Heather McFarlane | Nineteenth-Century Studies

Colin Peartree, Cassandra Ballini, McKenna Miller, Alyssa Knott

The premise of this project was to add meaningful information to various Wikipedia pages of characters seen in Dickens novels. Our goal was to extend the online discussion of characters to promote deeper understanding of the characters through a more analytic lens. We hoped to spark more discussion on the character’s talk pages by providing a more analytic view of Dickens characters.

It was suggested that a good starting place for blog posts would be to consider some of the text from the ‘Talk’ page and begin to draft posts based on some points of interest the other Wiki users brought up. In general, the characters we chose to focus on did not have much information on their talk pages, which lead us to derive much of the focus from class discussion. Furthermore, most of the information found on each page was descriptive rather than analytic. The lack of analysis prompted us to attempt to include some deeper understanding of the characters in each edit. Since each edit was expected to prompt discussion, and potentially re-edits of our original additions, we made to sure to track the changes and regularly check for edits or discussion resulting from new information on the pages.

The things we learned in editing each Wikipedia page tended to mirror what we learned in reading each text, and what came up in class discussion. That is, each individual Wiki post served to extend findings discussed in class to the world at large. In order to add meaningful information to each character’s Wikipedia page, we had to understand each character in enough depth to accurately portray their roles in each of the novels. This deepened understanding of each character provided valuable insight into the topics discussed in class. The posts were beneficial because potential subsequent edits from other users could solidify the nature of our discussion as reputable contributions to the greater general understanding of Dickens’ literature relative to the context of the 19th century, and the texts per se.

Character Pages that we Edited:

Oliver Twist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist_(character)

Artful Dodger:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artful_Dodger

Ebenezer Scrooge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Scrooge

Tiny Tim:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Tim_(A_Christmas_Carol)

Esther Summerson:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Summerson

Lady Dedlock: