Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and EMiC co-applicant Mary Chapman has her hands full with the work of Edith Eaton, who has been called “the mother of Asian-American literature.” Eaton, who wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, is a remarkably complex individual: she had two racial identities and three national identities, wrote under multiple pseudonyms and in multiple genres, and published in multiple venues. All of this complexity makes Eaton an intriguing figure, but also a difficult author to edit.
While researching for her anthology of American suffrage literature, Treacherous Texts: US Suffrage Literature 1846-1946 (Rutgers UP 2011), Chapman came across several stories in which Eaton provides somewhat critical views of middle-class white American suffragists. Chapman then discovered a racy story published by Eaton in a 1909 issue of New York’s Bohemian Magazine which led her to suspect that more of Eaton’s works were buried in non-indexed periodicals and newspapers.
Since joining EMiC as a co-applicant in 2010, Chapman has worked tirelessly with her graduate research assistant and EMiC stipend-holder Reilly Yeo, as well as other graduate research assistants, to collect these previously uncollected works. So far, Chapman and her team have located almost 90 unknown works by Eaton, which were published in over 50 magazines in both Canada and the United States between 1883 and 1929 — fifteen years after Eaton’s death. Amongst the Canadian finds are a follow-up to Eaton’s well-known September 1896 letter to the editor, “Plea for the Chinaman,” published a week later in the Montreal Star, as well as a reprinting of Eaton’s signature story “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” in a Toronto illustrated magazine. Chapman has also uncovered some anonymous reportage filed from Fort William, Ontario in the 1890s that she thinks were written by Eaton.
Over 100 years ago, Eaton took full advantage of a mediamorphosis to forge her career writing for mass-circulating magazines. Now, approaching the centenary of Eaton’s death (2014), Chapman thinks it fitting that she publish Eaton’s works at another moment of mediamorphosis — that is, when digitization projects offer scholars a new way to present new findings to larger groups of readers.
Chapman has encountered a bit of difficulty in her digital project because some previously digitized magazines are incomplete or misrepresent their degree of completeness. Also, Eaton’s pseudonym, Sui Sin Far, is not easily recognized as a name in the English searches of some of the digitized magazines, making Chapman’s work more labour intensive. Nevertheless, at this point in the project, Chapman and her team have scanned and proofread all of the found texts.
In addition to writing the introduction for her collection this summer, Chapman will be attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute TEI workshop at the University of Victoria. She is looking forward to learning more about the digital humanities opportunities for sharing more of Eaton’s work. Chapman has also found many American-published texts that she wants to make available to the public, and she will begin to interest American presses after her EMiC project is complete.
Vanessa Lent has just begun the second year of a two-year postdoctoral EMiC fellowship at the University of Alberta (EMiC UA). As part of the larger EMiC UA efforts to digitize the fonds of Sheila Watson and the fonds of Wilfred Watson, led by Paul Hjartarson, Vanessa is creating a hybrid print-digital edition of Wilfred’s 1962 play, Cockcrow and the Gulls.
Wilfred was a dynamic artist, critic, and teacher whose work evolved over four decades. He began to work on Cockcrow as early as 1949, and was awarded a Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship with which he funded a yearlong trip to Paris to work on the play within an environment steeped in avant-garde and absurdist theatrical production. When it premiered at Edmonton’s Studio Theatre in 1962, Cockcrow caused a stir in the theatre circles and academic communities of Edmonton and beyond.
Projected as a multi-phase project, Vanessa’s postdoctoral work asks how the database can serve the humanities scholar to interpret, organize, and present archival material. In “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” Ed Folsom argues that the “[d]atabase facilitates access, immediacy, and the ability to juxtapose items that in real space might be far removed from each other” (Folsom 1577). A database of Cockcrow will take advantage of such “virtuality, endless ordering and reordering, and wholeness” to create a new space for scholarly work. Vanessa’s project will entail the creation of a database for the Cockcrow material to construct a composition history of the play, allowing the textual multiplicity of the journals, play drafts, letters, and interviews to connect in ways unrestrained by traditional notions of linearity.
Wilfred’s archive contains a multitude of documents, which include drafts of his creative works, correspondence, and a series of personal journals and notebooks. These notebooks are, as Paul Tiessen calls them, “private intellectual journals” that serve as commentary on the massive amount of draft manuscripts (106). The Finding Aid for the Wilfred Watson Fonds demonstrates that the composition of Cockcrow occurred not only within the multiple drafts of the play, but also within Wilfred’s personal journals. At times, his meditations on Cockcrow are recorded in journals of a more personal nature alongside day-to-day observances, lists of letters written, short reviews of books, ruminations on art of various media, and long treatises on literary and artistic theories. Other times, these meditations are recorded in journals reserved exclusively for creative rumination (sometimes on Cockcrow and sometimes on other projects).
