Culturomics’s New Project Has Periodicals

Harvard’s Cultural Observatory–the home of Culturomics and Google ngrams–has quietly introduced Bookworm, a new (still in alpha) tool for interacting with digitized library books.  The databases this time around are the Open Library and Internet Archive, and it searches only works in the public domain (more specifically, 1830-1922), which makes it a great took for studying the development of modernism.  It improves on nGrams in 3 big ways.

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Secession Magazine (1922-24) now available!

Over at Jacket2, they’ve recently published online reissues and downloadable pdfs of Secession magazine (1922-24).  Here’s a part of the  Jacket2 introduction:

Secession, founded in 1922 by Gorham B. Munson, sought to give corner to the “youngest generation” of interwar modernists. Printed at various junctures in Vienna, Berlin, New York, Florence, and Reutte (Tyrol), Secession nevertheless became an important platform distributing literary Dadaism to New York. Accompanied by editors Kenneth Burke, John Brooks Wheelwright, and Matthew Josephson (often operating under the nom de plume Will Bray), Secession moved in upredictable directions over the eight installments of its premeditated two-year run.

If you’re not already interested, look at this partial list of people published in Secession:

Call for Papers: Periodical Studies Panel at the ACLA

I’m organizing a panel at the American Comparative Literature Association, which is going to be held at Brown University March 29th to April 1st, 2012. Please encourage any interested periodical studies students/colleagues to submit papers.

Reading Beyond the Nation: Modern Periodical Communities

Seminar Organizer: Lori Cole (New York University)

How do artists and writers define their political and artistic affiliations through magazines? How do journals ranging from Der Dada to Tropiques position themselves internationally? This seminar will address how magazines serve to gather, define, and reflect communities formed in response to early twentieth century geopolitical shifts. Born of modern print culture, the periodical allowed for unprecedented communication across national borders, functioning as a collaborative space and a site for new forms of identification. While the seminar will focus on modernist magazines in Europe and the Americas, submissions on international themes are welcome.

To submit a paper: http://www.acla.org/submit/index.php

MSA . . . in a cloud

I made this using Wordle, using the name of every session, seminar, and roundtable as well as the titles of all the papers that will be given at the Modernist Studies Association’s 13th annual conference in Buffalo.  Wordle gets rid of all (or at least most of) the “the”s, “and”s, and similar words.  I removed the two most dominant words:  “modernism” and “modernity.”   This is what’s left.  Stein is clearly rising, as are politics, and aesthetics continues to do alright, but where are the other names?  And where are the big modernist words of yore:  “difficulty,” “autonomy,” “form?”

Mapping Research

For those interested in the network analysis we’ve covered of late, there’s a great article by Jen Howard in this week’s Chronicle about using network and other kinds of maps to track trends in scholarly research.