Are you the kind of reader who prefers a handheld book that you can read in an armchair?  If so, Travels with Mina Loy is the book for you (forthcoming from Lever Press, 2024). Like the popular Baedekers published for tourists a century ago, this print companion to our scholarly website provides a guided tour of Loy’s journey from Italian Futurism to New York Dada and Surrealism in Paris and New York, with illustrations, maps, timelines, and a theoretical framework to help orient readers along the way.

Despite the electric interest in Mina Loy in recent decades, students and scholars still lack an accessible guidebook to her life and work, and extant theories of the avant-garde fail to account for the range and diversity of her creative output. Travels with Mina Loy redresses this dual problem, providing in one pocket-sized book a guide to Loy’s avant-garde migrations and a more inclusive theory of avant-garde practices. Some of its outstanding features include:

• A print companion to this born-digital scholarly website, Travels with Mina Loy demonstrates that the book remains an essential hand-held device.
• Travels with Mina Loy is the first book to map out Loy’s complex geographic and artistic migrations in an accessible narrative form, as well as the first to offer a theory of the avant-garde capacious enough to account for the innovative work of women and other marginalized artists.
• Travels with Mina Loy uses the term en dehors garde to adumbrate an inclusive theory of early 20th-century artistic innovation: coming from ballet, en dehors describes a turn “toward the outside” and connotes how women and artists of color often came from the outside and circulated around the margins, working strategically to transform literary and visual cultures that excluded or objectified them. 
• The book remediates key ideas and arguments from the born-digital “Scholarly Book for Digital Travelers,” providing a new introduction, original illustrations to draw you into Loy’s world, and narratives to guide them you her innovative work, migratory life, and en dehors garde networks.

Co-authored by Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum, Travels with Mina Loy will be available as a print book as well as in electronic form on Lever Press’s Open Access digital platform, where we will recreate some of the interactive maps, timelines, video, and other media currently available on this site. Publishing academic books in both print and digital forms, Lever Press is at the forefront of innovation in academic publishing. In exploring new approaches to the production and dissemination of liberal arts scholarship, Lever Press is asking the same kinds of questions we are. Whereas scholars and publishers today typically ask, “How do we make print books digital?” Travels with Mina Loy asks, “How do we make a born-digital resource print, and why?” 

The content of this website is neither downloadable as a PDF, nor readily convertible to print form. Attempts to print individual pages eliminate interactive media and result in distortions of the page design that inhibit legibility. This is because we built our website with the understanding that UX design is essential to content delivery, and good design must be responsive to content, platform, and audience. Feminist design, which values aesthetic pleasure, engages users and makers as equal partners, and amplifies the voices of marginalized writers and artists, is crucial to our mission, whether we are designing a website or a book—though the two outcomes are very different in our handling.  A website is not the same “thing” as a book, and users behave differently than readers. The experience of reading our portable Travels with Mina Loy will be complementary—not duplicative—of navigating our website’s more extensive and varied content. We believe Lever Press is uniquely positioned to help us exploit the distinctive affordances of print and digital platforms for the book companion. 

We are thrilled to announce that Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde has been awarded two prestigious scholarly prizes:

• The Garfinkel Prize for Digital Humanities, Honorable Mention, from the American Studies Association (2020)
• The Modern Language Association Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographic, or Archival Scholarship (2022)

The Garfinkel Prize honors DH projects that:

1. 1. model ethical and equitable collaborations that responsibly reflect on the politics of collaborative research in the digital humanities;
   2. participate in transparent and open scholarly practices;
   3. center research topics that “promote the development of interdisciplinary research on U.S. culture and history in a global context” (following ASA’s stated purpose);
   4. address these topics through anti-racist, feminist, community-led, or activist modes and methods.

The 2021 Honorable Mention puts our project in the distinguished company of the Taller Electric Marronage and Life x Code: DH Against Enclosure, Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, and Mapping the Gay Guides.

