General:Representing Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Law and Literature

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Revision as of 14:15, 7 November 2009 by BenAuthers (Talk | contribs)

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User Story Creator Identification

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Name: Ben Authers

Email: bauthers@uoguelph.ca

Tell us something about your level of study and the type of institutional appointment you hold. 
Choose any of the terms below that apply to you:
* undergrad
* grad
* part-time instructor
* pre-tenure faculty member
* tenured faculty member
* archivist-librarian
* independent scholar
* creative practitioner
* interested citizen

Role: Graduate Student, Postdoctoral Fellow

Institution: University of Guelph, University of Alberta

Field of Study/Creative Endeavor: Canadian Studies, Victorian Studies, Law and Literature

Self-description

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and the extent to which you use computers in your research. 
You may wish to mention particular tools that you use with some regularity.

I am a graduate student completing my dissertation and about to begin a postdoctoral research fellowship. I work in Canadian studies, with a particular interest in the representations of nation produced interdisciplinarily by law and literature.

I use computers in my current research primarily in order to access primary and critical materials. Major case law and legislative materials have been made publicly available by government and universities, so that much of what I need to do my research is readily available online (although, frustratingly with case law, without the pagination of the original text). I use the collection of Supreme Court decisions and CanLII very frequently (both are provided by LexUM), as well as material provided online by government. I use legal journal searches less frequently (often because of lack of institutional access).

Fewer of the primary materials that I need for research are available online (I largely work with novels that are currently in print and in copyright). That said, I make extensive use of online tools such as library catalogues and journal indexes in finding material for research, and have made use of tools like Google Books and OCLC WorldCat for bibliographic information.

My new project will see me doing more research in nineteenth century material, using online resources such as C19, Canadiana.org, The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, as well as geographical mapping material, and special collections catalogues in Canada and in Britain.

Project

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The Project is an analysis of how the idea of “responsibility” is constructed though legal, political, and literary discourses in nineteenth century Canada. It seeks to bring together critical material with primary texts to contextualise terms like criminality and capacity, as well as complex relations between communities and legal regimes, and between Canada as colony and Britain as colonial “centre” (with corresponding interrogations of what these ideas mean). Given the legal and literary interconnections between Britain and Canada, and the influence that English legal practices in particular have on Canadian legislation and common law of the period, as well as the close and often contentious presence of the US and analogies drawn with other British colonial nation-states such as Australia, this work must necessarily also be understood in a manner that recognises trans-border, trans-Atlantic, and increasingly global relations. With this caveat, this Project will focus in particular on Canadian material, and on connections that in the first instance are limited to those with Britain, with a possibility for developing further inter-relations. Ideally, it will also incorporate visual aspects that can represent, through mapping and graphs, changing legal relations within Canada, and in Canada’s relationship with the United Kingdom.



Story


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* broadly applicable
* shared by some
* shared by few or none

Scope: potentially broadly applicable as a model, content shared by some.


Does your story describe current research activities that you think CWRC will enhance (present), 
or future research possibilities that you can only dream of now? (future)

Timeline: future


Please provide some keywords that will allow us to group or cluster related stories--or aspects of stories. 
Use as many of the ones listed below as relevant or provide your own.
* Aggregate
* Annotate
* Consider
* Discover
* Interact
* Publish
* Archive/Preserve
* Share
* Visualize
* Map
* Historicize
* Edit
* Network
* Collaborate
* Integrated History of Women's Writing in Canada
* Orlando

Keywords: Visualize, Orlando, Historicise, Map, Archive, Annotate, Trans-Atlantic, Compare, Interdisciplinary, Law, Cultural Studies.


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Related Stories:


Are there tools that do some of the sorts of things you'd like to see in CWRC? 
If so, what are they?

Related Tools: Old Bailey, MLA bibliography, CanLII, Orlando, Canadiana.org, C19, GIS.