Since the late 1990s, I have recruited students to work on the John Milton Reading Room, an online hyperlinked edition of Milton’s poetry and selected prose. They have prepared texts, tagged spelling variants, written annotations and introductions. Working as apprentices under a Presidential Fellows program administered by Dartmouth, dozens of students have produced meaningful scholarship used by readers around the work. The MRR answers about 16-18 thousand requests for pages every day. Britannica, Norton Literature Online, Wikipedia and scores of library guides link to the site. It is used as a primary text in many Milton courses around the world. See the list of student contributors at
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/links/index.shtml (Click on “About the MRR”)
This kind of teaching/learning hasn’t translated well to the classroom, however. The courses I teach on Milton seem poorly structured for this kind of apprentice work. I’d like to change that if I can.
I’d be interested in hearing more on projects like this, and brainstorming ways to bring it into the classroom, especially with students at less selective colleges than Dartmouth.
I too am very interested in figuring out how to get students to participate in original scholarship as part of their work. I believe that getting them engaged in this sort of work is probably a good way to increase majors coming into the field. Why should students have to wait until the end of graduate training to do something new?