Newswise — The University of Tulsa and Brown University have announced a joint research project to create fully searchable digital editions of journals from the early 20th century. The Modernist Journals Project (MJP), founded and directed at Brown by Robert Scholes, will now be co-directed by Sean Latham, assistant professor of English and editor of the James Joyce Quarterly at The University of Tulsa. Latham was a former project manager of the MJP at Brown.
"The project is an exciting opportunity for us to share the riches of McFarlin Library's Special Collections while enhancing TU's long-standing reputation as a vital center for the study of modern literature. It also reflects an expanding commitment to the possibilities of the digital medium that is re-energizing current scholarship," Latham says.
The MJP will also make available digital editions of other resources useful to students of modern culture and media. All of the editions will be displayed on the MJP site at Brown (http://www.modjourn.brown.edu) as they are completed and will be backed up at TU.
The University of Tulsa is currently working on digital editions of the James Joyce Quarterly, from its founding in 1964 to the present, and on an edition of Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought (1904-1905). Brown is currently completing an edition of The New Age, edited in London by A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922, a project supported by a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
MJP digital editions offer facsimiles of the original pages in PDF format. Those PDF files also incorporate text files keyed to each page, allowing users to search both the entire archive and individual documents for particular words and phrases. Additionally, an evolving editorial apparatus, including biographies, essays, image reproductions, introductions to volumes, and other elements is offered on the site to help orient students and scholars.
The actual work of scanning pages to produce facsimiles and of using optical character recognition to create and edit the text files is done by faculty, graduate students and undergraduates at both schools.
The MJP will provide introductions to each volume, biographies of contributors and images of artworks discussed in the journals. The journals represented will be those that helped shape the transition from earlier modes of cultural production to those called modernist.
The Department of Special Collections at Tulsa's McFarlin Library and the John Hay Library at Brown will be participants in the project. Both libraries have important collections in modernist literature.
A likely future project is a digital edition of The English Review, which was a distinguished modernist journal under the editorship of Ford Madox Hueffer from 1908 to 1911. The McFarlin Library has a complete run of this magazine.
Basic funding for the MJP has been guaranteed by the administrations of both universities, subject to review after four years. The project has both local and external advisory boards. Lori Curtis, head of archives and Special Collections at TU, has served on the MJP External Advisory Board.
Current members of the external advisory board include, Ann Ardis, University of Delaware; Shari Benstock, University of Miami, Fla.; Michael Groden, University of Western Ontario; Wallace Martin, University of Toledo; Robert Spoo, Doerner, Saunders, Daniel & Anderson L.L.P.; and Robert von Hallberg, University of Chicago.
The James Joyce Quarterly was founded in 1963 at The University of Tulsa by Thomas F. Staley, who edited the journal for its first 25 years. Beginning as a modest publication of 40 pages, JJQ grew in size and quality under Staley's guidance and was soon unchallenged as the journal of record on the life and writings of James Joyce. From 1989 to 2001 Robert Spoo edited the journal, overseeing its continuing expansion by encouraging a wide variety of theoretical, critical and historical work on Joyce.
The McFarlin Library's Special Collections, which include more than 110,000 print volumes and 3,000 feet of manuscripts, is internationally recognized as a literary repository of 20th-century British, Irish and American literature, as well as Native American history. Collections include an extensive James Joyce archive, as well as the papers of Richard Ellmann, Jean Rhys, Stevie Smith, Rebecca West and the life archive of V.S. Naipaul.
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