• enter the project schedule into our Outlook calendars, including deadlines for submitting reports.
• keep track of media coverage, write press releases, and write about our project in journas such as the American Scholar and Digital Humanities Quarterly.
• communicate with our congressional representatives to tell them about what we’re doing so they know what they’re paying for.
• make creative use of social media, e.g. Tweet, post to Facebook, Snapchat, create an Instagram story, and swipe it to Medium.
• think about who your audience is and identify them where they are, using different hashtags to join different conversations.

The best part was learning that the terrific ODH staff have resources, expertise, and eagerness to help. We are definitely going to open those channels of communication.

During the talks and lightning presentations, we also got ideas for ways we can develop Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-garde:

• use the “news/events” blog to update our advisory board and other interested people about what we’re doing and when, and allow users to subscribe to updates.
• link the site to our new social media accounts so people can follow and share us.
• create an interactive “Guess the date?” quiz for Loy’s writing and art, encouraging users to interact with her work and experience firsthand the difficulty of situating it in a linear chronology.
• explore the updated Omeka S and CurateScape to see whether either platform can help us create a more effective way of showcasing selected texts by Loy and providing searchable metadata about each item.
• contact project directors who are using WordPress to see if they’ve found a way to enhance the platform’s metadata functions.
• contact project directors who are using split-screen technology for side-by-side viewing of texts and transcriptions to see if their tools would work for us.
• contact ModNets about the SHARE tool for harvesting metadata, which could help them—and us.
• try Tesserae, a free open source search engine used to detect allusions in literary texts, on Loy’s writing to see who she’s alluding to.

Mina Loy enthusiasts, take note of this forthcoming title from Coach House Press: Suzanne Zelazo’s Lances All Alike (Apr. 2018,  trade paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-55245-362-9). The collection weaves lines of poetry by Modernist poet-painters Mina Loy and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven into an imaginary conversation. Zelazo examines the way their work has been suppressed, stitched, spliced, and edited by male editors and arbiters of taste. The result is poems such as: 

A more tender button

Red spoon
Of the laboratory
Brimming  sea whispers— — —
Crushed moon
Sinuous consciousness
congealed fantasia
ribald tonnage
radium love

You can read about Zelazo and another poem from Lances All Alike  in Rob Mclennan’s column, “Some notes on Canadian Poetry” in Jacket2.

Maybe you’ll be inspired to try using Poemage to visualize the sonic patterns in “Last Lunar Baedeker.” If so, send us your results!

We are thrilled and honored to have won a 2017 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to expand and develop Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. 

You can read about the grant award here:

• The National Endowment for the Humanities: Announcing New ODH Grant Awards
• Davidson College: Digital Humanities Project Wins Prestigious NEH Grant
• Duquesne University:  English and Theater Arts Department announcement
•  University of Georgia: Four at UGA awarded NEH grants for 2017

Stay tuned for our flash mob formation of a new, feminist theory of the avant-garde, coming to you via social media in summer 2018!

Works Cited

Here’s an example of how digital platforms for scholarship upend the traditional, slow, linear trajectories of academic print publication. Our website Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde has received a wonderful, online review on MLACommons before we’ve officially gone public or been peer-reviewed. Since this review, we’ve restructured the website, redesigning the user interface and adding more student work and interactive features. Although we plan to use Hypothes.is for public peer review and work with Mod-Nets to make sure we meet their standards, it’s exciting to see peer review happening spontaneously on our work-in-process.

In the raw caverns of the Increate
we forge the dusk of Chaos
to that imperious jewellery of the Universe
— the Beautiful —

— Mina Loy, “Apology of Genius”

Genius breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world. It’s your interactive guide to human culture.

— “About Genius,” Genius.com

Genius.com began in 2009 as a platform for annotating rap lyrics and has grown to be a crowd-sourced forum for lyrics, songs, and poems of all styles and genres. Texts published on Genius.com become “living documents,” as readers add annotations and vote them up or down.

Help interpret Loy’s genius and keep her work alive by adding your annotations to these poems:

• “Lunar Baedeker” (1921-22)
• “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” (1922)

You can also annotate lyrics from contemporary songs inspired by Mina Loy, such as:

• Billy Corgan, “Mina Loy (M.O.H.),” from the album TheFutureEmbrace (2005)
• Thurston Moore, “Mina Loy,” from the album Demolished Thoughts (2011)