We are also honored to share the MLA Prize with Catherine D’Ignazio, associate professor of urban science and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lauren F. Klein, Winship Distinguished Research Professor of English and Quantitative Methods at Emory University, who received the award for their book Data Feminism (MIT Press).

Lesson #1

In DH there is no expertise—only courage and resilience

Don’t wait for someone to come along with the expertise to show you how to do what you want to do or build what you want to build. What you’re envisioning hasn’t been invented yet. You have to jump in, unafraid of failure, knowing that whatever you’re attempting won’t work—at least at first. But you’ll persist, tinkering, troubleshooting, and Googling around for answers. Eventually you’ll get something to work, even if it’s not exactly what you set out to do. In DH you learn by doing, not prior to doing. As one graduate student put it, “You have to do the work to know how to do the work”; and, as another attests, “You have to expand your notion of work to include thinking, failing, playing around, and learning new skills.” 

Lesson #2

Set realistic limits

Without a clear roadmap or precedent for this work, we worked intuitively, which allowed us to be open to discovery, enabled the project to expand organically, and helped us to be more flexible about its parameters. Andrew Rikard’s expression, “It’s doable,” became an early motto that encouraged us to take risks and explore.

When the project grew to a cross-institutional collaboration, we had to modify the motto, reminding ourselves that just because “it’s doable” doesn’t mean we should pursue it. When you have a team of high achievers, “it’s doable” can fuel a relentless drive to succeed at a task, even if the time and effort needed to accomplish it isn’t commensurable with the benefits of the outcome. The project is going to grow bigger than you ever anticipated and take more time than you ever set aside, so it’s important to set limits. 

Lesson #3

Collaboration is key to DH projects

DH scholarship is necessarily collaborative, in part because no single humanist by training will have all the skills necessary to build a successful project. But when those necessary collaborations—the seeking of guidance and assistance and ideas from others—becomes a personal exchange, the nature and design of the project changes. Its most distinctive aspects may be those that result from the interpersonal exchanges, rather than from the idea or vision of an individual genius. 

DH collaboration is also distinctive because often the “help” does not exist prior to the emerging project, but is part of its making. The knowledge, expertise, and even tools may not exist yet. You learn as you go, making and adapting tools to answer your questions and achieve your goals. Our collaborations were strengthened by practices such as work retreats, periodic and mindful delegation of work, and sharing of external training. These practices made the collaboration sustainable and gave contributors a greater sense of knowing how to contribute. 

Collaboration will invariably lead to some friction and frustrations. But don’t forget that you encounter friction, frustration, and even despair when you work alone. The joy of a collaboration is that your partners can restore your faith in the project at those moments when you’re ready to throw in the towel. They’ll remind you why it’s valuable, why they joined in, and why it’s worth continuing. And they’ll produce work—new insights, new material—that make the project better and make you proud to be a part of it. 

Lesson #4

Identify & network with communities of practice

Participating in various DH workshops and institutes such as ILiADS (Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship) and DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) was critical to the project, not just for technology training, but also for a sense of community. Communities of practice provide vital support and knowledge for DH pioneers; instead of feeling like you are wandering in the wilderness without a map, you understand that you are part of a larger, collaborative exploration, full of like-minded researchers eager to share their knowledge and expertise.

Applying for an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant also helped us connect with wider communities of practice, including the staff at NEH, the directors of our respective institutions’ Digital Libraries/Laboratories, scholars with expertise in modernist Digital Humanities, and later with other grant recipients. The grant writing process goes beyond seeking funds for your project; it helps you develop a plan and template, drawing upon the expertise and examples of others. NEH Senior Program Officer Jennifer Servanti’s suggestions on our draft proposal were crucial to our success. Serventi had a broader perspective and wider experience, asked good questions, and pointed out weaknesses and gaps in our plan. 

Lesson #5

Incorporate strategic planning throughout your project

A strategic plan is essential for setting manageable goals, identifying steps to achieve them, and matching those steps to a calendar. Our NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant served as our strategic plan, and the NEH guidelines, requirements, and advice made this document detailed, thorough, and practical. It became an essential reference point throughout our process. Perhaps most importantly, it required us to address the question: How will you know when your project is finished? 