How does a researcher approach the complexity of such an archive? Kim Sawchuck encourages an understanding of archive as media because it “emphasizes its character as a complex organizational tool that facilitates or impedes individual and social communication with future generations about past events, through the instantiation of specific protocols and rules of access” (Sawchuck, n.p.). Understanding the archive as not only a collection of documents, but also as an “organizational tool” that can be interpreted as a media in itself opens up possibilities for approaching Wilfred’s fonds.
For Vanessa, the Cockcrow project opens up and explores many questions: What are the strengths and weaknesses of such a relationship between archive and database? Further, how does the researcher best use the interface to present the material to an audience? How can the scholar expand the audience for such a project from the academic to the public? How does the database serve the literary form of drama in particular? How does the co-existence of text on the page and text as performance manifest within a database? Are there visualization tools that allow the researcher to extend the interpretive possibilities of drama in new ways?
The Cockcrow project will be built as a relational database comprised of five potential phases. While “phase one” of the project consists of Vanessa’s post-doctoral work, the subsequent phases are suggestions of where the project could potentially be taken. Phase one will serve as a proof-of-concept of the strength of the database as an organizational tool for archival material, and will see the contents of the database limited to the first act of Cockcrow.
Doctoral student Nick van Orden is part of the University of Alberta’s expansive and collaborative EMiC project (EMiC UA) focussing on the work of Wilfred Watson. Nick is working on two projects with EMiC UA, the first of which involves scanning the Wilfred Watson archive. This project is in its third year, and is estimated to consist of approximately 80,000 scans. Numerous people — including Nick — are involved in this vast endeavour to digitize Wilfred’s papers.
EMiC UA’s other project in which Nick is involved is a small — but very interesting — offshoot of the scanning project. Since December 2012, Nick has been tweeting from the @Wilfred_Watson Twitter account. As the EMiC UA team scans Wilfred’s papers, they flag particularly insightful, pithy, humorous, or poignant passages, which Nick then tweets.
The Twitter account serves two general purposes. First, it works as a marketing platform for the project, helping the team to spread awareness about Wilfred, his work, and the project. Part of EMiC UA’s motivation for increasing awareness — aside from advertising the forthcoming digital collection of Wilfred’s material — is an upcoming exhibition of Wilfred’s work at the University of Alberta Library’s Special Collections, which is set to take place in the fall of 2014. The @Wilfred_Watson Twitter account provides EMiC UA with the opportunity to network with members of the digital humanities and modernist communities.
Tweeting from @Wilfred_Watson has prompted the team to consider several interesting legal, ethical, and theoretical questions related to digitization. How, for example, does EMiC UA negotiate the legality of making public previously unpublished material, to which they have been granted access by the U of A Library, which is, in turn, beholden to Wilfred’s literary executor? To what extent should the scholars intervene in the material they tweet? Should they edit and/or correct the passages that they have select to tweet? Also, what are the ethics of tweeting as a person now dead? What does it mean to put Wilfred in conversation with other long-deceased modernist writers and thinkers? Are these scholars creating a set of false relationships, or are these avatar-based interactions a different (and new) form of what might otherwise be called intertextuality? Although the project is still developing, Nick’s work with Twitter on behalf of EMiC UA provides a unique opportunity to explore these issues, which have implications for the larger digital humanities community as a whole.
At about four months into the project, Nick and the rest of the team are just getting started. Right now, the @Wilfred_Watson Twitter account has amassed 40 tweets and collected 35 followers, and the numbers are growing steadily. Still, the team would like to increase both of these numbers a great deal; this will require more material to tweet, and more time spent monitoring the account. The EMiC UA team is also exploring the possibility of creating a “Wilfred Watson” digital brand, but is wary of the labour involved in establishing and maintaining a social media presence beyond Twitter.
For anyone interested in learning more about EMiC UA’s work on the Twitter account, Nick, Paul Hjartarson, and the rest of the EMiC UA team will be presenting a paper — entitled “Tweeting the @Wilfred_Watson Archive (or, I Tweet Dead People)” — at the CSDH/SCHN 2013 conference (part of Congress) this June in Victoria, BC.
As a doctoral Research Assistant for Stephen Ross and the Modernist Versions Project at the University of Victoria, Katie Tanigawa is neck-deep in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Katie is versioning two witnesses of Nostromo — the 1904 T. P.’s Weekly serial edition and the 1904 Harper & Brothers edition — with the goal of using digital technology to gain insights into the text. In particular, Katie is looking for variants in the naming of central characters in the two versions.
