A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts

Scholarly and Research

Brent Nelson

volume 3 / issue 4 / 2012

Communication

University of Saskatchewan

Stan Ruecker

Illinois Institute of Technology

Milena Radzikowska

Mount Royal University

Stéfan Sinclair

McGill University

Susan Brown

University of Guelph

Mark Bieber

University of Alberta

and the INKE team

University of Alberta

Abstract
This article presents a brief account of the form and function of the “table of contents”
to establish a theoretical framework for understanding the form and function of this
common element of book architecture with the aim of informing the development of a
dynamic table of contexts for books and reading in the digital medium. This article will
thus theorize the relationship between textual studies and interface design in INKE, a
project for Implementing New Knowledge Environments.
Keywords
Table of contents; Index; Table of contexts; INKE; Ebook
CCSP Press
Scholarly and Research Communication
Volume 3, Issue 4, Article ID 040149, 14 pages
Journal URL: www.src-online.ca
Received March 22, 2012, Accepted March 22, 2012, Published August 28, 2013
Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.
© 2012 Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark
Bieber.. This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca), which permits
unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.

Stan Ruecker is Associate
Professor of Design at
the Institute of Design
in the Illinois Institute of
Technology in Chicago.
Stan holds advanced degrees
in English, Humanities
Computing, and Design, and
has expertise in the design
of experimental interfaces
to support online browsing
tasks. He was the principal
investigator of the Humanities
Visualization project, and is
leading the interface design
team of Implementing New
Knowledge Environments.
His current research
interests are in the areas of
computer-human interfaces,
humanities visualization, and
information design. With
Milena Radzikowska and
Stéfan Sinclair, he released a
book in 2011 by Ashgate Press,
titled Visual interface design
for digital cultural heritage:
A guide to rich-prospect
browsing. Email: sruecker@
id.iit.edu .
Stéfan Sinclair is a Professor
at McGill University. He
has been responsible for the
development of more than
half a dozen experimental
online systems for humanities
computing. Sinclair is
currently associated with
HyperPo (http://hyperpo.
org/), the TAPoR Portal
(http://portal.tapor.ca/),
Satorbase (http://satorbase.
org/), and BonPatron (http://
bonpatron.com/). Email:
sgsinclair@gmail.com .

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Susan Brown is Professor in
English and Theatre Studies at
the University of Guelph and
in English and Film Studies
at the University of Alberta
(seconded half time) whose
research focuses on digital
humanities, literary history,
and women’s writing. With
Patricia Clements and Isobel
Grundy, she established
the ground-breaking
Orlando Project, an ongoing
collaborative experiment
in digital literary history
that produced Orlando:
Women’s Writing in the British
Isles from the Beginnings
to the Present, published
online by Cambridge UP.
She currently directs the
Orlando Project as well as the
Canadian Writing Research
Collaboratory (CWRC).
CWRC will produce an online
infrastructure for research on
writing in and about Canada.
Email: sbrown@uoguelph.ca .

Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) is a multi-year major
collaborative research program whose objective is to inform and influence the design
and implementation of powerful new reading environments in the digital medium.
Central to this project is the study of a mature reading technology that is so familiar
and comfortable to us as modern readers (i.e., the printed book) as to render its
effectiveness as a technology almost invisible, in order to understand more fully and
think more critically about the desirable functionality of new and as-yet-unimagined
reading environments for the digital medium. The familiarity of the table of contents,
for example, can easily obscure the complexity of its function and the malleability
of its form. On the surface of it, a table of contents gives a simple account of a book’s
major sectional divisions correlated with page markers that point to the beginning of
each division, and it represents this information in a tabular form. But in the history
of the book, especially in its more complex instances, the representation of a book’s
contents has taken many, often multi-faceted forms. The etymology of the qualifying
term “table” is evocatively ambiguous. It comes from the Latin tabula, which means
a flat writing surface, hence a document or a register, sometimes applied to a list of
intellectual content. Accordingly, in its first English applications to writing technology,
it refers to a single tablet of stone or other material used as a writing surface, and so
by extension, to a single reading surface. The second relevant sense (OED II.14.a.), of
a systematic arrangement of numbers, words, and other symbols, is first recorded in
the late fourteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the latter
sense incorporates the first: “esp. an arrangement in rows and columns, typically
occupying a single page or sheet” (emphasis added). For complex books, this latter
stipulation rarely holds, but an implied principle is generally true: a representation of
contents should ideally present the reader with a single visualization that is, on some
level, comprehensive. A more precise application of the later definition (II.14.b.) adds
further resonance for the purposes of this paper: “[o]riginally: a concordance or index
to a book. In later use usually: =table of contents” (which then points to the entry
under the general head “CONTENTS”). In the early age of the printed book, before its
architecture became conventionally standardized, the “table” of “contents” sometimes
assumed forms that we usually regard as distinct from it, most notably, the index.

Milena Radzikowska is a
visual communication and
interface designer, as well
as an associate professor in
Information Design in the
Faculty of Communication
Studies at Mount Royal
University. In 2000, she
graduated from NSCAD
University (BDes Hon.) and,
in 2003, from the University
of Alberta, with a terminal
masters (MDes) degree in
visual communication design.
Her active research interests
are in the areas of decision
support systems, visual
communication, interface

This article will present a brief account of the vagaries of the “table of contents” to
establish a theoretical framework for understanding the form and function of this
common element of book architecture with which to inform the next iteration in
our development of a dynamic table of contexts for books and reading in the digital
medium.

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Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

Function
To begin, we must consider the basic functions of the table of contents: summation,
location, visualization, and conceptualization. The two functions of summation and
location will be immediately recognized by any reader of the printed book. Typically,
the content of the chapters are represented (sometimes in explicit summary, but more
often obliquely or allusively) in a short string of text, and correlated with chapter
numbers to provide a breakdown of the book’s material. Sometimes chapters are
grouped into larger partitions, sometimes they are broken down into smaller sections,
and usually preliminaries (list of figures, list of tables, forward, preface, etc.) and back
matter (appendices, glossaries, indexes, bibliographies, etc.) are also itemized, so that a

table of contents becomes something like a structural outline of the book. The chapter
numbers also, then, serve as structural milestones for mentally mapping the content
of the book and navigating its structure. More precise location of the major elements
of content is facilitated by page numbers. These elements together constitute the
tabular form often associated with such an account of a book’s contents. Some tables
of contents are so detailed that they amount to an extensive outline, as in the case of
Fredson Bowers’ Principles of Bibliographical Description (1962), which goes four levels
deep, giving a fairly granular representation of its contents (Figure 1). So detailed is
the table of contents for The Use of the Law in Spedding, Ellis, and Heath’s edition of
Francis Bacon’s Works (1870), that the first five items listed there all occur on page 463
of the text (Figure 2). Indeed, this table of contents requires three and a half tightlypacked pages to represent only forty-one pages of actual content.
Figure 1. Table of contents in Bowers’ Principles of Bibliographical Description (1962)

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and information design, and
text visualization. In January
2009, she joined a PhD
program at the University of
Alberta in Computing Science
& Humanities Computing,
under the supervision of
Dr. Walter Bischof and
Dr. Stan Ruecker. Email:
mradzikowska@gmail.com .
Mark Bieber is a computer
programmer and software
consultant with a B.Sc. in
Computing Science from the
University of Alberta. Mark
has worked on research teams
in areas as diverse as health
information design, citation
visualization, and multilingual
query enhancement. For the
dynamic table of contexts
project, Mark participated
on the team that created the
first prototype and was solely
responsible for the coding of
the second iteration. Email:
bieber@ualberta.ca .
Brent Nelson is Associate
Professor of English at the
University of Saskatchewan.
Most of his current research
employs digital approaches
of one kind or another. He is
director of the John Donne
Society’s Digital Prose
Project, and with Richard
Cunningham is leading the
Textual Studies research team
on INKE (Implementing New
Knowledge Environments).
He is also general editor of
a digital archive of primary
materials related to early
modern collections of
curiosities. Email: brent.
nelson@usask.ca .

Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

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Figure 2. Table of contents for The Use of the Law in Spedding, Ellis, and Heath’s
edition of Francis Bacon’s Works (1870).

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Less obvious are the functions of visualization and conceptualization. Even in a
simple, standard table of contents, the reader is presented with a visual representation
that enables him/her to conceptualize the intellectual content of the whole book.
Visualization is implied nominally in the form of a “table,” a particular layout of
information in columns (chapter number; chapter caption; page locator) and rows (the
particular iterations of these combinations of information) (Figure 3).

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Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

Figure 3. Table of contents from Murray Roston, The Soul of Wit (1974).

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This mapping of content enables imagination not only of the ordering of content
(facilitated by chapter numbering), but also of spatial quantification by mentally
calculating the page spread between sections, and thus the physical size and location
of the various sections of the book (a twenty-page first chapter vs. a seventy-onepage final chapter). The table of contents also guides how the reader thinks about the
book’s intellectual content, abstracting the particulars into high-level concepts: in the
case Murray Roston’s study of John Donne in The Soul of Wit (1974), for example, the
concepts of perspective, logic, illusive wit, and faith, etc. (Figure 3). But contents are
not always visualized (and conceptualized) in a tabular form. The crucial point here is
that, regardless of the form it takes, a rich representation of contents provides context.
It enables the user to visualize the part within the whole and to conceptualize the
elements of content in their larger intellectual/conceptual context.

Malleability of form
The table of contents, when understood in terms of its functions of summation,
location, visualization, and conceptualization, becomes a dynamic piece of architecture
that is often expressed in decidedly non-tabular forms and sometimes distributed
throughout a book’s architecture. The table of contents thus becomes a dynamic
and malleable form. Indeed, in many instances the restrictive nominal metaphor
is dropped in favour of a more general title of “Contents” (see Figure 1). The
representation of these contents then can take any number of forms. In the 19th century
it was quite common for the representation of contents to escape the tabular form
altogether and migrate into other architectural spaces, such as the header and even
the margins. Header titles assumed the role of providing a specific summary, offering
a dynamic, page-by-page indicator of content (Figure 5). In this example from John
Keble’s collected works of Richard Hooker (1888), the header provides a summary
statement that indicates the new content on the page—“Disputation against the Laws
Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

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anomalous”— while a marginal note locates the page within the structure of the whole
work; for example, this page contains sections 2 and 3 (as per the original publication)
of the fifth chapter of the Preface to the present work, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.
Each page has its own content summary, thus providing supplementary information to
a table of contents that is entirely lacking in detail.
Figure 4. Example of a header titles in Richard Hooker’s Works (1888).

Similar functionality can be expressed in a very different form that more effectively
leverages the power of visualization to map not just the structure, but also the
conceptual content of the book. The frontispiece of Jan Swammerdam’s Tractatus
Physico-Anatomico-Medicus (1667) functions as a graphical interface that gives the
reader a customized means of both locating and imagining the material of the book.
This navigational device reflects the interests of an emerging group of readers–
early modern natural philosophers–and the need for their reading environment to
respond to the particular practices of this group of readers. The desire for objective
representation, familiarization with new and, to many readers, strange apparati,1
and careful representation of physically executed processes provide the impetus for
a visualization of the experiment that the tract describes. It also presents a way to
navigate the text that is organized around the logic of the type of material the book
contains (i.e., the steps and stages of the experiment, rather than the structural
arrangement of the book’s contents). For example, the reference on the frontispiece
to page 40 (Figure 5, at the base of the receiver, to which is attached the pump
piston) sends the reader to the corresponding point in the book where that stage of
the experiment is described, using alpha-labels to correlate the discussion to a more
detailed description of a diagram on the facing page (Figure 6).