While the NEH proposal was a valuable planning document for the project as a whole, the Faculty Success Program (FSP) from the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity taught me the importance of ongoing strategic planning for each semester, along with weekly planning. The FSP strategic planning method requires you to set goals, identify the steps to reach the goals, and match those steps to your calendar. 

Lesson #6

Choose a system for project communications & record-keeping

As vital as interpersonal exchanges are, communications will be more difficult than you think, not because they don’t take place, but because they occur in such abundance, over such long stretches of time. Even with a tool like Slack and with a process blog to record progress, it was hard to retain all the thinking, talking, decision making, and delegating. We thought Slack would be a good place to gather and record our decision-making process, but we didn’t use it consistently or its interface intuitive.

We’ve realized the importance of a decision log, as well as a place and system for storing project materials. We ended up reverting to email for communications and using Google folders and docs for project materials. Next time around, we would investigate open source project management tools or platforms that would enable us to keep a decision log that we could search and sort by date or topic. 

Communications aren’t just important within your team. You need to be connecting and networking with your desired audiences and networking with communities of practice throughout your project. It’s important to be dedicated and aggressive about promoting your site. Our hits skyrocketed when we ran the flash mob and had students orchestrating our social media campaign, but our faculty leaders couldn’t sustain that activity, since none of us are social media savvy. We would have benefited from a permanent team member dedicated to social media, as well as a detailed outreach plan, which should include not just social media, but also applying for awards, attending conferences, and contributing to DH forums and publications. 

Lesson #7

Give students freedom & peer review

Students (undergraduate and graduate) are capable of innovative research. In our project, they made crucial decisions, implemented them, and contributed original content. Even in an era of flipped classrooms, the dominant model of learning remains top-down and hierarchical, perhaps even more in the production of research than in the classroom. Students are invited to do interesting work, but often within a framework established by the professor. There’s good reason for this scaffolding, because the professor often has knowledge, training, and experience a student lacks. 

But what if you don’t know exactly where your research will go or how you will present it? In this regard, it helps to lack knowledge, training, and experience, because students may have knowledge, expertise, and experiences that faculty lack. We had to figure out ways to help students explore and implement tools we did not fully understand ourselves, collaborating with librarians and instructional technologists as intellectual partners. Our lack of expertise often enabled us to learn with and from our students.

Our students contributed original research projects to our website, included under a section titled “New Frequencies.” They researched, wrote, and edited biographies of figures in Mina Loy’s social and artistic networks. They culled data from these biographies to create a visualization of Loy’s social-artistic network. They created maps and timelines of Loy’s life and career, as well as 3D animations, lexicons, and e-commerce sites to promote engagement with her work. In short, their contributions to mina-loy.com were essential.

As much as they have to offer and teach us, students may also produce work that doesn’t meet scholarly standards of accuracy, citation, or accessibility. And once they’ve completed a course or graduated, they have little incentive to correct their work. How to strike that balance between giving them the freedom to explore, invent, and design, while also making sure they research thoroughly, represent accurately, cite adequately, or uphold accessibility standards—all within the constraints of a summer or semester? It’s important to build in oversight for projects that occur during the semester as part of a course. Have students sign release forms or agree to give editorial access, so that you can make changes—or have another set of students make changes—to their work before it is published. We also set up systems of peer review, in which undergraduates evaluated each other’s work, graduate students vetted and edited undergraduate work, and the faculty PIs reviewed and commented on graduate student projects. Creating systems of peer review and editing is crucial to upholding scholarly standards for student work.

Duquesne University

Use the arrows to move through the timeline (or view in full screen).

