Modernist Magazines and Digital Humanities

Just by casually browsing through Scribner's in the database, it is easy to see that the magazine was very concerned with the war. Every cover boasts an article to be found within that touches on the war. Even the magazines advertisements promote books on the war such as this page (12c) found in Vol. 60, No. 3. All six books promoted here are either about the war or are related to the nations that are participating in the war. Scribner's was a New York based magazine and this issues was published a year before the United States joined in the war effort and seems to show that the American people were curious about the war and the people fighting in the war, especially the French.

There is an interesting moment in a short piece of fiction called "Baytop" by Armisead C. Gordon published in Vol. 57, No. 5, on pages 561-574. The story takes place on a plantation "fifteen years after the close of he war - the only war that ever was or ever could be for the oldtimers of Kingsmill" (561). The author is obviously refering to he Civil War and on first read it could seem a controversial statment to make about recently freed slaves, especially in a story published while another war was raging on. Does the author mean that no feed slave would care about any other war before or after the Civil War? It could also simply be read as the author establishing age and setting of his characters, but in a very interesting way.

          Rosanna Cinquemani    

          In The New Age magazine on September 29th 1921, scientists expressed their opinions on "weapons" used in war such as posionious gas. Sir T. Edward Thorpe states on page 258 of the article entitled "Our Generation" that "Posion gas is no merely contary to european military tradition; it is repugnant to the right feeling of civilized humanity. It in no wise displaces or supplants existing instruments of war, but creates a new kind of weapon, of limitless power and deadliness." He is stating how it's against the right way we should be feeling or going about the war. It is no longer a war with just weapons and the most skillfull wins but has become a war where posion gas is used against civilized humanity to kill people; it is the opposite of traditional war weapons.

              This whole article speaks about how war is something evil and works against all morals. Edward Moore, the author of this article, states people aren't against war because of the simple fact that it goes against anything we call "human", like the existence of living or the commandement which states, "love thy neighbor". People have become repulsed by the thought of war because it is something more deeper then this, it is the fact that war is a "terrible" crime that goes against the 'spirit of man". In other words, it is and never was a fair fight nor is it a form of civilized compromise. It is killing of perhaps innocent people so that people gain more power or money for themselves. People, Edward Moore states, are killing one another for reasons that are immoral and disgusting. Scientists also believe that the tactics that are being used to kill have become harsh and "evil".   

     In this article by Edward Moore, he discusses how life was like for the generation living in America after World War One had ended. This article can be found in the September 15, 1921 isssue of The New Age. This article was particulary interesting to me, because when I was first browsing through the articles in this issue, I skimmed through an article on Foreign Affairs and then an article on World Affairs. Both of the previous articles dealt with freedom and the financial situations of Europe. When I came across "Our Generation", it spoke about America and the unemployment rate and situation that we faced right after the war. I think that he titled this artilce "Our Generation" to show how a new generation has formed that Moore is disgusted with. He wants to show how this generation that formed is not like the one that he grew up in, and that this genertion of people is one that he wishes he wasn't a part of, based on their poor decisions and lack of intelligent governing.

     Research tells me that the year 1921, was one of the worst years to find employment in America. The rate of unemployment during this year skyrocketed as a result of end of war production, as well as the influx of labor from returning troops. Global trade also contributed to this financial crisis; America had a wartime inflation caused by the borrowing and printing of money to fund the war effort. Moore quotes "The Condition of the unemployed is becomming worse and worse; and the withdrawal of the unemployment dole from thousands of human beings shows more clearly than most of us can endure how inadequate is our current amount of goodness and intelligence to deal with tragedy." Some women had also managed to hold onto the jobs they had aquired during the war, making it even harder for men to find work. The frustration of the removal of the unemployment dole shines through in this article, making America seem unintelligent and inadequate to make logical decisions during a time of need. The removal of the unemployment dole basically took away applications from those who were willing and able to work after the war.   

Elsie Dwyer

Maja Vukosavljevic

Jenny Luczak

Editing the Time Line

On the time line, fix errors of non-attribution of a magazine title, genre,
author, topic, etc.

          One of the first things we decided to do was make sure that all of the magazine titles were uniform. We went through them, changing those entries that said "Scribner's Magazine" rather than "Scribner's" or "Tyro" rather than "The Tyro" or "DANA" rather than "Dana."  Then set off to take care of the dates. As per the instructions we received about writing out the dates at the beginning of the semester, I added the first month and the first of the month where they were missing for those yearly and monthly magazines. Then, I tackled the genres section.

