PI: Michelle James
Co-PI: Rob McFarland
Without funding there would be no Sophie project, which is why the first item in this report on the Sophie activities during 2015 must be an expression of our gratitude to both the ORCA office and to the College of Humanities, on behalf of the faculty members involved, and particularly, on behalf of the many students whose lives have been enriched in numerous ways by their Sophie work. We are aware of the many projects vying for your attention and funding, and are particularly grateful for the support you have given this project over the years. Your grants have enriched the education and scholarship of over 150 students who have been directly employed by the project, as well as numerous others who have been involved in Sophie scholarship through classes, ORCA projects, Masters theses, Honors theses, capstone papers, and internships. In addition, your generosity has enhanced the research and learning of thousands of individuals across the world who regularly make use of the online Sophie Digital Library (http://sophie.byu.edu).
The Critically Annotated Collected Works of Elisa von der Recke
With the exception of money used for supplies such as photocopying, postage, permissions, and the purchase of out-of-print books, all funding in 2015 was applied to student wages. As outlined in our Mentoring Environments Grant proposal, the predominant focus of our work during 2015 has been the Critically Annotated Collected Works of Elisa von der Recke. Volume I of the critical edition is the most significant, and therefore has taken the most time, because it includes the introduction to the entire collected works, a chronology of Recke’s life, a bibliography of primary and secondary works connected with Recke, a photo gallery, and an essay detailing portraits and busts of Recke, in addition to the critical annotations to the texts. With a project this large (Volume I contains over 2,000 pages), it has taken endless hours to bring the work to the point of completion. The main results of our efforts during 2015 can be seen in the following:
- Gavin Grant, the current student editor of the Recke collected works, overhauled, simplified, corrected and standardized all of the texts for Volumes I and II which had been formatted in the InDesign desktop publishing program by previous students. This includes the correction of previous formatting errors, correction of spacing and punctuation in footnotes, correction of title and margin formatting, etc.
- In 2014 Dr. James worked closely with Heather Jensen from the Comparative Arts and Letters department to bring the Recke portrait essay, which was started by Rob Sowby as an ORCA project, to an essentially final form. In 2015, Gavin Grant devoted many hours to devising a way to format the Recke portrait essay such that the correct text appears with the portrait to which it belongs, so that readers can be easily view the text and the image at the same time. He also created successful formatting for the photographs and other images that will be included with the introductory materials in Volume I.
- Gavin Grant has built on the formatting developed by Alec Down for Volume I, in preparing the texts and Table of Contents for Volume II in E-book form. He proofread and corrected all scholarly notes and annotations previously made by Dr. James for Volume I, which had been entered by Alec Down. Throughout the year, he has collaborated continually with Dr. James on details that have arisen in the preparation of the Volume II E-book and the correction of previous formatting in Volumes I and II. He also revised and refined the work flow model being used for the project, including simplifying and updating the work flow documents to track the progress of text preparation for each volume. The result of his work is that all of Volume I now exists in final form, except for the critical materials that must be completed by Dr. James. In addition, all of the primary texts for Volume II have been formatted and prepared in E-book form.
- In 2014 Katie Adams and Jenna Gwilliam worked together to organize, simplify and finish the searchable file of several hundred annotations which is included in Volume I, and which now forms the basis for the annotation file for Volume II. In this, they were bringing to completion work which Chuck Richards, Nathan Conder, Daniel Taylor, Gwyn Kutschke, Matt Kearney, Katharina Burton and Andy Anderson pushed forward in 2013. When Jenna graduated at the end of 2014, Katie continued the work on these annotations until she left the project in early 2015. The result of this effort is that for Volume I, all the words, names and places have been glossed, as far as the students have been able to complete this work. In 2016, the student researchers will consult with Dr. James to finish the most difficult words for Volume I which are still left to be annotated.
- Building on the annotations completed for Volume I, Eve Smith, Jacob Hogan, Taylor Blanchard, and Van Stonehocker spent 2015 compiling the list of words, names, and places that need glossing for Volume II. This massive project is still in process, and will continue into 2016.
- Alec Down, Katie Adams and Gavin Grant have formatted all of the texts for Volume II in the InDesign program, while Gwyn Kutschke, Devon Wood, Jacob Hogan, Van Stonehocker, Taylor Blanchard, Eve Smith, Daniel Taylor, Larissa Kranewitter, and Elisabeth Allred have completed the second, and in some cases, the third proofing of most of the texts, including the large travel journals which make up the core of this volume. Elisabeth Allred has also typed and proofread several new texts which were located by Dr. James and by Gavin Asay, who completed Sophie research in Vienna and Leipzig. These new texts have now been formatted in InDesign by Gavin Grant.
