• “Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable” has just opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where it can be viewed until September 17, 2023. This exhibition, curated by Jennifer R. Gross, is the first comprehensive presentation of Mina Loy’s visual art: “Over 80 paintings, drawings, and constructions made by Loy through the course of her life, are united to reveal her omnivorous creativity as an image-maker, author, and cultural arbiter. These works, drawn from a dozen institutional and private lenders, are complemented by extensive, never-before assembled, archival materials that will contextualize her art within the arc of her life” (Bowdoin Museum of Art). Princeton University Press has published the exhibition catalog, richly illustrated with images of the art in the exhibition, with essays by Jennifer R. Gross, Dawn Ades, Roger L. Conover, and Ann Lauterbach.
• “‘All about / Unfolding’: Mapping Mina Loy Studies in 2023,” an Online Symposium organized by Dr. Jade French, Jennifer Ashby, and Julia Heinemann, will take place on August 4, 2023. For further information see the symposium website.
• “Mina Loy and Her Networks,” a conference organized by Dr. Yasna Bozhkova, Dr. Diane Drouin, and Dr. Juliette Utard, is scheduled for September 8-9, 2023, at Sorbonne Université & Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. For further information see the conference website.

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.

The band Short Fictions recently (November 2019) issued an album, Fates Worse Than Death, that includes the song “Property of Pigeons.” Check out the track at this link, along with the liner notes that acknowledge the use of Loy’s poem and transcribe the poem’s lines appearing in the song:

Pigeons doze, or rouse, stripped crescendos of grey rainbow
a living frieze, on the shallow sill of a factory window
pigeons arise alight, on vertical bases of civic brick
whitened with avalanches, as if an angel had been sick

Sam Treber, leader of the band, is a Duquesne University graduate. Thanks to one of his past professors, the fabulous Matt Ussia, for sending along this link to us, and gratitude to the (unknown) professor or student or friend who turned him on to Mina Loy. And thanks to Sam!

Artist Mary Montgomery-Lee spent the past year constructing a multi-media dada-style book about the early twentieth-century Dada movement. Using found materials and collaging text pieces, she submitted the completed project to the Brooklyn Art Library Sketchbook Project . Having discovered Mina Loy in her research for the project, Montgomery-Lee constructed a portrait page in her book inspired by Loy’s late assemblage “House Hunting.”

About the sketchbook project, entitled Dada, Stitch, and Story, she writes:

I have always loved the DADA period and Avant-Garde art in general, so I began by constructing a story from words cut from a book (like some dada poetry), then alternating pages with art I am making on teabags, featuring artists from the period. I am representing female and male DADA artists 2:1, respectively. I am creating these works infused with the artist’s style and then posting tidbits of their history on my Instagram page, along with the image of my art. This art is then sewn into my sketchbook.

I’m also intrigued by the juxtaposition of the cut up text and the portraits and the meaning that can be derived from them. I am posting on Instagram as @mary_art_girl and on Facebook as Mary Lee.

Mary contributed her Loy portrait as a postcard to our “En Dehors Garde Flash Mob” project. Dada, Stitch, and Story is now part of the Brooklyn Art Library’s sketchbook collection.

[F]irst, the photographs are the only truly contemporary images of Loy’s assemblages that show them the way Loy herself chose to display them, revealing Loy’s particular orientation of her artwork. . . . Second, while some of the content of the photographs may be recognizable  . . . none of the previously circulated images of the assemblages were produced by Abbott. And third, of the seven assemblages in these newly discovered photographs, three have never been published or seen by the public, to my knowledge, making them a tremendous new contribution to our study of Loy’s multimedia practice. (1095)

What would happen if we tried to bring a more open, collaborative spirit to the work of peer review? Could expert scholars provide honest criticism, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses, without the protection of anonymity? Would our readers be interested in seeing the process of peer review as it unfolded?

We considered creating a public forum open to all readers, from experts to enthusiasts—in other words, a crowd-sourcing approach to peer critique. While we recognize the value of the social construction and curation of knowledge as effected on an ever-expanding resource like Wikipedia, we realized we had only a limited time to receive and respond to feedback from the public. We also wanted to make sure experts vetted our site content and technical design, in order to make sure it meets the highest scholarly standards.