> Next timeline (1907-1916)

Works Cited

• Brown, Pam. “Interview Carolyn Burke in Conversation with Pam Brown about Mina Loy.” Jacket # 5 – Interview with Carolyn Burke about Her Mina Loy Biography, 1998, jacketmagazine.com/05/mina-iv.html.
• Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern the Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux., 1997.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Trans. by C. J. M. Hubback. London, Vienna:
• International Psycho-Analytical, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2010. www.bartleby.com/276/. [Date of Printout].
• Loy, Mina, and Roger L. Conover. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Jargon Society, 1982.
• Loy, Mina. Ed. Roger L. Conover. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.
• “Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde.” Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde, 2018, mina-loy.com/.
• Parmar, Sandeep. Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Potter, Rachel, and Suzanne Hobson. The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. Salt Publishing, 2010.

This timeline was created on Knight Lab’s free, open-source tool Timeline JS.

Duquesne University

Use the arrows to move through the timeline (or view in full screen).

> Next timeline (1916-1923)

For more details about Loy’s time in Italy, explore these chapters in the Mina Loy Baedeker:

• Loy’s Italian Baedeker: Mapping a Feminist En Dehors Garde

• Courting an Audience: Loy’s Plays

Works Cited

• Brown, Pam. “Interview Carolyn Burke in Conversation with Pam Brown about Mina Loy.” Jacket # 5 – Interview with Carolyn Burke about Her Mina Loy Biography, 1998, jacketmagazine.com/05/mina-iv.html.
• Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern the Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux., 1997.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Trans. by C. J. M. Hubback. London, Vienna:
• International Psycho-Analytical, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2010. www.bartleby.com/276/. [Date of Printout].
• Loy, Mina, and Roger L. Conover. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Jargon Society, 1982.
• Loy, Mina. Ed. Roger L. Conover. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.
• “Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde.” Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde, 2018, mina-loy.com/.
• Parmar, Sandeep. Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Potter, Rachel, and Suzanne Hobson. The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. Salt Publishing, 2010.

This timeline was created on Knight Lab’s free, open-source tool Timeline JS.

Duquesne University

Use the arrows to move through the timeline (or view in full screen).

> Next timeline (1923-1936)

For more details about Loy’s time in Italy, explore these chapters in the Mina Loy Baedeker:

• Courting an Audience: Loy’s Plays

• Pas de Deux: Mina Loy & Alfred Stieglitz Dance Dada

Works Cited

• Brown, Pam. “Interview Carolyn Burke in Conversation with Pam Brown about Mina Loy.” Jacket # 5 – Interview with Carolyn Burke about Her Mina Loy Biography, 1998, jacketmagazine.com/05/mina-iv.html.
• Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern the Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux., 1997.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Trans. by C. J. M. Hubback. London, Vienna:
• International Psycho-Analytical, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2010. www.bartleby.com/276/. [Date of Printout].
• Loy, Mina, and Roger L. Conover. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Jargon Society, 1982.
• Loy, Mina. Ed. Roger L. Conover. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.
• “Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde.” Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde, 2018, mina-loy.com/.
• Parmar, Sandeep. Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Potter, Rachel, and Suzanne Hobson. The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. Salt Publishing, 2010.

This timeline was created on Knight Lab’s free, open-source tool Timeline JS.

Duquesne University

Use the arrows to move through the timeline (or view in full screen).

> Next timeline (1936-1953)

For more details about Loy’s time in Italy, explore this chapter in the Mina Loy Baedeker:

• Surreal Scene: Paris, 1923-1936

Works Cited

• Brown, Pam. “Interview Carolyn Burke in Conversation with Pam Brown about Mina Loy.” Jacket # 5 – Interview with Carolyn Burke about Her Mina Loy Biography, 1998, jacketmagazine.com/05/mina-iv.html.
• Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern the Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux., 1997.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Trans. by C. J. M. Hubback. London, Vienna:
• International Psycho-Analytical, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2010. www.bartleby.com/276/. [Date of Printout].
• Loy, Mina, and Roger L. Conover. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Jargon Society, 1982.
• Loy, Mina. Ed. Roger L. Conover. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.
• “Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde.” Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde, 2018, mina-loy.com/.
• Parmar, Sandeep. Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Potter, Rachel, and Suzanne Hobson. The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. Salt Publishing, 2010.

