“On or About 2020”: MSA Digital Exhibition, Third Installment
Lili Elbe Digital Archive
Officially launched in February 2020, the Lili Elbe Digital Archive is a companion to Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, co-edited by Pamela L. Caughie (Loyola University Chicago) and Sabine Meyer (Humboldt University) and published in Bloomsbury’s Modernist Archives Series (2020). Man into Woman — published in Danish, German, and English editions between 1931 and 1933 — is the life narrative of Lili Elbe, an early recipient of what was then called “genital transformation surgery,” and one of the most iconic figures in the history of gender variance.
The Archive gathers together on a single interactive site the full range of materials comprising the compositional and early publication history of this canonical transgender work. Transcribed and encoded facsimiles of each edition, linked at the paragraph level, enable detailed comparison of different versions. These various editions, a mélange of historical and fictionalized materials, differ markedly in terms of narrative elements, pronoun choices, and paratexts in ways that affect the reading of gender across the texts.
A rich archive — including letters by Elbe and the editor, Ernst Harthern; Danish newspaper articles from the 1930s; and chapters on Elbe from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Le Sexe Inconnu (1935) and Hélène Allatini’s memoir Mosaïques (1939) — supplements the editions. All materials in Danish, German, and French are translated into English for wider access. This interactive site is more than an assemblage of static documents; it is an innovative teaching and research tool that preserves the variability and collaborative nature of this historic narrative.
Pamela L. Caughie, Editor, Loyola University Chicago
Sabine Meyer, Editor, Ph.D. Humboldt University, Berlin
Rebecca J. Parker, Digital Editor, M.A. Loyola University Chicago
Emily Datskou, Project Manager, Loyola University Chicago
For full team, see here
Digital Harlem
Twitter @digital_harlem
Digital Harlem offers a way to develop a complex picture of the neighborhood central to the Harlem Renaissance by exploring a diverse set of historical sources revealing everyday life and to situate places and events in Harlem’s material environment. Created by a team at the University of Sydney, the site uses digital mapping tools to combine fragmentary evidence and visualize it on real estate maps that represent every building in Harlem. Digital Harlem features all the events and places identified in a variety of sources: the case files of the Manhattan district attorney; the two major black newspapers published in Harlem, the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News; probation files; prison records; undercover investigations; social surveys; and material collected by the Federal Writers Project for the 1939 New York City Guide.
The site is interactive, allowing users to explore places, events, and individual lives that interest them, and to layer different combinations of information on the same map to examine relationships and change over time. A related blog provides posts examining a range of topics that can be mapped on the site, from business to sports, churches to the life of a domestic servant, and includes a preprint of a forthcoming chapter on using Digital Harlem in teaching the Harlem Renaissance. The overall approach suggested in that chapter is to have students explore life in the neighborhood in terms of what happens in the course of a day, a week, and a year in Harlem. A publication available on the blog as a preprint offers an interpretation of the neighborhood from that perspective.
Shane White, Researcher, University of Sydney
Stephen Robertson, Researcher, George Mason University
Stephen Garton, Researcher, University of Sydney
For full team, see here
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde
Twitter: @DigitalMinaLoy; Instagram: DigitalMinaLoy; Facebook Group: Digital Mina Loy
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde is a peer-reviewed, digital, multimedia scholarly book that charts Mina Loy’s avant-garde migrations. This open educational resource offers digital scholarly narratives and visualizations to contextualize and interpret Loy’s writing, art, and designs. Created by students, staff, and faculty at Davidson College, Duquesne University, and the University of Georgia (UGA), the project is the culmination of a five-year collaboration, supported by a generous Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The scholarly website comprises a Mina Loy Baedeker (a digital scholarly book that charts Loy’s relationship to Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism) and related materials, including timelines, maps, art exhibits, a Twine game, close readings that interlink a text with its interpretation, student-authored biographies and other projects (“New Frequencies”), and a crowd-sourced feminist theory of the en dehors garde (“Flash Mob”) — our feminist alternative to the avant-garde. In addition, we share our WordPress “DH Scholarship Theme” and site documentation in an open GitHub repository, so that scholars can use and adapt our model for other digital humanities (DH) projects.
Our aim is not to create a comprehensive digital archive or open source wiki, but to provide a curated, multimedia, interactive platform for accessing and understanding Loy’s writing, artwork, and career. Using Loy as a case study, our project aims to broaden understanding of the diversity of avant-garde production and activate a network of interested readers and scholars. Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde demonstrates how digital tools can transform humanities scholarship from the traditional model of a lone scholar writing a monograph to a team of researchers collaborating on a “multigraph” — an interactive, multi-authored, multimodal resource that sets UX design standards for DH scholarship.
Suzanne W. Churchill, Project Architect, Davidson College
Linda Kinnahan, Project Architect, Duquesne University
Susan Rosenbaum, Project Architect, University of Georgia
For full team, see here