At this point in her project, Katie is in the process of completing markup of Part 3 of the text. She is also using Mandala and Juxta to reveal meaningful differences related to her research interests — namely, the variants in character names and the location of the variants within the two versions of the text. Katie’s work so far has led her to wonder how a Rich Prospect Browsing Interface (RPBI) like Mandala can best be used in tandem with markup to reveal meaningful connections within a single text, as well as differences between multiple witness texts.
Many of the challenges Katie faces with this project centre on the ethics of markup as a critical practice. She is very aware that structural markup and semantic markup serve both performative and descriptive purposes, and that the decisions she makes in marking up the text are interpretive. Through her process, Katie has come to question who counts as a character and what counts as a place. Further, she must decide whether to use the <persName> tag, which is used to indicate a proper name (i.e. “Barack Obama”), or the <rs> (referencing string) tag, which is used to indicate a general-purpose name or character epithet (i.e. “the president”). These distinctions can be highly insightful, as they indicate relationships between characters, and also social and political hierarchies within the text.
Another challenge Katie continues to encounter in her work on Nostromo is workflow. One of her goals is to establish a versioning method that allows for both broad inquiry and specific, research-oriented inquiry, and her workflow is a key factor in determining that method. This has led Katie to question the interoperability and flexibility of this type of research-specific semantic markup.
Katie’s work on Nostromo has raised several questions about the role of digital or computational approaches in enabling critical insights into modernist texts — which is the central mission of the Modernist Versions Project — and as her work progresses, she will be well positioned to begin to answer those questions.
Three-quarters of the way through the Year of Ulysses, the Modernist Versions Project (MVP) is going strong. With the support of partners such as EMiC, the MVP is working on versioning a selection of modernist texts, as well as providing content, hosting chats, and featuring lectures for the Year of Ulysses.
The MVP is a large, collaborative project involving scholars and digital humanists from Canada, Ireland, and the United States, which aims to enable new critical insights into modernist texts that are difficult without digital or computational approaches. Right now, MVP scholars are working on several concurrent projects, including work on James Joyce’s Ulysses, Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, and plans for versioning other texts are in the works for the near future.
Perhaps the most visible and accessible aspect of the MVP at this time is the Year of Ulysses project, which launched on June 15, 2012 with a photo contest. The Year of Ulysses operates on a recurring three-week cycle of digital text releases, Twitter chats, and lectures presented by internationally renowned Joyceans. Every three weeks, the MVP posts one of 18 episodes of the 1922 first edition of Ulysses — which has been digitized by Matthew Kochis and Patrick Belk at the University of Tulsa — on the MVP website. Each text is prefaced with a brief synopsis to situate the reader, and is presented in PDF — a scanned version of the original — and searchable TXT format. This coming Friday will see the release of “Oxen of the Sun,” Episode 14 of Part II of the novel. Check out the MVP’s most recent text release, “Nausicaa.”
Second in the cycle comes the Twitter chat, which is moderated by a Joycean with a particular affinity for that episode. All Joyce fans — from casual readers to graduate students to international experts — are invited to participate in the chats. So far, in addition to seeing participants from Canada, the United States, Ireland, and the UK, the chats have seen participants from as far away as continental Europe and Fiji. Tweeters and viewers can follow the chats using the hashtag “yearofulysses” (#yearofulysses). Other information pertaining to the Year of Ulysses is also featured on Twitter using that same hashtag. Since June 2012, the #yearofulysses tag has amassed over 3 000 tweets, all of which are being archived for future use.
The final element of the Year of Ulysses cycle is the lecture or podcast. Since June 2012, the MVP has posted lectures from Joyce scholars who include Robert Spoo (University of Tulsa), Terence Killeen (James Joyce Centre, Dublin), and Hans Walter Gabler (Munich University). For more information on past and future MVP lectures, please visit the Year of Ulysses schedule.
Kaarina Mikalson is a Research Assistant for “Canada and the Spanish Civil War,” under the supervision of Bart Vautour of Mount Allison University. For this project, Kaarina’s main objective is to compile bibliographic data of all Canadian literature about the Spanish Civil War, which she then enters into the Canadian Writing and Research Collaboratory (CWRC) Repository. In order to do this work, Kaarina travelled to Winnipeg to scan material in the William Kardash Fonds, and subsequently ingested this material into the Modernist Commons. In addition, she just finished creating a clean text version of Charles Yale Harrison’s Spanish Civil War novel Meet Me on the Barricades.
