I wouldn't say the CD-ROM "Twain's World" is useless at all. Flawed, yes,
but
useful in many ways.
In some cases, they could have chosen more authoritative texts, and the
illustrations are truly wretched--with all those great originals, why they
had
to go with these lame cartoon is beyond me. And the quizzes are good only
for
kids, I guess.
But there are several pluses. First, to me, is the ability to do word
searches.
There's no concordance to Mark Twain, but with this CD, you can do a decent
search. I recently used it on a paper about racial language in _Huck Finn_.
The word search yielded instant results, and showed me some things I might
not
have otherwise seen. Also, it includes a number of minor works that are a
little hard to find. Finally, I've used it when I write papers and use
large
chunks of text to save typing: I highlight a passage, save it to the
clipboard,
then import into my paper.
I wish it were more scholarly, but for the price, I think it's worth it. At
least we work on Mark Twain! There's no Howells or James World, I notice.
There's a fuller review in the Mark Twain Circular from a year or two ago;
I'm
sure somebody has the reference.
|