We explained our goals to the team at Hypothesis, which included Jeremy Dean, Heather Stains, Jon Udell, and Katelyn Lemay. Knowledgeable, responsive, flexible, and enthusiastic, they were terrific to work with. They helped us clarify our vision and understand what was technically possible. They also provided information, guidance, and expert instruction to enable us to achieve our goals. We installed the Hypothesis plugin on our site, and the Hypothesis team created a closed but public Advisory Board group. This group includes experts in the fields of Loy studies, avant-garde studies, and digital humanities. Their comments were publicly visible, and they could read and reply to each other’s comments. Because we wanted to include the public in the process, we asked the Hypothesis team to create an Open Forum group that anyone could join.

We invited our Advisory Board members to review and comment on the site between March 18 and May 28, 2019 (see our letter of invitation below). In the span of the peer review, we received more than 80 annotations on the site, ranging from macro insights to micro corrections. The critiques were as helpful as the expressions of enthusiasm, and we were able to make many changes and improvements to the site based on their suggestions. Unfortunately, despite our social media campaign encouraging the public to participate, we received no annotations in the Public Forum.

Based on our experience with peer review we highly recommend the Hypothesis tool and encourage you to use it. Although we consider our experimental use of it for public peer review a success, we have made an editorial decision to deactivate the Hypothesis plugin for two reasons:

1. The tool is not yet accessible for vision impaired users, and we are trying to meet web accessibility standards.¹
2. The yellow highlighting that appears on annotated text distracts from the site’s aesthetics, which we believe are essential to an immersive reading experience.

Although you can no longer see the Advisory Board’s annotations, the good news is that you can still use Hypothesis to annotate our site in public, simply by going to their site, signing up for a free account, and installing Hypothesis in your browser. We’d love to hear from you!

Invitation to Advisory Board for Hypothesis Peer Review

Dear Advisory Board:

We are pleased to report that Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde is now ready for your peer review.

How to comment

Annotating with Hypothesis is simple. All you need to do is go to  /, click on the upper right sidebar, login to Hypothesis, select the Advisory Board PR group, and begin commenting. You can find illustrated, step-by-step instructions in this Google doc (thanks, Katelyn Lemay at Hypothesis!).

Where to begin

We suggest you begin by navigating to About/Our Team and adding an author’s note to introduce yourself to the other Advisory Board members and to the public, who will be able to see but not respond to your comments. We hope that personalizing peer review in this way will make the process more open, collegial, and even enjoyable for you. Once you’ve introduced yourselves, you may feel more comfortable replying to one another’s comments so that a once solitary process can become a lively conversation.

How to proceed

You may roam wherever you like on the site, deciding which parts you want to read and comment on. We suggest that you spend time on your areas of expertise—e.g. Loy scholars may want to focus on the scholarly chapters, while digital humanists may want to respond to the site design or the theory of the en dehors garde and the digital flash mob. We do not expect you to offer “peer review” of student work in New Frequencies and Bios, though you are free to comment on these sections in a general way. Maps, Timelines, Artifacts, and Exhibits are still under development and will be completed this summer, though you’re welcome to offer suggestions. We don’t want to impose any restrictions on you, and we welcome feedback on any or all aspects of the project.

Adopting a DH scholarship mindset

As you respond, please keep in mind how digital humanities scholarship can productively differ from print scholarship. In writing for a digital environment, we incorporate a scholarly approach that we hope appeals to a broad audience, including scholars, students, and the interested public. We adopt prose styles appropriate to the medium and the digital reading/viewing environment. In re-mediating the conventions of print publication (reference-dense, extended discussions employing a scholarly lexicon), our scholarly writing for digital readers aims to be concise, direct, lively, substantive, and enriched with visual images.

Timeline for responding

We ask that you review the site between now and May 28, 2019. You can do so at your own pace, taking deep dives or occasional dips. We will email occasional reminders, encouragements, and thank you notes for your participation.

Joining the revolution

Okay, that’s a bit of a hyperbole, but we are not exaggerating our gratitude. Thank you so much for supporting our project and participating in this pilot program to test Hypothesis as a tool for public peer review. Your efforts will not only help us improve the content and design of our site, but also can transform peer review into a more open, collaborative process.

