Invitation to Participate
What Can I Do With This Book?
Participate in The 19th-Century Open Pedagogy Project!
This volume is intended to address an audience of enthusiasts, students, and educators of all types.
- Join us by contributing your comments about your reading experience in the margins of the web text. (Web version only)
- Submit material for inclusion in this volume!
The information in this section describes ways to interact with, download, and contribute to the text.
Forms and Formats
The “Living Web” Version
The online version of the text includes interactive elements in addition to static media. For instance, this is where you’ll find:
- a Hypothes.is annotation layer that you can use to post comments or resources for yourself (in the form of private notes or highlights) or in community (as part of the public annotation sidebar or in unlisted groups).
- interactive videos, activities, and glossary pop-ups.
Hyperlinks provide primary and secondary source links, optional details, or connections to other sections in this book. It’s fine to skip over them.
There are some pages in this project that are so specific to web viewing that they are not included in the print and e-text exports (described below). For example, some of these omitted pages provide detailed descriptions of annotation layer activities in the online text.
Reading Copies
If you would like a copy of this text for offline viewing, you may download a static version by navigating to the text’s homepage and clicking on the “Download this book” dropdown menu.
The static versions of this text include visual materials such as primary source photos. When possible, I have converted interactive activities into static activities in the downloadable versions of this text. However, to access video content or interactive elements such as the collaborative annotation layer, you will need to navigate to the web text.
The latest download options available on the homepage will always reflect the up-to-date versions of the project. Any downloads you have made in the past will not mirror the changes and expansions made in the text. As participants add additional essays and reader personae to this project, I will maintain a Revision History log in the back matter of this resource.
E-text Downloads
To read the novel on an e-reader, you can download an Epub file (which opens in iBooks, Nook, Kobo e-reader, and many smartphones) or a MOBI file (Kindle).
Print Downloads
You can also download a PDF version of this text and send it to a print shop to obtain a hard copy of the novel and the supplemental readings associated with it.
Teaching Remixes
If you’re an educator (or if you’re not), you’re welcome to make a private annotation layer or even an entirely new version of this text.
I have included a more detailed guide to the technical aspects of cloning and remixing this material in the back matter section of this web text. This includes information about sharing and embedding this project in course materials as well as information about cloning a copy of this project to adapt for your own purposes.
Creative Commons Sharing Permissions: Teaching Materials and Original Supplemental Resources
Teaching and learning happen in community, and sharing is a community practice. One goal of the 19th-Century Open Pedagogy Project is to create resources that are as easy to access and adapt as possible. Thus, all of the secondary materials within this text, Hypothes.is annotations included, are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This means that you are welcome to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
- for any purpose, even commercially
…. under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- Apply no additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
A note for contributors:
We also ask that any material you may submit for public inclusion in this project carries an open license that allows others to rehost and repurpose this material.
We would like instructors, students, and other folks to be able to teach with or remix this text in ways that best suit their learning needs, and the licenses that make this the most feasible are CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution) or CC-BY-SA (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike). Keep in mind that in both of these cases, you receive credit for all of your hard work. (This is important to us!)
This said, I am also willing to consider contributions that bear other forms of open licenses if you would prefer. Some examples of these are CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) and CC-BY-ND (Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivatives).
Public Domain Resources
All of the nineteenth-century content in this “grangerized” edition is in the public domain, meaning that anyone can do what they want with the primary source text—rehost, remix, revise—even without attribution to the original authors.
This means that when you spend $20 on the print copy or $12 for the PDF of the (excellent) Broadview edition of The Woman in White, what you’re paying for is not the text of the novel itself. Instead, you’re paying for the scholarly commentary that prefaces the materials and the curation of additional public-domain primary sources in the novel. You’re also paying for the care that the editors have taken in verifying that the edition is accurately transcribed.[1] Academic and scholarly editions of public domain texts do add value to many of the freely available resources that exist in the world. However, one of the nice things about texts in the public domain is that people like you and I are welcome to add value to Victorian novels and freely share them in our own ways as well.
What about the images in this text? In the United States, what Supreme Court precedent we have suggests that even the scanned reproductions of Victorian articles, paintings, and novels that have been shared within databases and cultural heritage organizations’ websites are in the public domain. In other words, it should be legal for other people to re-host and adapt these primary source images without repercussion. The legal arms of many of these organizations may have you believe this is not so, and sometimes databases make you consent to a EULA (End-License User Agreement) that essentially opts you in for punishment if you reproduce their content.[2]
For an added layer of protection against unlawful legal threat, to the extent that this project includes images of primary source texts, I’ve drawn them from materials whose creators have openly acknowledged their public domain status. For example, I’ve linked to and excerpted from the HathiTrust volume editions of the novel that were digitized not by Google, which attempts to limit people’s use of its primary source scans,[3] but instead by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1860 British volume edition) and Cornell University (1873 American volume edition), which attempt to place no limitations on reuse.
You can also treat the footnotes that compare the serial and volume editions of this novel as public domain resources. There are two kinds of footnotes in this text: (1) footnotes that provide additional context and (2) footnotes that highlight changes made to the novel in later republications. While the exact phrasing of this second type of footnote may be mine or another contributor’s, the edition-comparison footnotes simply point to other public domain texts, so this edition places no restrictions on replicating this second type of footnote without attribution. (The law may be murky on curation work like this, so I can’t speak to the formal technicalities here for all texts of this sort, only this one.)
This said, we’d quite like a wider range of people to know that they’re welcome to take part in this project, and it would be in keeping with the values of 21st-century scholarly and educational communities to provide attribution to the 19th-Century Open Pedagogy Project if you do end up reproducing the edition-comparison footnotes in another context. Recognizing others’ work is part of celebrating the effort they put into sharing it, which is why all contributors to this project, even if they are submitting public domain resources, are also cited as co-authors in this volume. Please at least consider providing attribution to the project if you are using the edition-comparison footnotes in another project.
- Fun fact: As of 2018, the Project Gutenberg version of The Woman in White is free, but one thing it lacks is any reference to the edition of the novel that the text is based on. As we'll see in the footnotes and supplemental activities to this version text you're reading right now, editions of the novel differ from serial to volume as well as volume to volume, and this can have an impact on interpretation. ↵
- Jason Mazzone's work on the phenomenon of "copyfraud" can tell you more about the machinations and traps involved with this industry. ↵
- Specifically, they include a statement formally requesting that people don't rehost images, creating the impression that this is a binding request. This may not be legal in the spirit of the law, but who wants to mess with Google? ↵
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