Posted by Kate Ozment

It will be a surprise to none of you that have met me—either in person or virtually—that I’m a strong advocate for enumerative bibliography as a feminist tool. I’ve even written on how we built the database on this site (shameless self-promotion here), which is an enumerative bibliography translated into a relational database. According to the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA), enumerative bibliography is:

the listing of books according to some system or reference plan, for example, by author, by subject, or by date. The implication is that the listings will be short, usually providing only the author’s name, the book’s title, and date and place of publication. Enumerative bibliography (sometimes called systematic bibliography) attempts to record and list, rather than to describe minutely. Little or no information is likely to be provided about physical aspects of the book such as paper, type, illustrations, or binding. A library’s card catalog is an example of an enumerative bibliography, and so is the list at the back of a book of works consulted…

I sometimes tell my students that it’s critical list-making, emphasis on the critical. It’s the part of bibliography they are the most familiar with before they wander into my classroom (a well-known bibliography trap; come for the women writers and then oh no now you’re breathing in old book smell and playing with letterpress). It’s also the one I am the most passionate about, despite how much I enthusiastically participate in the critical and historical work that bibliography has pivoted to in the last decades.

This admission tends to surprise people or bore them. I often hear enumerative bibliography dismissed as intellectually less worthy of our time. Similarly to editing historical texts, enumerative bibliography barely counts for tenure points in many literature departments in the U.S. (perhaps not the same elsewhere? would love to know more details in the comments) and it is often advised that we want to do this work until after tenure. I have learned to dress up my bibliographic work in snazzier language to get people interested in what looks like the simple making of lists. Even the BSA does not support funding for enumerative bibliography projects, although I’m cautiously optimistic things are changing on that end.

So why should you care about enumerative bibliography? And why should you teach it? The following examples will show how both undergraduate and graduate students in a literature classroom benefit from engaging in collaborative bibliography projects. These projects are inexpensive, accessible, and have use outside of the single course in which you are working. I use these projects to teach skills you’d probably expect: citation and documentation of sources; reading comprehension; accurate and efficient writing about secondary and primary sources. Bibliographies give students who are struggling with the high cognitive load of research, analysis, and academic writing a lifeline to make sense of what is in front of them.

But they most importantly, for me, allow students to engage in difficult synthesis-level work such as identifying scholarly discourses by their keywords, central questions, values, and language and being able to then locate additional sources within the same discourse. Building a bibliography makes students agents in the process of defining a field by its output, which is deeply tied to the epistemological work that I usually leave outside of the classroom. Now, rather than me telling them what is transatlanticism, they now have to figure out how to tell me.

Collaborative Bibliographies within Research Projects

Using enumerative bibliography within research projects was common in my coursework. Many professors who teach research projects require an annotated bibliography or literature review as part of the research process. To help students see the importance of making their research legible to outside readers, I transitioned these solo projects into collaborative group work. They work together and make the final product available to other students in the course.

This exercise happens in a junior-level seminar I frequently teach that is a prerequisite to upper-level literature coursework. We focus on analysis, research, and writing to prepare students for the in-depth research papers they will need to write in their advanced coursework. My students have some familiarity with doing scholarly research in the humanities; they have heard of JSTOR or the MLA International Bibliography and have read a source or two. But this is the first time that they will do an in-depth research project. My students tend to struggle the most with the following parts of the research process:

Placing a secondary source within a scholarly conversation when most literature and history scholarship does not explicitly call out what it is doing; we rely on verbal cues and language to speak to other scholars that students are not yet able to identify the significance of
Consequently, meta-level thinking about what discourses their own arguments are participating in and how to communicate that to an audience using language appropriate for the genre

Asking new researchers to practice both of these skills within one semester that also includes extensive writing instruction and analysis of primary sources is difficult. However, collaborative enumerative bibliographies has let me get closer to students engaging effectively in both of these processes. Future assessment should indicate if they get closer to competence within our program.

Scaffolding the Project

This required substantial front-end work on my part, and it requires you to teach a text you know the scholarship on incredibly well or really want to learn more. We read Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), which is a novel of manners that somehow also packs in critiques of Rousseau’s educational theory, transatlantic tensions, and a subplot about breast cancer and disease. I identified five distinct scholarly discourses I thought students would be able to engage with for research projects:

Transatlanticism, especially with Caribbean characters, racial coding, and obeah imagery
Gender studies, specifically constructions of masculinity and femininity and discussions of sexuality
Edgeworth’s authorship and discussions about genre, narration, and form
Illness and the body with the relationship between physical bodies and mental or spiritual health
Educational theory, putting Rousseau in conversation with Edgeworth’s own theories and contemporary debates from Anna Barbauld or Sarah Trimmer

Each week, my class met twice for 75 minutes. It took us five weeks to get through the novel, and each week we would spend half the time working with Belinda and half the time working with a different discourse. I put them in an order that made the most sense for the novel; for example, we don’t meet the Caribbean characters until about 300 pages in, so we did transatlanticism at the end.

