Multiplying Access: the Marianne Moore Digital Archive's Tools and Methods for
Collaboration

Nikolaus Wasmoen

nlwasmoe@buffalo.edu

University at Buffalo (State University of New York) United States of America

Introduction

The Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA) has

begun to publish digital editions of the 122 manuscript

notebooks of Modernist poet Marianne Moore. The notebooks contain a plethora of
materials, include reading notes, recorded conversations Moore participated in
or overheard, drafts of poems, travel descriptions, financial records, notes on
concerts, lectures, classes, and sermons Moore 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. These unique resources
pose significant resistance to accessing the trove of literary and cultural
data they contain: they have never been published in any form, can be
visited by appointment at a library in Philadelphia for only limited hours
during the week, most of the notebooks are written in a cramped, uneven hand
with frequent abbreviation and shorthand, Moore repurposed calendars and other
cheap or free items that include preprinted material interspersed with her
writing, many notebooks are now too fragile for normal handling, and previous
attempts at conservation have led to the disordering of many pages. The
unfamiliar and sometimes obscure historical and cultural references that are
needed to trace the broad scope of Moore's readings and activities present an
additional layer of difficulty for most of the potential audience that could
take advantage of the notebooks for literary, historical, or cultural research.
In response to these challenges, the MMDA has created a team of Moore scholars
and scholarly digital editors at three universities and partnered with the
Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors (CUBS), an automated handwriting
recognition and machine learning lab at the University at Buffalo.

This paper reflects on our efforts to increase access with respect to the
notebooks in several senses: design choices with respect to the digital
editorial apparatus needed to make the notebooks usable to non-specialists; the
implementation of a HubZero 2.0 collaborative hub platform, designed for use in
the sciences and engineering, for a humanities project; and the development of
a customized, integrated editor/viewer based on existing digital manuscript
editing tools that can enable non-technical editors to participate
more directly in the digital workflow. The hub platform and workflow solution
are primarily designed to support the specific research needs of the MMDA and
its users, however the project code and our methodologies can be readily
applied to other digital editing projects and digital humanities
collaborations.

Abstract

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was among the foremost modernist poets of the early
twentieth- century. Her work contributed to the revolution in poetic form and
conceptions of poetry occurring during the 1910s and 1920s and she remained a
poet of profound reflection and innovative design throughout her lifetime.
In particular, Moore was among the first to conceive the poem as constructed
through both language and visual design on the page and she was the first
Anglo-American poet to divorce the poetic line from syntax. While her peers
such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and
H.D. often excoriated each others' work, all were profound admirers of Moore's
thought and poetry (see, for example, Leavell 2014, and Miller, 1995 and 2005).
Moore was also significant to modernism in her decades-long reviewing of work
by her contemporaries, her publication of essays on aesthetic and cultural
topics, and in her editing of one of the premier periodicals of modernist
literature and art, The Dial, from 1925-1929. Moore received the Pulitzer
Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Gold Medal of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters—among other awards. Additionally, she
was made Chevalier de l'ordre des Lettres in France and received a Gold Medal
Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society. Her notebooks
constitute a unique and extraordinary resource for understanding the
composition, experience, and intellectual alertness of a brilliant thinker
and poet to a very broad range of popular, mundane, intellectual, artistic, and
historically significant events of her time.

The MMDA is making digital reproductions and transcriptions of Moore's
notebooks readily accessible to scholarly, classroom, and non-academic readers
for the first time. The transcriptions are supported by annotations
contextualizing Moore's writing and life, including citations to the original
source texts she invokes, and an image-text linking feature that makes it easy
to move back and forth between the facsimile and the transcription. The digital
editions of the notebooks are supported by a growing collection of
related materials, such as indexes, a glossary, an interactive timeline of
Moore's life and publications, searchable reproductions of the now hard-to-find
Marianne Moore Newsletter, and faceted text and image search tools currently
under development. This site will, we hope, revolutionize criticism on this
significant poet; contribute to popular understanding of the modernist period's
history and culture; and develop new tools for the digital editing and
publication of handwritten materials.

Moore's notebooks offer extraordinary challenges for editors and digital
designers because they include multiple genres, images (Moore frequently
sketched objects that interested her), genetic layers of text (evidence of
Moore's later editing of and additions to earlier notes, sometimes with
different writing implements), and references to decades' worth of popular and
academic source materials. Fully edited and annotated, Moore's notebooks
suggest the deep cultural genesis of her poems: Moore's notebooks
constitute not nearly finished drafts of poems and essays (that
is, pre-publication texts) but, instead, a rich and varied collection of notes
and compilations from which Moore drew the materials that went into her
drafts and published work. Part commonplace book, part scrapbook, part
sketchbook, part diary, each of Moore's notebooks offers an extraordinary
window into the eclectic print and visual culture of the twentieth century and
the ways in which one of America's most innovative poets responded to her
world.

The MMDA addresses the special challenges and opportunities presented by these
documents through a customized version of the Edition Visualization Technology
(EVT), an open-source software project directed by Roberto Rosselli Del Turco
(Del Turco et al, 2014-15). We have extended the tool significantly to allow
for the transcription and facsimile coordinates to be edited directly in the
browser, then saved automatically to underlying TEI XML files according to our
project's customized TEI schema (Our viewer/ed-itor tool was developed on the
basis of the EVT version 1.0, which utilizes XSLT, CSS, and Javascript to
generate its viewer. The EVT version 2 recently released utilizes a different
method that removes the need for

XSLT and relies on converting the TEI XML documents

into JSON, which we are considering as an alternative

for future development. See the EVT blog for more information about the
proposed changes for version 2). This has significantly extended the utility of
the EVT, and we will continue to add more advanced editing features for modern
manuscript collections. This combination of editing and publishing capacity
makes the editing of these manuscripts accessible to any of our registered team
members directly in the browser, allowing us to address the needs of the site's
editorial team and its users through the development of an integrated web
platform, which we are continuing to develop along with manuscript editing
tools being developed at the University at Buffalo in collaboration with the
Computer Science and Engineering and the Center for Unified Biometrics and
Sensors (CUBS) at the University at Buffalo. Our partners in CUBS are also
developing automated handwriting recognition software that we are integrating
into our platform. We aim to create a complete editorial workflow solution for
transcription and annotation of manuscript collections. This is possible
through the use of the HubZero 2.0 platform, based on Joomla, which to our
knowledge has not previously been used for a digital humanities project.

The MMDA is making a vast quantity of unpublished writing by a major American
poet and cultural figure freely available and easily accessible for the first
time. Such access will have extraordinary impact. It is already transforming
Moore studies and, as the number of publications on the site increases, it
will contribute significantly to historical, cultural, and literary studies of
modernism and of twentieth-century women's lives. The specialized tools and
platforms for collaboration on digital manuscript editions we are developing
will, we hope, serve as useful models for making manuscript collections more
accessible to scholars and editors in collaboration.