“On or About 2020”: MSA Digital Exhibition, Fourth Installment

Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present

Twitter @Orlando_Project

Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is a feminist literary history comprising accounts of the lives and works of its subjects, together with contextual materials relevant to critical readings. Created by interdisciplinary collaborators and published with twice-annual updates by Cambridge University Press, it is a dynamic textbase of original scholarship.

What is Orlando’s value for modernist scholars and teachers? It offers striking views of the points of contact among canonical and lesser-known writers and participants in literary cultures of the early twentieth century, the conditions of possibility for their work, and their relationships to varied creative movements that developed well beyond their historical moment.

Named after and inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, the project takes an inclusive, experimental approach to the representation of life and art.

With structured text, developed via a combination of markup and databasing, Orlando also offers users the autonomy to remix its material based on their distinctive questions. Orlando employs narrative as a powerful tool for exploring relationships, casualties, and developments. But these narratives are multiple, parallel, and fractured rather than continuous and singular.

Changes to Orlando are underway. Its team is revising its interface, with the launch of its beta version this January. Its varied new features will include images, visualizations, open search options, and teaching resources.

You can get started with Orlando here. To learn more about the textbase and the project responsible for it, visit our blog and connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Susan Brown, Technical Director, University of Guelph

Katherine Binhammer, Literary Director, University of Alberta

Isobel Grundy, Research Director, University of Alberta

Kathryn Holland, Senior Research Fellow, MacEwan University

Jeffery Antoniuk, Systems Analyst and Senior Programmer, Orlando and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

Mihaela Ilovan, Project Manager, the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

For the rest of the team, visit our project site

New Modernist Editing

Twitter: @NewModEditing

The New Modernist Studies Network brought together people involved in or with an interest in the scholarly editing of modernist texts, including academics, publishers, editors, and book artists, in the light of the many new editions of modernist writers currently underway. One of our outputs was an interactive digital edition of Virginia Woolf’s short fiction “Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville.” Woolf’s piece was unpublished in her lifetime, had been published only once before this edition, and exists in one document, a typescript with two sets of amendments in Woolf’s hand. The aims of the edition were a) to produce a dynamic edition of a little-known text by a modernist author, and b) make the most of the digital environment to show the user the effects of the many choices that an editor must make in producing an edition of a text.

The edition is fully interactive. It allows users to create their own edition from among a range of options, including whether to show one, other, or neither set of handwritten amendments, or visible gaps or deletions; whether to work with a diplomatic transcription or edited text; and whether or not to preserve line breaks as per the transcript. High-resolution scalable facsimile images of the original typescript are presented alongside the edited text by default, but the user can choose to hide them. The edition includes extensive explanatory notes, a further information page providing the context for the edition and editorial rationale for the project, and a help page guiding users through the edition’s functions. It has been used in teaching, including for research postgraduate training in textual editing, in postgraduate seminars on short fiction and on research methodology, and in undergraduate seminars on modernist fiction.

Bryony Randall, Director, University of Glasgow

Modernist Archives Publishing Project

Twitter: @MAPP_Project

The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) is a critical digital archive of early twentieth-century publishing history. We began our project by focusing on the records of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Even for a medium-sized modernist press, such as the Woolfs’, archives and collections are split and geographically dispersed, reflecting the different acquisitions policies, priorities, and budgets of various libraries and institutions. By partnering with libraries in Canada, the US, and the UK, we have created an aggregated digital collection in which digitized images are accompanied by newly-created metadata and born-digital peer-reviewed contextual essays on book-related businesses and people working in the industry. Users can access newly digitized letters, books, pamphlets, sketches, and financial records in order to understand the processes involved in making books.

MAPP brings together materials that otherwise take significant time and resources to examine. The website and associated annual events and publications introduce a new public, including publishing industry professionals, creative artists, book designers, and interested members of the general public, to the publisher’s archive. We are currently in the process of expanding our resource to include the archives of other modernist publishers beyond the Hogarth Press.

The Co-Directors of the project are Claire Battershill, Matthew Hannah, Helen Southworth, Alice Staveley, Elizabeth Willson Gordon, and Nicola Wilson, and the MAPP team comprises archivists, students, librarians, and researchers around the world. MAPP is always seeking new contributors and we love to hear from readers. Please write to us if you are interested in collaborating!

Claire Battershill, University of Toronto

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, King’s University

Helen Southworth, University of Oregon

Alice Staveley, Stanford University

Matthew Hannah, Purdue University

Michael Widner

Nicola Wilson, University of Reading

For full team, see here

Modernist Networks (ModNets)

Twitter: @ModNets

Modernist Networks (ModNets) is a federation of digital projects in the field of modernist literary and cultural studies. A main goal in founding ModNets was to provide a vetting community for digital modernist scholarship. In addition to offering peer review based on content, conception, and technical design, ModNets promotes affiliated digital projects; develops standards and “best practices”; and maintains a system for the aggregation of scholarly resources in the field. It is the modernist “node” of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), whose catalog includes open-access resources and peer-reviewed digital projects produced and evaluated by field-specific specialists.

All projects aggregated by ModNets (such as the Modernist Journals Project, the Blue Mountain Project, Making Modernism: Literature and Culture in 20th-Century Chicago 1893–1955, and Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde) can be searched together, along with related projects in the ARC catalog, including NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Thus ModNets enhances research in modernism and, with its classroom feature and tagging capabilities, enables innovative pedagogical exercises.

The field of modernist studies has thrived and greatly expanded in recent years, becoming increasingly interdisciplinary and transmedial. Soliciting projects spanning the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth on canonical writers (such as Beckett and Woolf), historical figures (as in The Note Books of a Woman Alone), and geographically specific materials (as in Making Modernism in Chicago and New York 1920), ModNets aspires to contribute to the expansion of the field while simultaneously maintaining a focus on a historically-rooted modernism.

Pamela L. Caughie, Co-Director, Loyola University Chicago
David E. Chinitz, Co-Director, Loyola University Chicago
Niamh McGuigan, Associate Director, Loyola University Chicago

For full founding board, see here