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project: In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
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| Project start date: 2009-08 | Project end date: 2009-08 |
In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is an electronic edition of poetry by the Dadaist artist, performer, and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. This scholarly edition comprises digital surrogates and transcriptions of multiple manuscript versions of twelve poems by Freytag-Loringhoven. Work on this digital edition began as part of the dissertation entitled "The Makings of Digital Modernism" by Tanya Clement. A portion of the dissertation is included here as the essay "Knowledge Representation and the Networked Text in In Transition." The manuscripts are housed in the Papers of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, which are among the holdings in Special Collections of the University of Maryland (UM), College Park, Libraries. Tanya Clement created the digital surrogates of the manuscripts and transcribed and encoded them in TEI P5 XML. In addition, Clement augmented this instantiation with the free, open-source Javascript application called the Versioning Machine (v.4.0), which underlies the interface and allows for the cross-comparisons between these digital surrogates.
Freytag-Loringhoven created these twelve texts during a time of transition in her life, between 1923 and 1927, when she moved from New York to Berlin and finally to Paris. In Transition sheds light on a moment of transition in the culture of little magazines — it illuminates the changing technologies of conversation during the 1920s as well as those of the first decade of the twenty-first century. These twelve poems all participate in the performance of Freytag-Loringhoven's poetry by and through multiple and varied relationships within the textual network.
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| Data modelling | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Image enhancement | Data structuring and enhancement |
| Preservation | Strategy and project management |
| Visualisation | Data analysis |
The manuscripts are housed in the Papers of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, which are among the holdings in Special Collections of the University of Maryland (UM), College Park, Libraries. The bibliographic information for each poem includes specific information on the physical location of the original manuscript (series, box, and folder numbers). In addition, individual pages or leaves of manuscripts are identified by the corresponding reel and frame numbers of the microfilm edition of the Freytag-Loringhoven Papers. Folder and reel information is included in the bibliographic citation for each poem.
Tanya Clement created the digital surrogates of the manuscripts included in the edition and transcribed and encoded them in TEI P5 XML. In addition, Clement augmented this instantiation with the free, open-source Javascript application called the Versioning Machine (v.4.0), which underlies the interface and allows for the cross-comparisons between these digital surrogates.
Three primary relationships connect this digital network of texts:
1. Reception History: During the period between 1927 and 1929, three of the twelve poems included in the edition ("Café Du Dome," "Xray," and "Ostentatious") were published in transition. Five additional poems—"Ancestry," "Christ — Don Quixote — St. George" (a subsection of "Contradictory Speculations"), "Cosmic Arithmetic," "Sermon On Life's Beggar Truth," and "A Dozen Cocktails Please"— were under consideration for publication by the transition editors for future issues, although ultimately rejected.
2. Material Space: In some cases, draft versions of certain poems appear on the verso or in the margins of the manuscripts for draft versions of other poems. For instance, different drafts of "Café du Dome," "Ancestry" and "Sermon" appear on drafts of "Ostentatious" and "Orchard Farming," "Sermon," "Christ — Don Quixote — St. George"; a draft of "Ostentatious," appears on a version of "Xray."
3. Themes: There are many thematic ties among the poems. The remaining three poems ("Purgatory Lilt/Statements by Circumstanced Me," "Orgasmic Toast," "Matter Level Perspective") share similar scientific themes, while images of "radiance" appear in "Orgasmic Toast," "Sermon on Life's Beggar Truth," "Purgatory Lilt," and "Xray" and mathematic formulas in "Orgasmic toast," "Purgatory Lilt," and "Cosmic Arithmetic."
The images included in In Transition are JPEGs derived from TIFFs scanned at 600 dpi by Tanya Clement in early 2008. The Versioning Machine interface, which utilizes XSLT and JSP to transform the XML documents, is based on version 4.0. All deviations from this version were implemented by Tanya Clement in 2008.
“Datamining, visualizations, and collaborative application: critical trends in literary scholarship?” in Literary Studies in a Digital Age: A Methodological Primer, ed. Ken Price and Ray Siemens (under contract, MLA 2010).
| Other institutions involved: |
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| University of Maryland-College Park Libraries |
| Principal staff member: | Tanya Clement |
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| Other staff: | |
| External expertise: |
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| This project description was developed as part of the ICT Guides project. |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | Tanya Clement |
| Title | In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven |
| Record created | 2009-12-03 |
| Record updated | 2010-01-25 16:38 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3168 |
| Citation of record | Tanya Clement: In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3168> created: 2009-12-03, last updated 2010-01-25 16:38 |
