Adam Frank, author of Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (Fordham University Press, 2015), approaches digital archives from a hybrid perspective as a leader of the Radio Free Stein project (radiofreestein.com), a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and media, and a writer and producer of audiodramas. His paper, "When Is an Archive Like a Studio? The Radio Free Stein project," reimagines some of Gertrude Stein's lesser-known plays in the form of a digital archive of audio recordings that interpret the plays in the distinctive form of radio melodrama. These interpretations bring to life questions about the significance of these plays in their historical and media contexts and the ways they become part of new performances and experiences on the part of contemporary users when made accessible through Radio Free Stein: What might a reader be able to think and say about Stein's plays after undergoing the process of staging them sonically? What new affordances for understanding and criticism might emerge from this experience? Examining these questions, Frank shows, requires considering together the conceptual, pedagogical, and creative dynamics of a digital archive as an ongoing performance between contributors and users.
The second paper on the panel, co-presented by Thomas Berenato and Anna Svendsen, Co-coordinators of the David Jones Digital Archive, explores what the poet, writer, and visual artist's most recent editor, Thomas Goldpaugh, has termed Jones's "interpolational imagination," a compositional technique of self-interruption and expansion that poses significant challenges to the creation of a genetic digital edition of Jones's multimedia oeuvre. This paper uses as a case study the genetic edition being prepared for the David Jones Digital Archive of The Book of Balaam's Ass, an abandoned 1930's typescript about the "baptism by cowardice" of a WWI soldier who avoids the worst of a grim battle by falling into the safety of a shell hole. Never published in full, this typescript would be excavated by Jones late in his career to provide the opening and closing items in his final book, The Sleeping Lord (1974). Inspired by Jones's personal experience as a member of the “battalion nuclear reserve” stationed behind the front lines at the Battle of Pilckem Ridge in July and August 1917, The Book of Balaam's Ass suggests a work predicated, through the lens of traumatic experience that is relived in memory and a series of textual self-interventions, on an afterlife in the form of what Berenato and Svendsen call "its author's slow but steady progression by digression" as he continued to return, again and again, to insert new material within existing verses or write, as it were, entire new books within the interstices of old ones. Once identified, these dynamics can be traced beyond Jones's works to a host of other modernist poets and artists.
The final paper in the panel to be delivered by Nikolaus Wasmoen will reflect on the early development of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive, which he serves as Technical Director, to ask whether the new modes of access to the materials of modernist writing that are propagated by their remediation within a contemporary digital archive constitute new modes of literary memory, in the double sense of memory as both a constitutive element of the psyche and as an element of computational and communications media. By creating new ways to access and participate in Marianne Moore's writing as an ongoing process rather than as a series of fixed objects in publication, the digital archive creates new axes within the fields of cultural production, reception, and interpretation. Wasmoen will discuss the Marianne Moore Digital Archive's efforts to edit Moore's voluminous and highly miscellaneous manuscript notebooks, which she used to record bits of nearly every facet of her reading, writing, social, and intellectual life, including: reading notes, recorded conversations participated in or overheard, drafts of poems, travel descriptions, financial records, notes on concerts, lectures, classes, and sermons attended, and other miscellanea documenting an active and increasingly prominent life as part of New York's literary and cultural scene from the 1910s to the 1960s.
This panel will not dwell on technical aspects of digital archiving. Its panelists and presider are instead interested in examining the bounds of the terms that make up a "modernist digital archive," each in their own right as well as in their various combinations. No singular view or definition of "modernism" or of the "digital" or of the "archive" will be pursued, as we hope to engage in a broad theoretical discussion of the multiple forms through which modernism continues to take on new forms and new lives in the digital age, while closely attending to the particularities of given cases studies in Radio Free Stein, the David Jones Digital Archive, and the Marianne Moore Digital Archive. Just as Stein explodes the idea of what a play could be and Jones and Moore explode our conception of the relationship between draft and finished work, we expect, or demand, the digital archives through which these texts and performances will be transmitted to the future to alter or transform the bounds or assumptions we might have formed about the "archive" and of "archiving" as a practice in the wake of modernism and its afterlives.