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Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

Figure 5. Frontispiece to Jan Swammerdam’s Tractatus Physico-Anatomico-Medicus
(1667) with inset detail added.

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Note: Used with permission of the Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

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Figure 6. Correlating diagram and description in Swammerdam’s Tractatus PhysicoAnatomico-Medicus (1667).

volume 3 / issue 4 / 2012

Note: Used with permission of the Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Shared functionality and interoperable form: The table of contents and the index
Any account of the function and form of the table of contents must take into
account its relationship to the index. To simplify, the table of contents represents the
way in from the front and functions in the mode of synthesis, giving an overview
representation of the book’s content—the shape of the whole—while the book’s index
represents the way in from the back by way of analysis, giving a break-down of the
book’s contents in its topical and thematic bits and pieces.2 Both elements of book
architecture typically correlate these nodes of content with a location pointer, usually
a page number. In many instances in the history of the book, these functions of
analysis and synthesis have overlapped in forms of content indicators that escaped the
restrictive confines of the conventional table. Some tables of contents are analytical
in that they break the contents of the major sections into granular portions, often
approaching the sort of thematic and topical representation one expects of an index.
Conversely, astute readers of an index can often conceptualize the shape of the work by
inferring larger patterns from the particulars itemized therein.
For some kinds of books, a table of contents is impractical or inadequate, requiring
supplementary aid from a dedicated index. Take for example a book of collected verse,
such as John Shawcross’s edition of The Complete Poetry of John Donne (1967). The
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Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

extensive table of contents (listing all of Donne’s two hundred or so poems) groups the
poems into generic categories, so that the reader needs to know something of Donne’s
corpus in order to locate, say, “The Autumnall.” This case is complicated by two factors.
First, some editors classify this poem as an elegy, others as one of the “songs and
sonnets.” Shawcross classifies it among the latter, a grouping that contains dozens of
lyrics spanning almost two pages in the table of contents.3 At best, locating this poem
requires a fair bit of scanning of this fairly large generic grouping. The table of contents
provides a good representation of the shape of the corpus and a convenient locating
aid to the initiated reader, but for readers less familiar with Donne’s body of poetry,
the indexes at the back of the edition are crucial. Second, the titles of some of Donne’s
poems vary from witness to witness. Thus, the “Index of Titles” and “Index of First
Lines” provide two further, very precise avenues into the poetry, both of which are
necessary, not only due to the variations in the titles, but also because the reader might
come looking for a poem equipped with only a first line. In the case of Donne, the first
line index is the least ambiguous means of identifying and locating a particular poem.

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This complementary relationship is even more pronounced in the case of John Carey’s
edition of Donne’s Major Works (2000), which includes not only most of Donne’s
poems, but also selections from his much larger body of prose. Carey’s arrangement
of material, and thus his representation of his edition in the table of contents, gives
a very different shape to Donne’s writings. Carey arranges his texts chronologically.
Notwithstanding the lack of scholarly consensus in dating many of these texts, this
arrangement gives the reader a potentially valuable, temporal view of his writing,
whereby each poem is located in a temporal context. But again, this arrangement
poses challenges to the uninitiated reader who wants to locate a particular poem.
Unless one knows when a poem was written (and for most of these poems, no one,
not even the editor, does for sure), it is difficult to locate a poem by scanning the table
of contents. Again, an index of titles and first lines is a necessary supplement. Here,
we see a dynamic interplay between synthesis—a representation of parts that presents
a particular shape of the whole—which situates a poem in a particular (in this case,
temporal) context, and analysis, which breaks the corpus into individual, discrete units
for each location.
Larger works present a different kind of challenge in locating certain kinds of content
precisely. Most large literary works don’t contain an analytical index of the type one
finds in, for example, a monograph of literary criticism. A.C. Hamilton’s edition of
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) recognizes a particular need that arises
out of a very long poem that proliferates with characters. While Hamilton’s table
of contents simply provides the six numbered books identified with their titular
characters, together with the mutability cantos, and of course their starting page
numbers, a supplementary index preceding the table of contents names all of the
characters contained in the poem (well over two hundred of them), in alphabetical
order and with a citation locating their first appearance. In contrast, the original
edition of all six books of The Faerie Queene (1596, STC23082) provides very little
help in navigating the content of this 518 page book: there is no other representation
of contents. The title page gives only a very vague and misleading indication of the
contents of the book, “Disposed into twelue bookes, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues.” In
fact, only six books are included. Even the most simple representation of contents—a
Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

