how scholarly journals are presented in the MLAIB database • Search publications over periods of time • Perform metadata analysis on search terms • Form questions and conclusions to stimulate more research • Enter the scholarly conversation

  13. Q & A Contact us: Mary Onorato, Director of Bibliographic Information Services; Publisher, MLA International Bibliography monorato@mla.org Angela Ecklund, Associate Thesaurus Editor;Tutorial and Instructional Technology Producer aecklund@mla.org Julie Frick Wade, Associate Editor, MLA International Bibliography jwade@mla.org bibliography@mla.org

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