Modernist Magazines and Digital Humanities

 This being the first time I have ever "blogged", I found the process far more confusing than I suppose most others in the class did.  I found the timelining, and content creation to be simple enough, but I found myself stressing over the website/timeline as a whole in terms of overall organization.  Though it should not have frustrated me that there were misleading keywords or categories that overlapped, or were lower-case, etc. I suppose it made me question the value of internet sources--- where/who they came from? what was reliable?  In the end, it really motivated me to keep my own posts as objective, and when applicable, as factually correct as possible.  In terms of the actual timeline, I found it interesting to note when certain writers who I was now more familiar with, were writing.  Also, it is a good reference for works of art by a specific artist, whose contributions were now organized by keyword.

Working on the timeline has been fairly simple considering that the directions and columns are easily recognizable. I feel that it doesn't take very long to post on the timeline once you have chosen your topic and literary work. I have never worked with this kind of a timeline before and I find it interesting to see what other peope in the class have written, and to also give myself the opportunity of letting others see what I enjoy reading, and how I have responded to the pieces that I choose to write about. Working on the timelines in my collaborative assignment has been successful because I was able to catch a glimse and get some insight as to what my group members were reading and writing about in regards to our topic. I think that the timeline makes our discussions easier and opens up the lines of communication within our groups. Even though we each wrote our timelines individually, we all came together in the end to discuss our pieces and responses to them. I don't mind the timeline because I see it as an effective tool in both individual and collaborative work.

Working on the Timeline has been fairly simple to grasp from the beginning - it's a basic excel spreadsheet, and as an auditor for 2 years I dealt with spreadsheets everyday. Entering the information and tagging certain works of literature and art is a different story. Whenever it comes to tagging a piece of literary or art work, I always wonder the following: am I adding too much information? am I seeing something in this piece of work that others will not see? etc... For instance, I was looking at an ink drawing today titled "Ecstacy" in The Owl and I had my own understandings of the art work. But when I asked my little sister about what she thought of the piece it was completely different. So that makes me wonder whenever I describe a literary work am I describing it by using "Anna's Glasses" or am I giving the unbiased version of the literary work? That brings me to think, do others do the same thing? Did John Doe describe "Poem A" using his own understanding of the poem? Is this what we really want to be doing? I think that if we are laying out the Timeline for future scholars we should give a completely unbiased description of the literary/art work that we find in the magazines. I guess I will have to turn off my analytical skills for the Timelining project.

I'll admit that I'm usually one of those students that hates group work. It can be very nerve wracking for someone who is particular about their school work. Yet, the timeline in this class has been an eye-opening experience for me. The Modern Journals Project has so much information that it would be impossible to give everything its proper attention within a six week summer course. With the timeline I find things that I may have missed or overlooked but that my peers have noted. Most of what is on the timeline is pretty interesting stuff and should be since we are taking the time to post it. I also am amazed by the technology involved to turn the spreadsheet into timeline and seeing each other work on the spreedsheet in real time.

Working on the timeline has been a unique and rewarding experience so far. In particular the timeline seems to be useful when working with a topic that appears in a number of journals. As so much in the study of modernist journals requires cross-referencing not only a number of issues, but a number of publications, the timeline's ability to isolate by theme is very useful. Additionally it is very exciting to feel that our work is will provide a future resource to students and scholars. As the trailblazers on this project we unfortunately cannot rely on any previous work, but there is also satisfaction in laying the groundwork and problem solving.

Use of the timeline as a device for constructing these various blogs has been extremely useful in organizing my own thought process in accordance to the identity of this movement through these magazines. It offers visiual aid in helping process the date and its relation to the subject matter of a piece. It is displayed in a way that makes it interesting to see when these materials we are writing about separately appeared in accordance sequentially to one another. Moving away from the turn of the twentieth century, towards World War I, and beyond, the timeline maps the procession of context within these publications. It is interesting to see what types of articles become more and more prominent, as well as what topics are more frequently covered by various authors over the course of those twenty or so years.

As a group, the timeline did not seen to own any particular effect of our overall product, the final essay we contrived; however, use of the timeline on an individual basis almost acted as an outline would. To put my various pieces on the timeline helps me organize my own thoughts, and internally maps out what it is I want to discuss. It reflects the pieces I choose in context to each other, and works great as reference, considering the MJP website is somewhat tedious and time consuming to navigate. It acts as an interesting tool, but the three of us working together hardly used the timeline collaboratively, once we discussed how we would link our separate pieces.