This timeline was created on Knight Lab’s free, open-source tool Timeline JS.

University of Georgia (B.A. class of 2017)

Use the arrows to move through the timeline (or view in full screen).

> Next timeline (1953-1966)

For more on Loy’s second New York residency, explore this chapter in the Mina Loy Baedeker:

• Surrealism on the Move: New York, 1937- 1953

This timeline was created on Knight Lab’s free, open-source tool, TimeLine JS.

Duquesne University

Use the arrows to move through the timeline (or view in full screen).

> Next timeline (1907-1916)

For more details about Loy’s life and work, explore Mina Loy Baedeker: A Scholarly Book for Digital Travelers

Works Cited

• Brown, Pam. “Interview Carolyn Burke in Conversation with Pam Brown about Mina Loy.” Jacket # 5 – Interview with Carolyn Burke about Her Mina Loy Biography, 1998, jacketmagazine.com/05/mina-iv.html.
• Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern the Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux., 1997.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Trans. by C. J. M. Hubback. London, Vienna:
• International Psycho-Analytical, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2010. www.bartleby.com/276/. [Date of Printout].
• Loy, Mina, and Roger L. Conover. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Jargon Society, 1982.
• Loy, Mina. Ed. Roger L. Conover. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.
• “Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde.” Mina Loy – Navigating the Avant-Garde, 2018, mina-loy.com/.
• Parmar, Sandeep. Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman. Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Potter, Rachel, and Suzanne Hobson. The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. Salt Publishing, 2010.

This timeline was created on Knight Lab’s free, open-source tool Timeline JS.

Duquesne University (English PhD)

<Use the arrows to move through the StoryMap (or view in full screen)>

In alliance with the goals of the larger en dehors garde project, my StoryMap attempts to turn outward from the center of the avant garde by discussing not only the life and works of Mina Loy, but also those elements of her life that remain marginal in avant-garde discourses that privilege literary production and criticism over other valuable and equally important forms of labor (like emotional and familial labor) and production. This project aspires to fill those discursive gaps by juxtaposing visual, verbal, and geographic transits to create a story that is a map and a map that is a story. Like the larger website, this project is inspired by Loy’s fascination with Baedeker maps and attempts to map spaces, lives, arts, and times in an effort to encourage alternatives methods of knowledge transmission and meaning making.

To that end, this project asks: how can digital humanities be used to relay an assemblage of experiences of a single life in such a way that it feels as if a viewer is visually, emotionally, temporally, and spatially walking alongside the artist herself?

When accessing the StoryMap, viewers are able to travel alongside Loy from her birth in London of 1882 to her death in Aspen, Colorado, 1966. Through design, I hope to encourage viewers to linger in the specific places and time periods in which Loy lived. On several map locations, photographs of the interiors of specific places, like the Abbey of Saint-Germain des Prés in Paris, are provided to help viewers visualize such spaces, while at the same time archived photos are juxtaposed against contemporary photographs to explore and document the demonstrable changes that occur when socio-political events intersect with landscape, relationships, and artistic practices. Viewers can also zoom in to access, when available, the specific addresses at which Loy was known to have lived or frequented, such as her apartments in Florence and New York City, so as to visit such places and experience them for themselves. True to our experience in the world, the map ensures that the boundaries between any one aspect of a moment, place, or artistic production are never disconnected and always in constant communication in a never-ending exchange of energy (a concept that fascinated Loy herself), which continues today not only through this project but through all of you reading just now.

• For a basic chronology of Loy’s migrations, see Mina Loy’s Migrations in Timelines.

• For more in-depth scholarly interpretations of Loy’s migrations, see Mina Loy Baedeker: A Scholarly Guide for Digital Travelers.

This StoryMap was created on Knight Lab’s free, open-source tool StoryMap JS.