Alice Staveley, Michael Widner & Helen Southworth: "Book History Meets Digital Humanities: Designing for the Diasporic Archive in The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP)"

The intensive materialist turn in the ‘new modernist studies’ of recent years, with its focus on context, history, and archive, gives a modernist spin to an old academic chestnut: if the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, just where is Hamlet? Or, for that matter, The Waste Land or To the Lighthouse? With the recent digital turn in academic humanities, the potential to make the geographic whereabouts of the modernist archival object both newly visible and newly situated are manifold but unplumbed. MAPP is an international DH initiative whose six collaborators—in the UK, USA, and Canada—are building a critical digital archive of vastly dispersed documents related to modernist book production to better grasp the complex personal and institutional networks behind the publishing history of modernism. In this talk, three members of the team will discuss: the genesis of the project; its aspirations to bridge book history with digital practice; the design of the interface; the new capabilities and challenges of collaborative practice; and our plans for the site’s future. Our collaboratively written book, Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities, will be published by Palgrave in its New Directions in Book History series later this year.

Alice Staveley is Lecturer and Director of Honors in the Department of English, Stanford University where she teaches courses on modernism, contemporary British fiction, Canadian literature, Virginia Woolf, and women’s fiction. She received her DPhil from Oxford University, and has published widely on Virginia Woolf’s narrative theory, and her role as modernist publisher, including the history of Woolf’s hitherto ‘lost’ marketing agent, Norah Nicholls. Her current book project is Modernism in the Making: Virginia Woolf and The Hogarth Press.

Michael Widner works for the Stanford University Libraries' Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research as the Academic Technology Specialist for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. He works with faculty and their research assistants as consultant or collaborator on digital humanities and instructional technology projects, helping to organize and present events for the Digital Humanities Focal Group. He also teaches courses on the intersection between the digital and the literary. He received his PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 specializing in medieval Britain and France with a focus on romance, fabliaux, and Latin chronicles. He works in Middle English, Old French, Latin, Old English, Python, Javascript, Perl (deprecated), PHP, a few other machine languages, and on the command line.

Helen Southworth is Associate Professor of English at Clark Honors College, University of Oregon. Her research focuses on the modernist period, and she has published books and articles on a range of writers including Virginia Woolf, Colette, John Hampson, Ford Madox Ford, George Borrow, and Douglas Goldring. She has published The Intersecting Lives and Realities of Virginia Woolf and Collette (Ohio State University Press, 2004) and edited Leonard and Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Production (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Southworth’s biography of interwar British writer and musician Francesca Allinson, Fresca: A Life in the Making. A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath is forthcoming from Sussex Academic Press in 2017.