Mapping Modernism / Modernist Letters Project

This project, currently under development, is developing social and spatial maps of modernist correspondence, with a specific initial focus on the Bloomsbury Group and global modernism. Supported by the Scholars' Lab R&D Group at the University of Virginia, as well as collaborators in Library Science and twentieth-century literary studies, the project employs Omeka's collaborative data collection features alongside the exciting new visualization tool Neatline, due to be released soon. We welcome collaborators who wish to use this platform to develop and publish their own maps of modernist correspondence, as well as technical and theoretical collaborators interested in the "spatial turn" in digital humanities work.

Here's the standard description:
A persistent challenge of transnational modernist studies has been to coherently imagine and narrate an expanded global literary field, without resorting to the rhetoric of center/periphery, master narrative and counter-canon. "Mapping Modernism" proposes that we open up the study of a global literary modernity in a fundamentally new way, taking advantage of dynamic relational databases, social geolocation tools, and geomapping software to construct an expanded social map of interwar modernism. The platform works as a collaborative space for mapping modernist letters; it allows us to chart, for example, the networks of correspondence between Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Fabians, and the League of Nations. The project envisions fundamental changes in the way we study and review claims in modernist studies, foregrounding an open-source, dynamic presentation that opens up new possibilities for the future digital infrastructure both of modernist studies and the digital humanities.

See:

Project

Academic field
English literature
Digital Humanities
Modernist Studies
Affiliation
University of Virginia Scholars' Lab
Project link
Mapping Modernism / Modernist Letters Project
Tools used
Omeka
Neatline
mySQL
Drupal

Collaboration

Help type
Beta testing
Data entry
General digital humanities consulting
Peer review
Programming
Proofreading
Kinds of collaborators
Individual/small group
Faculty
Graduate students
Librarians
IT staff
Help description
We could most benefit from content collaborators, with suggestions on specific editions or collections of correspondence which might productively be mapped with geospatial tools. Graduate students are particularly welcome as collaborators, and no prior experience is required. General peer review and advice from digital humanists is always welcome, and will be solicited after the beta is released. Specialists in PHP and database design are also welcome.
Contact person
Gabriel Hankins
Help needed
Yes
Gabriel Hankins

Tools used

Omeka

Omeka is a content management system designed for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Omeka falls at a crossroads of Web Content Management, Collections Management, and Archival Digital Collections Systems. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability. Omeka allows users to publish cultural heritage objects, extend its functionality with themes and plugins, and curate online exhibits with digital objects.

Omeka on DiRT

Drupal

Drupal is an extremely flexible general content management system with numerous plugins that provide scholar-oriented functionality.

Drupal on DiRT

MySQL

A software application that enables relational databases to be created, managed and queried. The database management system enables multiple users to access a database through an appropriate interface. As an open source tool, MySQL underpins a number of free software projects, such as WordPress, phpBB and other software built on a LAMP infrastructure. Although widely used, there are a number of performance issues that limit its use in some environments. For example, it is unable to use multiple CPU cores to process a single query, potentially limiting its use as a data warehouse. Features:

  • X/Open XA distributed transaction processing (DTP) support
  • Connector/ODBC enables connection to a MySQL server using the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) API
  • Connector/NET enables developers to create .NET applications that use data stored in a MySQL database

MySQL on DiRT

Neatline

Neatline is a tool for the creation of interlinked timelines and maps as interpretive expressions of the literary or historical content of archival collections.

Neatline on DiRT

Project Collaborators