                 Working with the time line has been an interesting experience. The excel format of the time line reminded me of your typical science project lay out. The inputted the information is suppose lead for something pretty to come out in the end after formatting what ever the topic of chose into a graph or table. I think of the time line as one big class science project hopefully proving the conclusion of the hypothesis laid out for our experiment in the beginning of the semester. Even with the class slowing growing smaller the time line is still expanding beyond my expectations. I like getting to the lab and inputting what I have read or have come across while exploring the magazines. It is interesting to see how many topic coincide and how much information one article can hold. Also its interesting to see what other people have come into interest with. Many of my fellow class mates have chosen to continue along the same subject line. Which is just a fun little aspect of the time line. I agree that it dose have it flaws when it comes to sorting each topic. There are too many little subject lines and its easy to get confused if something is a topic or just another aspect of the article, poem or portrait with in the magazine. Overall it’s a exercise to get us to explore the magazines further than we would if an assignment was just to read any article . This gives us incentive to actually read several articles and get into the minds of the scholars of the early modernist movement.

The timeline didn't have a large overall impact on the way my group and I worked together to construct our essay.  This probably has much to do with the fact that our magazine, Dana, while covering a broad range of opinions, was nevertheless quite focused on the Irish angle of every topic, on national identity and politics, and relevant literature.  This specific bent made synthesis in our essay-writing fairly simple, in my opinion: although my topic of "identity" may seem somewhat unrelated to Abra's topic of "nature," for example, the very Irish interests of the editors gave us a helpful foundation for making connections.

On the whole, however, taking part in the development of this timeline is pretty satisfying.  Creating a small summary blurb for each piece that I've read is a nice way to organize my thoughts and ideas for the written assignments and the way the timeline tool categorizes and unifies seemingly disparate pieces from seemingly disparate magazines creates new crossroads for exploring and doing research.  As far as what I've included from my own reading, so far, it's really just been what's caught my eye, based on my personal interests, etc. Plotting our findings in this way, in a chronological fashion, but also according to themes and genres, based on our own individual interests, seems a diverse and unpredictable, yet inclusive way to not only map the work we've done with the magazines but also for creating a new means of research.   In addition to being able to search through links based on "author," "genre," "topic," etc., it's also interesting to view only those entries made by a specific class member, so that we can individually track our own progress. It's great to watch the project develop and I look forward to seeing the final result.

     I enjoyed working on the timeline quite a bit. The spread sheet method of entry took very little time to get used to, and makes for easier scanning of articles now that I know what information I should write down which will have to be entered later. I had a bit of frustration trying to move the timeline to the right or left so as to find the articles I posted, but besides that, the program also navigates very well as a research tool. The way it allowed me to work with the texts was absolutely the most enjoyable part of the program.

     To prepare for our lab class last week, I entered all the texts I had been working with in the timeline. I thought that the MJP would be bogged down with eveyrone using it at the same time, and figured I would save myself load up time by being able to see the images without going through the labrynthian search procedure. Turns out that by entering the texts before the actual writing is done helped me to approach the content in a new way. Since I had already entered the Poetry cover images for an earlier class, I could see the way the newly entered texts interacted over time with the changing covers. The timeline is actually my favorite part of these assignments.

In the beginning it started out pretty hard trying to gete all of our ideas on the same page. None of us could find one specific theme that exemplified the whole magazine. The magazine is filled with so much writings and we did not want to have to sit and read through each issue. We eventually came together and decided that it would be easier if we each chose one genre to look at and then write our paragraph about it. After that decision, it was pretty easy to get things done. It was also kind of confusing to then try to figure out how to connect our ideas because none of us came up with the same idea that would connect the different genres in the magazine. We decided that it made sense that there were so many different themes because the editor was probably trying to cover as many broad topics as possible. The differences in genres is what unified the magazine.

The timeline aspect of it was different from working on our essay. We did not really need to work together for that part. We each picked the specific works that we wanted to enter in the timeline and we did it on our own. To me that was almost like a separate assignment because it really didn't have that much to do with the writing of the essay. I do think that the timeline is a cool and useful tool to search for certain works of art or essays that other people find interesting. It is nice to see what other people think is important and it also allows me to look at things in different perspectives.