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list of the titular characters, corresponding to the six virtues—would have given the
reader some synthetic representation of the content and given some semantic help
in using the only navigational aid that is provided, a running title that indicates the
book and canto number. Otherwise, the reader is left to thumb through the pages to
locate the beginning of each book and canto. It is the job of a good modern edition to
make up for any original deficiencies in navigation, and to provide extra help, where
warranted, in the book’s navigational structure. A.C. Hamilton’s Longman edition is a
good example of an edition that goes beyond the normal table of contents to provide
multifaceted navigation of content. In the age of the electronic text, is it the job of
the scholar now to imagine a reading environment that similarly enables a dynamic,
empowering environment for navigating the text.

The dynamic table of contexts
The Dynamic Table of Contexts (Ruecker 2005; Ruecker et al. 2009, 2011) represents
a digital re-imagining of the two principal forms of summary apparatus (the table
of contents and the index), placed in conversation with each other (Figure 8) in an
interactive system that allows the reader to dynamically add to and subtract from the
table of contents what are essentially index items, i.e., material that has been encoded
with semantic-level XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The screenshot of the
Dynamic Table of Contexts prototype in Figure 7 shows the reader of Frances Burney’s
novel Cecilia (1782) looking at place names that were encoded in the XML <place> tag.
Search results for “Paris” and “Haymarket” are also shown as bubblelines in the panel
bottom left.
Figure 7. Screenshot of the Dynamic Table of Contexts

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Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

The system is designed so that readers can work without a great deal of familiarity
with the XML encoding. Since XML tags are often not semantic, and even those tags
that are semantic are defined in shorthand, the Dynamic Table of Contexts includes
a curator mode where an administrative user can select which tags will appear on
the main screen, and what those tags will be called. In our example of Cecilia, for
example, what appears as “foreign words,” “person,” and “place,” are actually “term,”
“persName,” and “placeName.” This ability for a curator to make the selection of select
tags and carry out their translation from technical shorthand into common language is
essential to making the XML accessible for use by people who were not involved in the
encoding.

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The goal of the Dynamic Table of Contexts is to provide readers with a greater range
of affordances when reading book-length digital texts. Since the text is digital, the
environment is not restricted to a single design choice, so it becomes possible to
provide functions such as reorganization of the table of contents according to different
criteria. In the case of a digital version of Hamilton’s Faerie Queene, for instance, the
list of characters could be sorted alphabetically by character name, by sequence of
first appearance in the book, or by frequency of appearance. It may also be possible
to expand it into a search tool for co-occurrence of other characters or even objects,
so that the user could ask, for example, where the Red Cross knight appears with and
without his horse.
In addition, once we have placed the dynamic table of contexts into an interactive
reading environment, it is possible to layer-in additional analytical tools. Figure 7, for
instance, shows a visualization of comparative search results across chapters IV to
VIII of Cecilia, while Figure 8 is a frequency graph of people’s names that have been
encoded with XML throughout the book.
Figure 8: This screenshot shows the frequency graph of the <placeName> tag
throughout Cecilia.

Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

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We are currently at the stage of bringing the prototype into user studies, preparatory
to experiments in implementing it in association with the Canadian Writing Research
Collaboratory (CWRC). As it stands, the dynamic table of contexts already makes
a step towards enhancing the reading experience for digital editions. It is, however,
still a relatively simple prototype, with many rich affordances yet to be implemented
as we strive to accommodate not only a wider range of digital textual material, but
also a broader understanding of the history of the conventional table of contents, its
variants in the form of images and lists of figures, characters, and other material, and
its complementary relationship to the index.

Conclusion
The form in which contents are represented can have a determining effect on how
the reader thinks about and understands a text. Speaking about the development
of reading technology in the early days of print, Elizabeth Eisenstein contends that
“the thoughts of readers are guided by the way the contents of books are arranged
and presented. Basic changes in book format might well lead to change in thought
patterns.” (1979, vol. 1, p. 88-89). In observing the cultural effect of the printed book
in this period, Eisenstein goes on to elaborate the impact of new affordances in this
nascent reading technology, as “[i]ncreasing familiarity with regularly numbered
pages, punctuation marks, section breaks, running heads, indexes, and so forth helped
to reorder the thoughts of all readers, whatever their profession or craft.” (vol. 1, p.
105-6). In this article we have argued that in their more thoughtful manifestations,
representations of contents in the printed medium experimented with form, and in
some cases interplay of form, to create dynamic means for summarizing, locating,
visualizing, and conceptualizing the intellectual content of a book. In the digital
medium, these dynamic possibilities are manifold. In theory, a more dynamic means
of representing contents should open up possibilities for new ways of reading and
thinking about a text. The ongoing work of INKE is to leverage the insights afforded
by the historical study of the book as reading technology and the affordances of the
electronic medium in order to imagine and inform the development of new reading
environments.

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Nelson, Brett and Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, Stéfan Sinclair, Susan Brown, Mark Bieber.
(2012). A Short history and demonstration of the dynamic table of contexts. Scholarly and Research
Communication, 3(4): 040149, 14 pp.

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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada and to thank the Brown University Women Writers
Project for providing an XML-encoded copy of Cecilia.
Notes
1.	 On the importance of experimental apparatus and the need for accurate
representation to audiences unfamiliar with the apparatus, see Steven Shapin and
Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump (1985), especially chapters 2 and 6.
2.	 On the index as an expression of textual analysis, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The
printing press as an agent of change: Communications and cultural transformations in
early modern Europe (1979; vol. 1, p. 100).
3.	 Most editions of Donne’s poetry take this genre-based approach to representing
its contents. See for example A.J. Smith’s Penguin edition (1996) and Charles M.
Coffin’s Modern Library edition (2001).

References
Bacon, Francis. (1870). The works of Francis Bacon. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, & Douglas
Denon Heath (Eds.). London, UK: Longmans.
Bowers, Fredson. (1962). Principles of bibliographical description. New York, NY: Russell & Russell.
Brown University Women Writers Project. (2012). URL: http://www.wwp.brown.edu/ [July 9, 2012].
Burney, Francis. (1782). Celia. Women Writers Online. URL: http://www.wwp.brown.edu/wwo/
[July 9, 2012].
The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory/Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada.
URL: http://www.cwrc.ca/ [July 9, 2012].
Donne, John. (1967). The complete poetry of John Donne. John T. Shawcross (Ed.). Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books.
Donne, John. (1996). John Donne: The complete English poems. (Revised edition). A.J. Smith (Ed.).
London, UK: Penguin.
Donne, John. (2000). John Donne. The major works. John Carey (Ed.). Oxford: OUP.
Donne, John. (2001). The complete poetry and selected prose of John Donne. Charles M. Coffin (Ed.) &
Denis Donoghue (Introduction). New York, NY: Modern Library.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1979). The printing press as an agent of change: Communications and cultural
transformations in early modern Europe. (2 volumes). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
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