The Modernist Versions Project (MVP) aims to advance the potential for comparative interpretations of modernist texts that exist in multiple forms by digitizing, collating, versioning, and visualizing them individually and in combination. Its primary mission is to enable new critical insights that are difficult without digital or computational approaches.

Working with established Digital Humanities (DH) research teams both within and beyond Canada, the MVP will establish a set of best practices and a shared workflow—as well as help build the necessary tools and resources—to allow scholars to digitize modernist texts, compare multiple versions, mark-up the variants to facilitate easy searching and comparison, and display the results in an agile and extensible way. The value of doing so emerges in two ways: first, because many modernist texts are now emerging from copyright in Canada (well ahead of their emergence in the United States), the MVP is positioned to make a significant contribution to modernist studies and edition production. We have an opportunity in this regard that is nearly unparalleled in the rest of the world. Second, the MVP will enable new critical insights and facilitate new modes of scholarly production by making modernist texts accessible and queryable.

While this work is in progress, you can follow MVP developments—and access texts it is digitizing and encoding—via this site.

OBJECTIVES

The MVP is a wide-ranging collaborative endeavour that brings together researchers from across Canada and around the world to create a scholarly resource freely available in a sustainable, agile, and responsive form.

Our objectives are to:

Provide scholars of modernism with digital tools and resources to catalogue and explore textual variants among works that exist in multiple witnesses in an integrated, web-based environment.

Make the fruits of the research thus undertaken freely available to the larger scholarly community in a format that is easily searchable, manipulable, agile, and extensible to particular research questions and objectives.

Enable scholars using Digital Humanities methods to generate new critical and interpretive insights on the basis of these collations.

Ensure that all participants (scholars and students) involved with the MVP are given proper credit for their work according to the Collaborators’ Bill of Rights.

Ensure that both the process and the tools remain open-access and open-ended so that they can respond to new demands and new technologies as they emerge.

Create a pedagogical environment where students can learn textual editing and up-to-date digital technology skills to create their own critical editions of modernist texts.

Collaborate with other modernist projects online to create a federated “modernist database” of texts.

The MVP’s research is currently being supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development Grant.

The design of this site is based on a theme made by Kuba Sto.