Students read 100 pages of the novel for the first meeting, and we practiced close-reading and analysis techniques. For the second meeting, they had 50 pages of outside sources to read. Usually, one was a short primary source reading and one was a secondary source that I felt was the most accessible and representative of the discourse.

During the educational theory week, we read the section of Belinda where Clarence Hervey attempts to make the perfect wife according to Rousseau’s description of Sophy in Émile. In the following meeting, we read the excerpt from Émile where the narrator describes Sophy. Then we read an excerpt from Edgeworth’s Practical Education, the educational guide she wrote with her father that shows her very different ideas about proper education of children. Lastly, we read Julia Douthwaite’s article “Experimental Child-Rearing after Rousseau: Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education and Belinda” (1997) that helped tie the pieces together. In sum, the reading looked like this:

Rousseau - 10 pages
Edgeworth - 10 pages
Douthwaite - 23 pages

We practiced this pattern every week with relevant sources, during which students were writing frequent analytical exercises and reflection activities. At the end of every week, I asked them “what is X discourse about?“ and they gave their best answer.

The Bibliography

Students were required to pitch a research topic that was located in at least one of the five discourse we had covered. Because of the previous scaffolding, they were able to pick based on experience with a discourse rather than identifying one haphazardly. They were then grouped by interest for the research phase of the course. I have 25 students, and they self-selected heavily into the gender and genre groups (not surprising for this novel). I ensured each group had at least 3 students in it.

The assignment was to build a collaborative annotated bibliography; they would be required to each write annotations for four sources. I used OneDrive to make a document that was easily accessible by everyone through a secure portal provided by my university (I highly prefer Google Docs for this, however). They were assessed only on their own work, but they had a social responsible for making their annotations accurate and useful for the rest of the class.

Some groups had required primary sources that were short relevant readings from Edgeworth’s wide canon: The Grateful Negro, Letters for Literary Ladies, and Practical Education. All groups had to read at least two secondary sources from a provided list. In advance of the semester, I located 10–20 sources for each discourse and tracked them in my personal Zotero that I use for all my work. Some sources were categorized in multiple discourses, such as the many sources that are interested in gender and a character archetype like the coquette or intersections of race and gender. Students were given this list and told to locate and access copies of the sources through the library.

After students completed the annotations, we spent a class period reflecting and analyzing what we had learned. Each person was required to read four annotations from their group members’ work and generate three keywords for each source. Keywords were supposed to be usable by someone else to put into the MLA Bibliography and find this and additional relevant sources. Then the groups pooled all their keywords and had to answer a series of questions together.

At the end of the discussion, each group had to present their list of keywords (at least five) and tell the other groups what their discourse is and what it is interested in in Belinda. They had an individual reflection due later in the week to cement these discussions within the boundaries of their specific project. Groups were all given access to others’ annotated bibliographies and many used them as a reference for locating more sources or seeing if what they were interested in was reflected in another discourse.

In a later phase of the research project, students were responsible for locating additional sources on their own, and they reported they felt more comfortable doing so after doing an in-depth study on how sources signal connections with one another. They were also better able to identify what they were doing after gaining language for how sources signal their methods.

Collaborative Bibliographies as Standalone Projects

Last spring, I taught a graduate-level course on the transatlantic eighteenth century focused on exchanges between England, the Caribbean, North America, and Africa. All but 1 of my 19 students had never read a work about race in the period other than Oroonoko. Many of them had ideas about British literature, but the only space they had been trained to discuss race and ethnicity was contemporary American literature. I decided early on that I wanted them to participate in the epistemological work of the class and take ownership over revising their perceptions about race in English literature. I chose an enumerative bibliography as the way to go about it, and I requested annotations so they could make a research tool for their final essays.

Similarly to my undergraduate exercise, this required a lot of preparation work on my part. With the help of other 18th centuryists on social media (thank you again!), I located 96 sources on race and ethnicity in the very broad Early Modern period (1500-1830). I then narrowed this down to ones directly relevant to the course, about 60 of them. In general, I avoided sources directly tied to course readings and went for general ones, which allowed them plenty of space to show off their own research skills for their final essays. This project was the scaffold to get them started with the discourse along with course readings on key texts like the Black Atlantic and Red Atlantic.

