Use Cases

A “use case” here is a brief scenario describing what a scholar, teacher, student, or general reader would do in a workspace like Melville ReMix: it sets goals, earmarks procedure, indicates desired results. MEL editors have contributed the following use cases.

If you have a use case you would like to share, please Contact US.

FOR SCHOLARS:

  • For a project on Civil War poetry and journalism, use Battle-Pieces edition to track Melville’s use of the Rebellion Record.
  • Use MEL’s Versions of Moby-Dick and MELCat art to study ekphrasis in Moby-Dick.
  • Drawing on Melville’s Marginalia Online, explore Melville’s revision of sources in any of his works.
  • Examine Melville’s geographical imagination by sorting places he wrote about but never visited in comparison to sites he visited.
  • Sort Melville Family Correspondence to establish lines of networking.
  • Compare episodes in Moby-Dick to their corresponding scenes in film.
  • Use Melville ReMix to demonstrate how a single scene from a film version of Moby-Dick draws from passages in different chapters of the book, by linking tagged passages to the transcription of a video scene from the film.
  • Compare tagged passages other Melville works, say Typee, and compare them side-by-side with related passages in Moby-Dick to demonstrate the growth of an idea in Melville’s writing career.

FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS:

  • Invite students to participate in any of the scholarly projects in MEL.
  • Use MEL Projects to build teaching units involving single or multiple Melville works.
  • Use TextLab to transcribe passages in the Billy Budd manuscript and compose Revision Narratives.
  • Use Itinerary to map routes in Melville’s novels (such as Typee, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter) or the short stories (such as “Bartleby,” “The Encantadas”)
  • Compare versions of Moby-Dick to study Victorian era censorship and expurgation
  • Use Annotation Studio to collaborate on contextual editing of chapters, stories, or poems
  • Compare the text of Moby-Dick side by side with texts from which it draws influence, such as Paradise Lost and The Bible.
  • Use Melville ReMix to tag one’s annotations of regarding “Ahab’s Madness” in several categories: “historical conception of madness,” “Ahab’s psyche,” “imagery of madness,” etc. A category is selected, all passages tagged under that category can be viewed together.

FOR GENERAL READERS:

  • Create a discussion site for a book group, with opportunities for annotating chapters and adding images, map routes.
  • Create a podcast or presentation enabling users to interact with Melville related materials.
  • Create a personalize commonplace book of favorite Melville passages, linked to full editions (MyExtracts)
  • Use Annotation Studio to share interpretations of passages in Moby-Dick for commentary and feedback from others.