          One of the biggest problems was in describing the pieces of art. What one might consider a sketch another might consider a drawing. It was difficult to tell what was a painting from the images, and some users are more exact than others in defining the pieces. Some had written that they were paintings, others watercolors, others drawings or sketches, sculptures or pictures of sculptures. It was a mess. We decided to, as we had done with the tags, make it as user friendly and simple as possible: Art. If one wanted to get more specific in searching through the fields of art they could always use the magazine titles, tags, and artists.  Furthermore, we hoped that the descriptions, which we left unedited so as to preserve the authenticity of our classmates work as well as for grading purposes, could offer the kind of specific information a searcher might need. Also, because we have included all the URLs, they could simply look at the piece directly.

         Another problem I ran into was "Editorial" and "Editorial Comment" and "Editorial Content." I changed all of these to "Editorial," and "Essay" or "Letter" again, to keep it as simple and easy as possible for searches. This covers everything from Blast manifestos to Harriet Monroe's pieces in Poetry, which are often described as such: "Editorial; Essay." With the Blast piece "To Suffragettes," which could be described as a letter or an essay, as with much of the work of Blast, I described it as "Editorial; Essay; Letter." This way it will come up in a number or searches. It is difficult to define what much of the non-poem written work of Blast is, as it fits into so many genres. So we kept it as wide as possible.

        "Article" or "Essay" became confusing. What is the difference between them? We decided that an article is written by a staff writer. But students cannot be expected to figure out who worked for the magazine, and establish the point of the piece, so I changed all of them to "Essay." If one is looking for a long body of text written by anyone they should search the "Essay" field. If it is not a poem or a play or an art, it's an essay. We also considered that an essay can be an article, but an article is not always an essay. Celebrity gossip, for instance, could be considered an article, but not an essay. It might be argued that this is not true, that celebrity gossip can support a thesis with implicating evidence, and it is perhaps for this reason that we felt it fit--if not counter intuitive--to combine the two as Essay.

"Poem and Illustration" and "Story and Illustration" were changed to "Story; Art" or "Poem; Art." I also added "Art" as a tag where it was needed for these pieces.

          Though it only appeared once, Jenny had entered an entry about a Walt Whitman quote that appeared in the back pages of Poetry. Assuming that this is significant enough to stand alone for now, and assuming that there will eventually be others to be entered in, I left this as a genre.

          Other small-scale changes included making sure each entry said "Advertisement" rather an "Advertising" or "Story" rather than "Short Story." We left "Poem" and "Play" obviously, as well as "Novel" for serialized novels, which are obviously different from "Story" and Jenny's many entries about "Cover Art" and "Magazine Emblem" (Well, somebody has to blaze the trail here).

Simplify tags that are close variants of another term, either by spelling or meaning and correct errors of multiple tag allocation.

          By July our class had named pictures and prose in the modernist journals in over thirty different ways. Some of the finer choices included Fish, Grape Nuts, Breasts and Ham while others were more specific: Feminism, Female Identity, Drunkard and Misogyny. As you can see, we covered quite a bit of territory. To scale down the tags, we grouped things together into broader categories as best we could, and left some of the genre section to fill in details where appropriate. What follows is a list of some of the combining we did, and why:

Change includes Tradition, Progression, and really any piece that touches on the subject of movement, good or bad.

Visual entries are cataloged under Art if the entry contains your own interpretation, i.e. the picture may relate to society or religion, these are added as extra tags.

In many cases the way the cataloger is using the prose or image determines the way it is categorized: Many of the advertisements, for instance, were characterized with reference to an the thesis of an essay. This occurred often in the case of Gender which we have expanded here to include men, women, feminism, female identity, etc.

Something tagged as Society talks about human nature or relationship between humans in groups, Culture does pretty much the same thing, but also specifies a country or culture

Why use the term Emotional Distress? Because that is simply what some poems are about: identity crisis or utter sadness. In this case you've got to call it what it is.

Age includes poems, prose or Art concerning both Youth and Old Age.

Although there was an Imperialism category, it was the only type of government which was specified while other entries were tagged as Society which could have been tagged as Government. For a while we had a Government category and an Imperialism category, but later combined them.

Epistemology and Existentialism? There are no lies here, Epistemology was the tag of one particular gardener, and she thinks it fits that particular play perfectly. Sartre would probably have a fit over this, nonetheless, its use indicates that the piece discusses some element of existence: time, our understanding of ourselves, etc.

Modernity is included in particular art selections because they refer to "modern art"pieces (as in the Tyro) or are visual copies of such pieces. The instance in "Le Petite Journal de Refusee" is used because the image refers to contemporary writers.

Vorticism and Cubism were under debate as to whether they should be a Tag or a Genre. Ultimately, it was decided since both could and often are both used in describing one entry, they should be given Tag status so that any given entry could be implicated in both categories (on the time line, only one genre entry can be made for each entry).

Unmentioned entries have been considered unique enough in that which they describe about the entry so as not to be clumped into something larger just yet. Each is additionally self explanatory for the purpose of tagging in the future. Lastly, and for the record: Grape Nuts and Ham were moved into the Advertisement tag, as that's what they were. Breasts has naturally been relocated to Nudity.

