MITH is pleased to welcome its 2008 Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellow, Tanya Clement, from the Department of English. Tanya's dissertation, The Making of Digital Modernism: Re-reading Modernist Texts with Computer-Assisted Analysis, is genuinely groundbreaking and will contribute new readings and new knowledge to the scholarship on Gertrude Stein as well as a lesser-known figure, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (who was pivotal in the American Dadaist movement). By using a wide range of computational tools and techniques, ranging from text encoding to text mining and visualization, Clement's project is a bracing demonstration of just how completely our readings and understandings of complex literary work can be reconfigured with the intervention of new media.
Clement says, "I am very excited to receive the Winnemore fellowship and start my residency at MITH this semester. Support from MITH provides for an essential combination of practice and theory that ensures my dissertation research in humanities computing and literature will be both productive and ahead-of-the-curve." She adds, "This semester, I will create an electronic sampling of poetry from the manuscripts of dadaist poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. I will use current encoding standards while also augmenting the Versioning Machine (http://v-machine.org/), an open-source tool used for visualizing textual variants. As a result, I will explore the possibility that a digital edition could invigorate scholarly interest in her poetry and the extent to which digital methods meant to facilitate humanist inquiry are still challenged by the difficult work literary study engages."
Clement's dissertation is directed by Matthew Kirschenbaum.