User talk:TaliaMary/sandbox

A list of possible citations: 1. Wikipedia already written on her 2. An article which speaks about the authentic of her work. 3. A crash course video which provides a good overview of who she was! It also speaks about the fact that she wanted to write holy plays as she did not think that current plays were holy enough. She was also known for shaming women who were not practising chastity. The gorilla girls paid theatres to put on her plays! 4. This article details her life and history

Peer Review

Hi! This draft is really well developed and has a lot of potential. I was particularly interested in the section on the modern perceptions on Hrotsvitha. I think it's an interesting topic to discuss and has a lot of potential for expansion. For example I think it would be interesting to discuss how Celtes ignored her religiousness. Has there been any research done on why he ignored the religious aspects of her work? How did this removal affect contemporary understanding of who she was and what she believed? You may also want to add a section that explains how her works were received in her time and how her religious affiliation helped her works be taken seriously. I know that there is mention of that in the section on gender but I think it could be expanded on a little. I hope this is helpful --Aarwatson (talk) 23:23, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

I think this is a terrific first draft and I can tell you put a lot of thought into this! I wanted to acknowledge that you did a really good job of sticking with a neutral voice through remaining with "suggesting" what is known about her life. I would consider citing sentences that begin with "some scholars think", etc. just to strengthen the validity of the information. I really liked the descriptions you gave for her works, I found it very informative. I agree with the above comment; I am interested what kind of criticisms she received, if this information is available, that could strengthen the role she played in feminism. If you have any questions about these comments, let me know! Cpetryshyn (talk) 20:40, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Instructor Feedback. Note: This article has received three peer reviews.

The quality of this first draft is very mixed. On the one hand, you seem to have been very ambitious and possibly even creative and original in your approach to the new “feminism” section. However, your focus on that came at the expense of ignoring the solid information that I provided for you in class. You definitely put in effort, but I think you may have misdirected it. At the same time, it’s possible that some heavy lifting in terms of citations and polishing will result in a really excellent end product.

I will address the various sections of your sandbox in turn.

At the top is a potential new opening summary (at least I think that is what it is) that simply refers back to Wikipedia itself, rather than to external sources, and which therefore is outright invalid as a contribution to Wikipedia (I hope you see the logic there – I was shocked that you seemed to think you could cite the wikipedia article itself in your new version!). Furthermore, I do not understand why you appear to have chosen to add a new sentence highlighting the questioning of “the validity of her work.” That certainly does not contribute to the project of improving the coverage of feminism; in fact, quite the opposite. As it stands, the assertion is simply tossed out with no justification or backing, since you include no citation to any relevant work; the citation to the article about coverage on Wikipedia definitely fails to provide support for that particular statement. Finally, think carefully about language. “The validity of her work” has never been questioned anyway; it has always been recognized as high quality work. The word you want is “authenticity” because what has been questioned (and not for a very long time, which is one of the reasons the point is irrelevant and doesn’t deserve this prominence) is whether or not she (as opposed to someone else) actually wrote it.

Clearly you mean this to be your key new sentence: “Since her "rediscovery" Hortsvitha has become an important part of the feminism narrative.” Please take care to correctly spell the subject’s name. I also don’t know if you should be putting “rediscovery” in quotes. More importantly, there is simply no such thing as “THE feminism narrative.” You must make an effort to be more careful with your word choice. And now to the heart of the matter: your new section on “Feminism.”

It look like that YouTube “crash course” video is something new that you found. From what I can tell, based on what’s here in your sandbox, that’s effectively the only new thing that you turned up in your research/search for sources. I am worried though, because it does not constitute reliable peer reviewed scholarship. I admit I didn’t watch the entire thing so perhaps it provides references to scholarship? Did you draw on it for the many points in your new section on “Feminism”? If that content is not from the YouTube video, I have no clue where it is from since there are no other citations here at all (except to that blog you cite as note 4 on your sandbox talk page, which adds nothing new anyway and is not the sort of thing you could cite on Wikipedia; in fact, it is itself already a paraphrase of the Wikipedia article).

I certainly appreciate that you wrote that long statement, but I am having a lot of difficulty evaluating it in the complete absence of citations. There are a lot of superscript numbers in there, but they don’t lead to anything, so I cannot assess on what basis you are making these assertions. It’s possible that this is really original work on your part, something you put together on your own. If so, on some level that is admirable but it’s also problematic, because that isn’t the way Wikipedia works; you must cite to previously published scholarship. Furthermore, many of the points in this section seem shaky and suspect to me and it might be that we can only work through them by sitting down together for quite a long session. It’s simply impossible for me to address most of the issues raised in this section without more information. But I can offer some comments on some individual pieces of this long new section. Please, however, do not take my silence concerning other points as an indication of approval. 

1. The feminist “rediscovery” of Hrotsvita predates the 1970s by many decades. I discussed this in lecture. 2. Your characterization of all the work of feminist rediscovery as being about not saying something was feminist but just showing how it could be seen as such is a wild and unsustainable generalization. 3. The second paragraph: she is not a “play write” (there is no such word). Her work did not take “thousands of years” to be rediscovered. It is only a little over one thousand years since her death, and the serious rediscovery took place over one hundred years ago. Depending on what you actual sources are for the details of this appreciation of H as a feminist playwright, you may well have here the germ of an important addition/Wikipedia contribution; perhaps all you need to do is polish this section. I really do want to emphasize that there may well be something valuable here but I simply cannot tell without citations.

More importantly – indeed, most importantly - you didn’t even draw on my lecture. The fact is, the Hrotsvita article was probably the single easiest choice for this assignment, because it’s the one for which I provided the clearest possible roadmap for improvement (including the necessary citations) in my lecture. Much of the relevant information is on eclass, including the entire pdf of the University of Toronto dissertation on which you can and should draw. I hope you did not miss that lecture. If you did, or if you failed to take good notes on it, I would encourage you to come see me at your earliest convenience.

There is another issue: someone should remove or at least fix those few new sentences that were recently added to the current summary (the one connected to note 4). It is possible that the main problem is the contributor’s lack of fluency in the English language, but it’s hard to tell. There are linguistic problems with every sentence, and it could be that (e.g.) the reason for the incorrect and misleading phrase “in the twelfth century” is not that the contributor is trying to place Hrotsvita in that time period, but rather that the contributor does not command enough English to use “before” or “until” (and that only addresses one problem with the formulation). It looks like that same person, or someone else with similarly limited English skills, has also recently added the incomprehensible sentences connected to note 11, and that part of the article should also be fixed.

Roitberg (among other things) suggested that you include something about the impact of Hrotsvita; for that, you might wish to draw on this article: Pintér, Márta Zsuzsanna. “The reception of Hroswitha of Gandersheim in Hungary.” European Medieval Drama 19 (2015): 77-94. Doi: 10.1484/J.EMD.5.110745 --FeliceLifshitz (talk) 15:10, 14 November 2019 (UTC)