- During his time on Study Abroad in Vienna during the summer of 2015, and during a subsequent research trip to Leipzig, Gavin Asay collected several texts by Elisa von der Recke, which we had previously been unable to locate. He also collected a number of other texts by early German-language women authors, which will be posted to the Sophie Digital Library.
- In 2015, Dr. James continued to work on the thorough, careful scholarly footnotes and annotations which only she can provide, for the texts for Volume I. Gavin Grant then entered these annotations into the InDesign documents in the proper format.
- As a side note, Robert Sowby, Mallorie Guerra, Margaret Ebeling, David Mann and Luke Swenson have all completed their ORCA projects, and Carrie Cox completed her Masters thesis, by writing introductions to several different sections of the Recke Collection: the general introduction to the edition, Recke’s portraits, memoirs, travel writings, Cagliostro writings, and her religious poetry. These are now ready to be edited and included in their appropriate volumes.
- In 2015, student researchers Eric Smith and Gwyn Kutschke helped Dr. Cindy Brewer to make progress on her book The Missionary Imagination, as they read and catalogued dozens of primary texts, based on their usefulness for each chapter in the book. The chapters of the book are thematic in nature, each looking at a different trope typical in mission literature. Eric and Gwyn read the texts, making notes on the content. They also helped in the continued search for secondary text on the topic of missionary literature.
- As webmaster for the Sophie Digital Library, in 2015 Gavin Grant improved and clarified many functions on the website, working closely with Dr. McFarland and Dr. James. Gavin has also been working with Conrad Rosenbrock, the student creator of the current Sophie website, to devise a way to post the collection of early German language women artists and their works, which Aloe Corry has compiled as an ORCA project.
Women’s Articles in Vienna’s “Die neue freie Presse:” A Digital Companion to Red Vienna, White Socialism and the Blues: Ann Tizia Leitich’s America
In 2015, Dr. Rob McFarland finished a Sophie mentored learning project that has spanned thirteen years. In 2002, Prof. McFarland used MEG money to involve six of his study abroad students on a women’s journalism project. Working together over the course of the summer, the group collected hundreds of articles written by women journalists in major German-language newspapers. Upon returning to Provo, Professor McFarland and his mentees catalogued the articles and prepared them for web publication as a part of the Sophie Digital Library (http://sophie.byu.edu ). In addition, Dr. McFarland worked with six of his Sophie mentees, Matt Embley, Kelli Barbour, Ruth Seppi, Brooke Wright, Kelsey Draper, and Stephen Simon, as they turned their journalism projects into Masters theses or Honors theses.
In 2015, Dr. McFarland finished the culminating part of the project, as his book, entitled Red Vienna, White Socialism and the Blues: Ann Tizia Leitich’s America, on the Austrian Journalist Ann Tizia Leitich, reached the final stages of publication. It will appear through Camden House publishers later in October. Over the years several students, including Carl Hayden in 2015, have helped Dr. McFarland with his research and with the editing of his book. In addition, as part of his Masters thesis, Stephen Simon translated 36 of Leitich’s articles, which will be web-published in the Sophie Digital Library in conjunction with this book publication.
As a completion of the MEG work proposed for this grant period, in 2015 Carl Hayden and Sarah Smith finished posting 1,090 articles by women journalists from all over German-speaking Europe in the Journalism Collection of the Sophie Digital Library, making them accessible to readers across the world. In this work, they were assisted by Taylor Blanchard, Larissa Kranewitter and Gavin Grant in working through the task of editing the entries in the journalism collection.
Other Sophie Mentored Learning Projects in 2015
The Ann Tizia Leitich book, the missionary writings book, and in particular the Recke collected works are all projects of such an extensive scope that it would be practically impossible to
complete them without the dedication and effort of the talented, bright Sophie student researchers. During 2015, our students have spent endless hours at the computer, in libraries and archives across Europe and in the BYU library. They have searched online collections, read, written, collected and compiled information, they have formatted and annotated texts. They have also spent many hours in meeting and discussing the projects with their faculty mentors, Dr. James, Dr. Brewer, and Dr. McFarland. The students are not mere appendages to the work the faculty are directing—they are the heart of it. Without them, the vitality of the projects would largely be lost. With them, the messy, sometimes frustrating, sometimes apparently endless effort to bring massive works of scholarship to completion is slowly but successfully approaching its goal.