As a midterm, students were responsible for reading one scholarly monograph and one shorter piece (article or chapter) from the list. They had to locate and download or get copies the piece on their own using the library. In class, they gave a short presentation on their sources and had annotations added to the group document. Presentations took about two hours of class with discussion and questions, and after the break we generated observations about patterns. They were asked to discuss the experience of reading and hearing about sources through a very deep dive into a discourse. We used this time to discuss norms of scholarly writing: how far in did you locate the thesis? How often did writers have an explicit methods or approaches section? Did any sources pop up over and over again? We then wrote down what we noticed as a guide to help us make genre-appropriate choices for final essays, which became incredibly useful at the end of the semester.

Later that week, they turned in a reflection on the analysis of transatlanticism in the long 18th century where they had to define the discourse and put it into conversation with their own perceptions about English literary history. They had to cite sources as examples of their observations when making generalizations about the field, linking their activities to their mental processes. Lastly, they had to find two additional sources that could be added to our enumerative bibliography and make a list of ways of finding more as a note to their future researcher self.

I steadfastly never defined “transatlanticism” for my students, instead hoping that ceding class time to meta-level epistemology exercises would let them take ownership over joining this field. By and large, it did, and I was able to see how to supplement the back half of the course based on their perceptions of the discourse halfway through.

Concluding Thoughts

Both sets of students’ final essays showed greater fluency with scholarly norms and an ability to engage with discourses as participants rather than passive viewers. I also managed to decrease having students citing sources out of laziness rather applicability. Both graduates and undergraduates reported that having a list of annotations made them feel like they had zero reason not to pick a source that works for them. They also said that the feeling of responsibility toward each other made them work harder on their abstracts—and they were incredibly grateful their grades were based on their work alone rather than a group grade. Some things never change.

The thing I still haven’t gotten to click? The actual citations themselves. But there is always next year…

About the Author

Kate Ozment is assistant professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Currently, she is working on a book project on women’s history of bibliography. Look for her forthcoming work in Textual Cultures, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Huntington Library Quarterly. Contact her at: keozment (at) cpp (dot) edu.

Want more Sammelband?

October 2022
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching in the Maker Studio Part Two: Safety Training and Open Making
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching Book Forms
- Oct 16, 2022 Teaching Letterpress with the Bookbeetle Press
September 2022
- Sep 24, 2022 Making a Scriptorium, or, Writing with Quills Part Two
- Sep 16, 2022 Teaching Cuneiform
- Sep 4, 2022 We're Back! Teaching Technologies of Writing
June 2020
- Jun 1, 2020 Black Lives Matter
May 2020
- May 1, 2020 The Special Collections Classroom in the Time of Covid-19
April 2020
- Apr 1, 2020 Teaching Materiality with Virtual Instruction
March 2020
- Mar 1, 2020 Teaching Manuscript: Lessons Learned From Quill-Cutting
February 2020
- Feb 1, 2020 Making the Syllabus Zine
January 2020
- Jan 1, 2020 Teaching Print History with Popular Culture
December 2019
- Dec 1, 2019 Teaching with Enumerative Bibliography
November 2019
- Nov 1, 2019 Finding Women in the Historical Record
October 2019
- Oct 1, 2019 Teaching in the Maker Studio
September 2019
- Sep 1, 2019 Graduate School: The MLS and the PhD
August 2019
- Aug 1, 2019 Research Trips: Workflow with Primary Documents
July 2019
- Jul 1, 2019 Research Trips: A Beginner's Guide
June 2019
- Jun 1, 2019 Building a Letterpress Reference Library
May 2019
- May 1, 2019 Teaching Manuscript: Writing with Quills
April 2019
- Apr 1, 2019 Why It Matters: Teaching Women Bibliographers
March 2019
- Mar 1, 2019 What does it mean to teach a feminist book history?
February 2019
- Feb 1, 2019 Roundup of Materials: Teaching Book History
January 2019
- Jan 1, 2019 Building and Displaying a Teaching Collection
December 2018
- Dec 1, 2018 Critical Making and Accessibility
November 2018
- Nov 1, 2018 Teaching Bibliographic Format
October 2018
- Oct 1, 2018 Teaching Book History Alongside Literary Theory
September 2018
- Sep 1, 2018 Teaching with Letterpress
August 2018
- Aug 1, 2018 Teaching Manuscript: Circulation
July 2018
- Jul 1, 2018 Setting Up a Print Shop
May 2018
- May 1, 2018 Teaching Manuscript: Commonplace Books
April 2018
- Apr 1, 2018 Getting a Press
March 2018
- Mar 1, 2018 Teaching Ephemera: Pamphlet Binding
February 2018
- Feb 1, 2018 Empirical Bibliography: What It Is and Why It Matters
- Feb 1, 2018 Introducing Sammelband: A Book History Pedagogy Blog