After a brief pause to reevaluate resources, aims, and methods, the Modern British archive of the Foreign Literatures in America project is back on track and slowly making progress. I’ve recently come to appreciate even more Peter Mallios’ previous blog posts comparing the FLA project to a sea voyage, both in terms of the excitement it holds for potential discovery and in terms of the daily routine of rote, occasionally monotonous, activities that it takes to sail a ship…or build an online archive. It’s been a long few weeks at the scanning machine! Of course, there have been small but extremely rewarding discoveries along the way, and, as it did for Joseph Conrad, our time “at sea” has provided space for reflection. In this blog post, I’d like to share how the Modern British sub-team of the FLA project has remapped its goals and focus, as well as some of the questions and ideas that have come up on our journey.
To briefly fill-in anyone just joining the conversation, the FLA is a project that seeks to understand the significance of literature written by foreign authors in the United States. (For a more extensive description, you can check out the project information page here.) The Modern British archive is a sub-project focused on the reception of modern British authors. Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland and eventually became a British citizen, is our first focus-writer. We began our work this past fall by organizing an enormous amount of print archival materials on the reception of Conrad that has been gathered by Peter Mallios and his students over the past several years. These materials covered the length of Conrad’s career and beyond, from contemporary reviews of Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), to personal reminiscences of individuals who met Conrad during his only trip to the U.S. in 1923 to reflections on the impact of his works written well after his death in 1924.
Our original efforts were put into scanning as much of this material into an OCR-able format. However, after learning more about sentiment analysis and what it can potentially do, and also after reevaluating our initial resources, some of which consisted of copies that we found would not produce OCR-able scans, we decided to adopt a new strategy. We both narrowed our data set in terms of years and headed back to the library to gather more materials. We decided to focus on the latter half of Conrad’s career, beginning with the publication of Chance, which first appeared in serial form in 1912. It was published as a book in 1913 and became his greatest commercial success to-date and marked an important milestone in Conrad’s transition from the relative obscurity of his early career to the widespread popularity he enjoyed later. Our data set will extend to 1926 to include reviews of and references to the last published original collection of Conrad’s short stories, Tales of Hearsay (1926). We are particularly interested in understanding Conrad’s shift from a lesser known to a popular writer in the United States. We are further interested in how the specific group of women readers contributes to this shift. Our work will build on that of Susan Jones, whose groundbreaking Conrad and Women (1999) explores Conrad’s relationship to women, both in terms of women within his personal life and women as a set of readers that Conrad’s works engage and respond to. In contrast, our research will focus on women readers as reviewers, as writers who actively create an idea of Conrad within the public sphere.
In compiling our new data set, we have drawn on our own previously mentioned collection, tracking down alternative copies of any materials that cannot create scans readable by our OCR software. We’ve also used Theodore George Ehrsam’s A Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (1969) as a resource for identifying materials not already in our collection. We now have an extensive list of six hundred and fourteen articles to track down, which continues to grow. We’ve located many of these articles at the Library of Congress and the University of Maryland’s own libraries. Numerous original journals from the early twentieth-century are stored in off-campus shelving at UMD, and the staff at McKeldin Library has been a wonderful help in obtaining these materials. We’ve begun the scanning process, and, as of this week, we have roughly one hundred and sixty-six files scanned, comprising just over eighty articles, although some of the earliest scans produced from our initial materials may not be OCR-able. We have not yet finalized our sentiment analysis questions, but we anticipate that many of them will be similar to those used for the Russian Author Initiative. (While we belong to the same fleet, we’ve got a somewhat smaller crew, and we’re not quite as far along.)
Obviously, we still have an enormous amount of work to do. However, while standing at the scanner, it’s hard not to think forward to what this archive might some day look like, and what it might potentially do. Two issues in particular have occurred to me that we may need to delve into as we proceed. 1.) With both the Modern British archive and the Russian Author Initiative, we’ve considered the issue of how much supplementary material to provide users. On the one hand, such material would serve to allow users to understand what they read in context. On the other hand, scanning supplementary materials takes up resources, both in terms of time and storage space. One comprise we might consider would be to include within the site descriptions of the journals and newspapers our materials come from, including political affiliations. 2.) A fair amount of the reviews we have found are either unsigned or merely initialed. If we are serious about tracing the role of women reviewers in Conrad’s reception, we are going to have to come up with a method for tracking down these names. (Any suggestions readers of this blog may have as to how we can go about this, beyond Google, would be greatly appreciated!) Identifying these reviewers will be an additional step in our process, but could dramatically affect our results.
Jennifer Wellman will receive her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland in May 2012. She is an Executive Editor of the FLA Project.