In working on “Canada and the Spanish Civil War,” Kaarina has run into both practical and technical issues. When she arrived at the Archives of Manitoba to access the William Kardash Fonds, she learned that the rules and restrictions governing scanning had changed earlier that week. Kaarina had only one day to work there, and she spent half of it waiting around for archivists to make decisions according to guidelines they were not yet familiar with themselves. As a result, she was not able to scan all the material she set out to scan, and left somewhat frustrated.
Another of Kaarina’s challenges involves the technical side of working on such a large digital project as “Canada and the Spanish Civil War.” Much of the literature on the Spanish Civil War is obscure, so finding accurate information has been challenging. Also, both the CWRC Repository and the Modernist Commons are still under development, which means that Kaarina is limited in what she can do and encounters occasional errors that delay her work. These challenges, however, are not without their positives. Being involved with the Mods Repository and the Modernist Commons at an early stage means that Kaarina can give feedback to the developers, allowing her to influence — at least to some degree — how these repositories take shape. Plus, Kaarina has already seen amazing developments in the Modernist Commons since she started working with it last spring.
Kaarina will continue to be involved with this fast-moving project throughout the spring and summer. Because Bart Vautour and Emily Robins Sharpe have such a clear plan and keep Kaarina well informed of any developments, she finds her work to be very engaging and rewarding — she can see where the project is going, and how her work fits into the bigger picture.
“Canada and the Spanish Civil War” has taught Kaarina a lot about Canadian history, and she anticipates that the project will have a strong influence on her future academic work. Further, Kaarina sees this project as fulfilling an important role in Canadian society by illuminating this fascinating but underrepresented event in Canadian history.
While formal Canadian involvement in World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and multiple peace-keeping assignments is common knowledge, the voluntary enlistment of nearly seventeen hundred Canadians to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is arguably less commonly known. Further, although Spain figured prominently in the creative works produced by modern Canadian artists – who range from Patrick Anderson to Dorothy Livesay to Malcolm Lowry – these works are scattered, inaccessible, or even undocumented. By creating “Canada and the Spanish Civil War: A Digital Research Environment,” an accessible repository of Canadian material, co-directors Bart Vautour (Mount Allison University) and Emily Robins Sharpe (University of Guelph) hope to remedy that issue.
“Canada and the Spanish Civil War” is a three-phase project that aims to collate Canadian material for public consumption in a systematic way as part of The Canadian Writing and Research Collaboratory (CWRC). Right now, Vautour and Robins Sharpe are in the first phase of the project, which requires conducting archival research and gaining digital skills, as well as scholarly consultation and project development. The second phase of the project will build upon the first to prepare and publish a clean-text print anthology, Selected Canadian Writing on the Spanish Civil War, with a scholarly apparatus housed in the Digital Research Environment (DRE). The third phase of the project – which is perhaps the most logistically challenging – will culminate in the creation of a digital collection within the DRE, and will require a massive collation and digitization effort.
At Guelph, Robins Sharpe has been busy co-directing a digital humanities reading group with Dr. Susan Brown, one of her co-supervisors. She is also working hard on skills acquisition for the next phases of “Canada and the Spanish Civil War,” as well as researching and writing an introduction for the project website.
Robins Sharpe also organized and chaired a panel on the Spanish Civil War, “The Spectacle of War,” at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Las Vegas last October. The panel had three presenters – one of whom was Vautour – each speaking on a different genre and national/international grouping of writers. Overall, the panel was well received and led to some interesting intersections and conclusions. Robins Sharpe also presented a paper, “The Wartime Mosaic: Canadian Jewish Literature and the Spanish Civil War,” at the Modern Languages Association convention held in Boston this January.
At Mount Allison, Vautour is working on building a bibliography, doing some archival research, and working with designers to get a start on building a website for “Canada and the Spanish Civil War.” Vautour has hired a Research Assistant, Kaarina Mikalson, to help with some initial digitization.
EMiC is pleased to announce that video recordings of the plenary speakers and keynote presentation at last year’s “Exile’s Return” colloquium in Paris, France are now available online.
Modernism Reaching Out: From Paris to Planetarity
Chair: Dean Irvine (Dalhousie University/Yale University)
Chair: Hannah McGregor (University of Guelph)
Global Migrations and Mutations
Chair: Marta Dvorak (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Keynote Presentation (~16:10:00)
Chair: Gregory Betts (Brock University)
For those who haven’t downloaded QuickTime, please click here. The videos are grouped with those from other conferences at La Sorbonne Nouvelle — just scroll down until you reach “Exile’s Return.”
