“On or About 2020”: MSA Digital Exhibition, Second Installment
Canada and the Spanish Civil War Project
Twitter: @CanadaSCW
The Canada and the Spanish Civil War Project brings Canadian cultural materials about Spain to a broader audience and recovers Canada’s anti-fascist cultural history. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was not only a watershed moment in international history but also a crucial moment for Canada’s developing political identity and for the global development of literary modernism.
The conflict inspired nearly seventeen hundred Canadians to travel to Spain to join the fight against fascism. The artistic community in Canada also adopted Spain as one of the most rigorously represented subjects of the time. The anti-fascist cause in Spain helped to reorganize some of the prevailing aesthetic principles circulating throughout Canada, such that transnational political engagement and transnational modernist aesthetics became vital facets of Canadian modernism.
Most Canadian Spanish Civil War literature is out of print or held in disparate archives across Canada, the US, Spain, and the UK. Our virtual research environment brings these materials together and makes them accessible. The website includes a range of materials and resources for scholars and teachers of modernism: an extensive bibliography of Canadian literature on the Spanish Civil War; digitized texts, including fiction, photographs, and pamphlets (some of these connect to our print series: a subseries of the U of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection); a timeline; teaching modules; case studies; our research podcast, “Listen In”; interviews; and a biographical database of Canadian volunteers. An anthology of Canadian Spanish Civil War literature, The Word Becomes the Deed, is forthcoming next year.
Co-Directors
Emily Robins Sharpe, Co-Director, Keene State College
Bart Vautour, Co-Director, Dalhousie University
Kaarina Mikalson, Project Manager, Dalhousie University
For full team, see here
Linked Jazz
Twitter: @linkedjazz
Linked Jazz is a long-running project developed at the Pratt Institute’s Semantic Lab that explores the potential of applying principles and techniques of the semantic web to the area of jazz history documented in the archives of cultural heritage organizations. A combination of automatic computational methods and linked open data technologies are used to represent the rich web of social relationships that exist among jazz musicians as recorded in digital primary sources, such as oral histories. This methodology has proven effective for creating open and shareable datasets that link information that is otherwise dispersed and fragmented, providing integrated views of the data as well as multiple access points.
Linked Jazz has continued to evolve, currently expanding its scope beyond people entities to include, for example, organizations (e.g., music groups) and places (e.g., music venues). Most recently, the project has focused on underrepresented segments of the jazz community, including women musicians who are almost invisible in jazz history, despite their extraordinary achievements. By identifying and weaving together people mentioned in discrete textual documents, Linked Jazz helps researchers to better understand complex historical contexts and social structures.
Moving forward, we hope to continue to leverage linked open data technologies as a tool for critical engagement and transformative storytelling. As large amounts of open, structured, and linked semantics become available on the web, new and unanticipated opportunities are likely to emerge for digital cultural heritage materials, triggering new interpretations, fostering new narratives, and supporting new models of historiography.
M. Cristina Pattuelli, Co-Director, Pratt Institute
Matt Miller, Co-Director, Library of Congress
For full team, see here
Marianne Moore Digital Archive
Twitter: @DigitalMoore
The Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA) is making the extraordinarily rich and eclectic notebooks kept by Marianne Moore readily accessible to scholarly, student, and non-academic readers for the first time. Each notebook edition provides facing-page transcriptions and manuscript facsimiles, is searchable, and includes annotations. Moore’s notebooks document her intellectual, personal, social, and artistic life across sixty years, touching on virtually every topic of importance to understanding the twentieth century.
The MMDA provides a wealth of educational resources for courses including Moore’s poetry or focused on digital presentation of modernist texts, as well as for courses in creative writing, modernism, gender politics, and early twentieth-century popular culture. Her poetry notebooks allow students to trace poems from their earliest stages of drafting; her reading notebooks include information on topics as far-flung as religion, national and international politics, fashion, and diet fads. The MMDA also provides a timeline, critical interpretations of poems, links to hard-to-find critical scholarship, a bibliography of Moore criticism, and teaching materials.
Transcriptions of Moore’s notebooks are available only on this site, and the MMDA will continue to build out its presentation of other currently inaccessible Moore manuscript materials. The notebooks and the MMDA’s contextualizing features contribute uniquely to cultural, popular, literary, and historical understanding of the modernist period and of Moore’s particular importance to understanding the complex dynamics of modern life in the twentieth century.
Cristanne Miller, Director, State University of New York at Buffalo
Elizabeth Gregory, Associate Director, University of Houston
Heather Cass White, Associate Director, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Nikolas Wasmoen, Technical Director, Buffalo
Srirangaraj (Ranga) Setlur, OCR and Site Construction Director, Buffalo
For full team, see here
