The Modernist Archives Publishing Project is an international book history and DH project that aims to make disparate materials relating to the production and distribution of C20 books more readily available. Currently funded by SSHRC, we have been partnering with archives and libraries to aggregate records held in publishers’ and other archives relating, in the first place, to the early publications of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s iconic Hogarth Press (phase 1 1917-22).
This poster will explore some of the issues we have been engaged with as we develop the data model and structure of MAPP, which takes inspiration from book history models of Darnton’s “communications circuit”, Adams and Barkers’ rejoinder to this, and Drucker’s work on the text as distributed object. Our data model and site pays attention both to the role of human agents in the production and reception of texts and to the materiality, provenance histories and bibliographic details of the texts themselves. Key content types to reflect this are business-person-work-edition-primary object-correspondence-related materials. Yet digitizing the qualitative and (often masses) amounts of quantitative material held in a publishers’ archive in a way that makes it useful for book history, bibliographic and literary critical research is a challenge. The poster will offer some reflections on the structure of archives - both physical in situ as institutional collections and in the ‘virtual’ sense - and highlight some of the decisions we have made with our data model and in the ever thorny problem of how to incorporate so much disparate material into a new open access structure.
Poster size: can be A0 (841/1189) or A1 (594/841)
n.l.wilson@reading.ac.uk