At West Virginia University, graduate students study the Old English poem “Beowulf” with the aid of Beowulf Workstation developed by English Professor Patrick W. Conner.
Once every two years, seven or eight advanced graduate students take the class after completing the prerequisite Introduction to Old English Grammar, in which the rudiments of Old English, a language more similar to Modern Icelandic than to Modern English, are taught. The program, developed on HyperCard, trains students to master this foreign language and decipher “Beowulf” with the help of translations, pictures, and articles.
Students translate the poem by studying an assigned number of lines a day in the university’s Center for Literary Computing, a lab equipped with three Pluses, five Classics, two Macintosh IISIs, and a II. Conner leads the discussion in class twice a week after the students have made their own translations in labs. He also brings in books and pictures relevant to the poem, discusses the content of the poem and introduces ideas of scholars and critics. Believing that group discussion is vital to English literature classes, Conner keeps computers out of the classroom so they don’t come between him and the students.
Conner began developing the software in the fall of 1989. He brought it into the classroom in the spring of 1990. It includes a 4,000-entry Old English dictionary, several translations, genealogies of the characters, historic illustrations of the text, collected critical studies, historical background notes, and other ancillary materials. Students are also able to write their own translations of portions of the text.
Students can stop the poem at any time to refer to articles by scholars or to examine pictures or drawings of artifacts that are part of the culture in the poem.
“A real advantage of this homemade software is that I can put the materials on-line. I’m not trained in programming design. I created what I wanted and needed. That’s basically the HyperCard philosophy. Students can say, ‘What does this mean? I wonder if anyone has written about it,’ and they can look it up,” says Conner.
Professor Conner has encountered some problems with the class that he didn’t foresee. Students are so accustomed to translating Old English on computers and having so many resources at their fingertips that they don’t know what it’s like to look things up manually. They complain of spending so much time in the labs. “I give them the Old Man speech: ‘In my day I had to look everything up.’ I’m surprised. I never really thought about that happening.”
Conner and his colleague, Rudolph P. Almasy, are working on another HyperCard project, the Sonnet Workstation, designed for English professors who are not programmers.
The Sonnet Workstation will include a corpus of all Renaissance sonnets and many other poems. Students will be able to create fairly complex searches and test theories about the nature of the sonnets. The project is still under development, but 10 students have volunteered to work with the software to test this combination of technology and pedagogy.
For information, contact Patrick W. Conner at the Department of English, West Virginia University, 231 Stansbury Hall, Morgantown, WV 26506; (304) 293-3107; Internet: PConner@wvnvm.wvnet.edu. AppleLink: U1615.
