On some books in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s library

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Posted on by Amanda French

When my mother and I first entered the library at Steepletop in 2010, the first book I saw was Ulysses, lying flat and nonchalant upon a table as though it had a perfect right to be there. “!!!!” I thought, though “thought” is not the right word for that moment of éclat. It would be difficult to think of two writers more different than Joyce and Millay, though of course they were near contemporaries; the only thing more astonishing than seeing Ulysses in Millay’s library might be seeing A Few Figs From Thistles in Joyce’s.

The rest of the Steepletop library created almost as great an impact on me, though mostly for its volume of volumes. It’s rare for a writer’s personal library to remain posthumously intact, and even rarer for the books to remain in the very place where the writer read them. Looking at them, I had a thought that did manifest in actual words: “This should be a database.” I therefore wrote to Peter Bergman, then executive director of the Millay Society (which operates Steepletop as a historic house museum), and he put me in touch with retired librarian Maureen O’Connor, who with other volunteers had begun to catalog the books at Steepletop. Maureen provided me with the initial 1950 inventory of books given to her by Millay’s one-time literary executor Elizabeth Barnett and, later, the set of index cards from the more recent (daunting) effort to catalog the library. I spoke briefly about the project, and about some initial conclusions I had drawn from my work entering the data and building the online catalog, on a panel at the Modern Language Association in January of 2014. After several years of on-again off-again work, we do now have a provisional online catalog that lists over 1200 works available at steepletoplibrary.org.

Much remains to be done, however. The initial typed inventory of 1950 appears to lack some pages, and in any case it lists only authors and titles, lacking all edition information. Since Steepletop first opened to the public in 2010, volunteers have quite rightly focused on other efforts than the catalog, and so the card index is also incomplete. But more urgent even than ensuring that the books properly cataloged and described is ensuring that they are preserved: Steepletop lacks climate control. The Millay Society has therefore launched a fundraising campaign to save Millay’s library at Steepletop by raising money to install an HVAC system to keep the books in good condition.

In support of these efforts, I have undertaken to write a few brief squibs about some of the books in the library at Steepletop while the fundraising campaign continues, using the “Exhibits” feature of Omeka (which is the platform for the catalog) to feature some interesting works. I’ve started with a few books by prominent modernists, including that very Ulysses that first grabbed me. Pardon the emphasis:

See the exhibit on Modernist Books at Steepletop Library

There are probably swathes of information about Millay’s relationship to these and others of her books in various archives, in the attics at Steepletop, or in the margins of the copies themselves, but I haven’t yet been able to explore these beswagged chambers of potential knowledge; these hasty efforts are provisional drafts that I hope to revise in the future. But in any case, to me the significance of a library like this isn’t only what the books say or imply about Millay and her works, but also what the books reveal about their historical moment: they are “a way of happening, a mouth”, things that have survived that are worthy in themselves of consideration. I’m enjoying researching them, and whether you enjoy what I write or not, I hope you’ll consider passing the word along to others about them.

Omeka links for the University of Colorado

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The 7 Best Links to Digital Poetry Projects from MLA

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Posted on by Amanda French

Before I give you the listicle, I’m going to make you skim through some summary. I’m mean like that. (Back off, man. I’m an academic.)

I go to the Modern Language Association annual convention these days for the digital panels — and to hobnob with the smart people on them, of course, many of whom I know already, but many of whom I don’t know, even “just” online. If I had to name just one thing I got from MLA this year, it’s that digital humanities is no longer the next big thing — it’s beginning to be just an ordinary thing. In other words, I felt that there was a lot less defensiveness about digital methods in the study of literature this year.

Granted, most of the papers dealing with digital methods are still located on panels themed around digital methods, as I think you can tell by Mark Sample’s helpful annual listing, but there was some promising intermingling between digital and traditional methods papers on panels such as “Diversifying the Victorian Verse Archives.” (Note: I was on my way to that panel when a minor emergency came up that took an hour or so to resolve; I was very sorry indeed to have to miss it.) All three of those papers basically teach us a bit more about Victorian songs and their relation to Victorian poetry than we used to know, but only two of them explicitly mention the creation or sophisticated use of digital archives as a major component of the research. And Brian Croxall and I both had the same idea in forming our panels: to concentrate on the results rather than the methods. Both his Association for Computers and the Humanities panel “Beyond the Digital: Pattern Recognition and Interpretation” and the panel I put together titled “Things My Computer Taught Me About Poems” tried (with fair success) to do less description of and argument for digital approaches while giving more concrete examples of the new insights into language and literature these approaches have given.

But I have to admit that the single best paper I heard that took what we might call this “more interpretation, less demonstration” approach was Mark Algee-Hewitt’s, of the Stanford Literary Lab. In a panel titled “Making Sense of Big Data,” Algee-Hewitt seemed all insight, though granted what he had insight into was a particular well-known literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin’s rather than a literary text or corpus. In The Dialogic Imagination Bakhtin famously argues that novels get their energy from “heteroglossia,” or what we might call “polyvocality.” Novels have so many voices, so many registers of diction: all the characters and their dialogue, the narrator in various moods and modes. Lyric poems, by supposed contrast, generally have one voice: that of the poet. Algee-Hewitt recounted an absorbing tale of getting results from his analysis of the comprehensive Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database (ECCO) that first supported and then challenged Bakhtin’s theory: ultimately, at least if you consider these texts at the semantic level of individual words (what individual words mean, that is), Bakhtin seems to be wrong — poems are actually far more polyvocal, less “self-similar” in Algee-Hewitt’s term, than novels and non-fiction. Theorists versus data analysts! I love it. Can’t wait to hear more. I’m sure the debate over that particular issue of the heteroglossia of novels and poetry, if it branches out, will indeed circle back to method — one questioner raised the issue of whether semantic word analysis really matches Bakhtin’s idea of “heteroglossia” — but at least it won’t be an argument about whether such data analysis is legitimate: only how to do it as well as possible. As a side note from that paper, I was impressed by the very fact that the Stanford Literary Lab has developed a simple and effective algorithm to tell novels apart from nonfiction apart from poetry and poetic drama from the full-text data: I think Algee-Hewitt said it had about a 95% accuracy rate. I can see that being very useful for someone else’s project. Clearly I need to keep a closer eye on that Stanford Literary Lab.

Here’s the listicle for you, then — The 7 Best Links to Digital Poetry Projects from MLA:

  1. Princeton Prosody Archive, Meredith Martin et al. (database not live yet)
  2. Steepletop Library – The Books of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amanda French (me!)
  3. Poem Viewer, Julie Lein and Katharine Coles et al.
  4. Songs of the Victorians, Joanna Swafford
  5. Stanford Literary Lab Projects, Mark Algee-Hewitt et al.
  6. eMOP: The Early Modern OCR Project, Laura Mandell et al.
  7. I ♥ E-Poetry, Short-Form Scholarship on Born-Digital Poetry and Poetics, Léonardo Flores et al.

There’s a lot more that happened at MLA that I didn’t see that I could have posted, I’m sure, and there’s a lot more that I saw and liked that I can’t easily link to, but that’ll do for now. (I’ve always wanted to dip a toe in the listicle biz.) And if you’re interested, here are a couple of Storify stories from the two panels I presented on — they often have helpful summaries and reactions and commentary from the twittering audience:

Amanda out.