Kailin Wright, Assistant Professor at St. Francis University, is working on a critical edition of Carroll Aikins’s play The God of Gods (1919). Kailin’s edition seeks to situate the play, which has been out of print since its first and only edition in 1927, within the field of Canadian literary modernism.
In order to take account of the different staging techniques in the play’s four productions (at Birmingham Theatre in 1919 and 1920, Hart House Theatre in 1927, and Everyman Theatre in 1931), Kailin researched the archival holdings both at Birmingham theatre — where she found photographs from the premiere production — and at Hart House theatre. In an interesting twist, Kailin discovered that the Hart House archives contained photographs of the Birmingham production directed by Sir Barry Jackson, suggesting that Jackson’s staging and directorial choices influenced the Toronto performances. Kailin has received written permission from the Sir Barry Jackson estate to publish the Birmingham production photos and archival findings, and she has also been in correspondence with the Carroll Aikins estate. Aikins’s granddaughter has provided oral permission to publish the play, and has offered to help with Kailin’s project through interviews or by allowing Kailin access to Aikins’s manuscripts and library.
The rare and out-of-print 1927 edition of The God of Gods (published in Canadian Plays from Hart House Theatre) serves as the copy text for Kailin’s edition because it best represents the play’s production in Canada. However, this text neglects the productions’ integral music accompaniment (the protagonist is a singer), and offers no critical introduction or textual notes. Kailin’s explanatory notes on the staging techniques will not only supplement the incomplete edition, but also facilitate classroom study of the play and help to foster international interest.
In addition to providing a more complete guide to The God of Gods, Kailin’s edition aims to recuperate the play as a modernist Canadian work featuring overt influences from European and American modernisms. So far, she has completed a draft of the script text with annotations on the Birmingham and Hart House production choices. Currently, Kailin is working on textual notes on literary echoes, including allusions to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Kailin has also researched and is in the process of drafting a critical introduction to her edition.
Kailin’s EMiC stipend has not only enabled her to embark on this important editorial project, but has also provided her with opportunities to share her research findings with fellow scholars, editors, and publishers. In 2010, she presented a paper on her project at EMiC’s Conference on Editorial Problems. A longer version of the conference paper, entitled “Bringing the Text to Life: Editing the Modernist Canadian Play The God of Gods,” will be published as a chapter in Editing Modernism: Textual Scholarship and New Media (edited by Dean Irvine, Matt Huculak, and Vanessa Lent; University of Toronto Press in 2013). Further, an editor from the University of Alberta Press approached Kailin about publishing her edition after EMiC’s Conference on Editorial Problems; Kailin is currently working on a book prospectus for her project.
Nadine Fladd, an EMiC doctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario, is in the midst of writing her dissertation. Her project, “Transnational Conversations: The New Yorker and Canadian Short Story Writers,” explores Canadian short-story writers’ relationships with their editors at The New Yorker magazine. Nadine focusses on the publication histories of stories by Morley Callaghan, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro in the esteemed American institution.
In delineating these authors’ relationships to editors, publishing institutions, and discourses of nationalism, Nadine hopes to reveal the implications of the changing relations of literary production between Canada and the United States throughout the twentieth century. In particular, she is interested in examining the development of the Canadian short story, and the influence Callaghan, Gallant, and Munro had both on the celebrated and geographically specific publication The New Yorker, and on American letters more generally.
The most difficult challenge Nadine has faced so far has been tracking down and accessing the archival materials necessary for the completion of her project. In order to complete her research, Nadine consulted archives in Toronto, Ottawa, New York, and Calgary. While she has enjoyed travelling to the various cities, her project would have moved more quickly — and been less expensive to complete — if she had been able to access the archival materials digitally from her home institution.
Having completed rough drafts of all of the chapters in her dissertation, Nadine is currently working on revisions so that she can submit her dissertation. Time seems to be her biggest obstacle at this point: right now, Nadine must schedule her revision work around her full teaching load and commuting between Laurentian University’s Barrie campus and Humber College in Toronto.
Over its development, and thanks in part to the influence of EMiC events such as the Exile’s Return Colloquium in Paris this past summer, Nadine has shifted the focus of her project. Originally, she envisioned her project as being concerned primarily with issues of nation and national identity in both Canada and the United States. As her archival research progressed, however, Nadine’s project became much more focussed on textual studies. Both her Munro and Callaghan chapters focus on issues of collaboration, reception, and revision more than they focus on nation and nationalism, which were her planned foci. Instead, Nadine provides close readings for various versions of the same stories and their (different) intended audiences. In the future, Nadine would like to see the various versions of these stories available side-by-side — perhaps in a digital format — so that other scholars and students can appreciate and interpret the differences between the iterations.