Fill in tags for any items that you notice to be missing and fixing the URLs

         We carefully went through all the URLs to ensure accurate linking to the actual documents. Our job was two fold: filling in missing URLs and correcting incorrect ones. Where URLs were missing we had to reference the coordinates provided to us such as magazine, volume, edition and page number to locate the correct URL. If these happened to be inaccurate then a more laborious approach was taken and we searched through the “content” page on the MJP page for the title indicated on the feed spreadsheet.

          Incorrect URLs such as “tiny URLs” which compress longer URLs were removed and replaced with the original. URLs ending with .pdf were also removed and replaced. These .pdf URLs lead to the enlarged PDF pages were deemed not as useful because they lead to a specific page of the magazine independent from the rest of it versus putting it into perspective to the remainder of the magazine. If only the PDF is there, people will not have access to the website from your image and cannot see the the magazine that exists around the text, which is often times of equal importance.

          Lastly we re-visited the URLs to ensure that the correct page numbers were indicated on the time line. When going through the incorrect and missing URLs we noticed that some of our classmates were noting the number of the “thumbnails” versus the actual page numbers within the journals. We thought this warranted our attention as well.

         When correcting the URLs we also paid attention to weather or not the correct titles were used on the time line. There were a few instances of people naming things incorrectly. For example there was one piece that was titled “poem” versus the actual name, etc.

          In conclusion, we found editing the time line to be a slow and meticulous process. When something was noticed wrong on the actual time line, it was often difficult to find the error in the time line. The find and replace option was offered near the end of the project which was of a great help, but also dangerous since it searches the whole document the replace all option could not be used at the risk of changing words found in bodies of text other than the tags or genres section. Something can also be said for some guidelines in what is grouped at a tag and what is grouped as a genre. We have provided some here from our research, but a more unified method would be very helpful. If the archivist had an option to refer two genres to one topic independently of one another it would give the genres section more versatility in defining the specifics while the tags sections could be used for general categories.

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I would really like to look into the way that The New Age viewed the Russians. From our discussions earlier in class and my readings so far I see that the contributors to The New Age were very opinionated about the political situation in Russia. I don't think that the contributors were pro-Communist. The editors as well realized that there was a political problem in Russia that needed to be fixed. There were many editorials written and many letters to the editor about the situation in Russia and what could be done to "fix" it. I will choose a couple of editorials and some essays to write about the way that Russia was viewed by The New Age. 

As noted in one of our earlier discussions I think it would be interesting to see how Russia was included in the magazines during the Modernist Era even though the movement did not reach that country. I am open to any and all suggestions.

While looking through Scribners I noticed a few representations of African Americans and Africans - one claiming to be factual and two so far in fiction - that are obviously written from the standpoint of those on the outside looking in. The "factual" book is available on google books and I am in the process of reading the two stories within the book that contain interactions with African people - or as the book calls them "savages". What is interesting to me from what I read is that there is little understanding of the nuances of African life as well as African-American life dispite the relatively close proximity. My paper would explore this obvious racial divide of the time.

     Rosanna Cinquemani

      In my final paper I would like to write about The Harlem Renaissance. I would be using the magazine entitled "Crisis" that has not yet been added to the MJP but will be added shortly, as previously discussed. I would discuss the Harlem Renaissance in general while comparing it to the magazine and how the magazine expressed emotions going on during the African American movement in Harlem.

In my final paper, I plan to discuss an issue in the 1910 Collection Magazine, entitled Cosmopolitan. I will give a brief history of the Cosmopolitan Magazine, and how it has changed over the past century. I will touch on articles, poems, and stories discussed in this issue, while making strong attempts to compare how the magazine has changed from then to the current magazine that is still sold in many stores today. In this comparison, I will bring up issues of gender, femininity, family, school, love, lust and how the female empowerment has influenced the magazine to transform from what it was, to what is has become today.

For my final paper, I would like to discuss the influence of the French language and culture in regard to the work in the magazines, and on the Modernist movement, particularly in earlier magazines such as Rhythm and Le Petit Journal des Refusees. I would like to delve into what may have been particularly pivotal in France that held such sway over the art of the movement of the time. My paper will explore various allusions to French culture, use of the language, as well as full articles published in French, and what their significane was in the context of the magazines and literary and artistic world of the time.

I would like to talk about the representation of female identity/consciousness in the magazines, particularly Wheels and Coterie, with a focus on the poems of Iris Tree in multiple numbers of both magazines.  I will discuss the poems by Sitwell and Tree from Wheels that I wrote about for the group project, further contextualizing them among Tree's more sexually overt post-war poems in numbers 4-7 of Coterie, as well as poems by another female writer, Amy Lowell.  I hope to include an analysis of war vs. post-war effects in these poems, as they pertain to an emerging frankness of sexuality and self-awareness.