We look forward to receiving your comments and suggestions. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Kind regards,

Suzanne Churchill, suchurchill@davidson.edu

Linda Kinnahan, kinnahan@duq.edu

Susan Rosenbaum, srosenb@uga.edu

In the past year, we’ve been busy not only working on this site, but also writing and talking about it. Our articles and conference papers have helped us clarify our vision and goals, and more importantly, put us in conversation with a broader community of practice in feminist digital humanities and modernist studies.

In Spring 2018 we completed our co-authored essay about the mina-loy.com project, “Digital Baedeker: A Feminist Experiment with Mina Loy’s Archive” for the volume The Contemporary Poetry Archive, edited by Linda Anderson, Mark Byers, and Ahren Warner (Edinburgh UP, July 2019). In addition, we co-authored an essay, “Feminist Designs: Modernist Digital Humanities & Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde,” which was published in Feminist Modernist Studies, in a special issue devoted to Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities (DOI: 10.1080/24692921.2018.1505255).

In November 2018, we showcased mina-loy.com in the Digital Exhibition at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Columbus. Suzanne spoke about the project in a roundtable on “Feminist Designs: Visualizing the Future of Modernist Digital Humanities,” organized by Amanda Golden (New York Institute of Technology) and moderated by Shawna Ross (Texas A&M University). Linda included discussion of the project in her conference presentation, “Light Years With Loy,” as part of a roundtable devoted to long-term critical work with a single woman poet entitled “Taking Our Feminist Time: Years Spent with a Woman Poet,” organized by Linda and Debra Mix (Ball State University).

We also featured the website at the “Mina Loy and Trans-Atlantic Surrealism” panel, organized by Susan, Linda, and fellow Loy scholar Sarah Hayden, author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), at the inaugural SURREALISMS conference sponsored by  the ISSS (International Society for the Study of Surrealism) at Bucknell University, November 1-3, 2018. The panelists discussed Loy’s surrealist artwork, Loy and the surrealist walk, and Loy’s surrealist novel Insel, and were delighted to discover several other presentations at the conference that also featured Mina Loy.

During the fall of 2017, each of us taught a course relevant to mina-loy.com, giving us an opportunity to pilot a cross-institutional digital humanities project with students and enhancing our collaboration with the digital librarians (Emily McGinn, UGA; Sundi Richard, Davidson; Gesina Phillips, Duquesne) and research librarians (Kristin Nielsen, UGA; James Sponsel, Davidson; Gesina Phillips, Duquesne) at our respective schools. The “Biography Project,” as it came to be called, involved students at Davidson, Duquesne, and UGA in researching and writing short biographies of figures associated with the historical avant-garde (chiefly Dada, Futurism, Surrealism) who were connected to Loy in Florence, New York, and Paris. In fall 2018, Linda and Susan resumed the cross-institutional project with students in their graduate seminars on modernism and the avant-garde.

Bio Project Assignment

A truly collaborative effort, we established and followed a shared template for the biographies and involved students in peer-reviews of at least two biographies authored by students from other schools. Students worked with research librarians to find relevant sources and to create annotated bibliographies of their sources. In workshops conducted by digital librarians at each school, students considered the technical and conceptual particularities of gathering and “cleaning” data, writing for a digital platform, and conducting peer review through the open platform hypothes.is.

The biographies were structured on a template that briefly summarizes each figure’s career and their relationship to Loy, along with a number of categories (birth, death, country of origin/citizenship, kind of artistic/cultural worker, dates and places of overlap with Loy) chosen with a digital humanities project in mind. Once the students had completed the research and writing of their figure’s biography, they learned how to enter information from the biography template into a Google spread sheet using a Data Dictionary (created by Dr. Emily McGinn, Director, UGA DigiLab).

An exciting outcome of this collection of data was the creation of visualizations of Loy’s social-artistic networks in Florence, New York and Paris (with the help of our wonderful digital librarians). Emily McGinn and Caleb Crumley created a preliminary visualization of this data for mina-loy.com using cytoscape (the final visualization and explanation of how to interpret it is now available under “Maps”):

Once the biographies were completed for class, three graduate students at Duquesne (John Hadlock, English PHD; Rochel Gasson, English PHD; Taylor Maldonado, English MA) undertook final editing and uploading of each figure’s biography to the website’s “Bios” page. Additional biographies are in the works and will be completed and uploaded in Summer 2019.