Without funding there would be no Sophie project, which is why the first item in this report on the Sophie activities during 2016 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 Gavin Grant, the current student editor of the Recke collected works, overhauled, simplified, corrected and standardized all of the texts for Volume I in 2015. During 2016, he completed the same work on Volumes II and III, thus finalizing texts 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. The Missionary Imagination: German-Language Missionary Writing during the Colonial Period The scholarly results of the mentoring collaboration between Dr. Brewer and the Sophie researchers she has been directing have already become evident in several ways, and will continue into the future. Kristen Jacobson wrote an excellent capstone paper, which will be incorporated in a chapter of The Missionary Imagination. Other Sophie Mentored Learning Projects in 2016 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 2016, 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.
With the exception of money used for supplies such as photocopying, postage, permissions, and the purchase of out-of-print books, all funding in 2016 was applied to student wages. As outlined in our Mentoring Environments Grant proposal, the predominant focus of our work during 2016 has been the five-volume 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 near completion. Once all of the work for Volume I had been brought to the most final form that the student researchers could achieve, we turned our efforts to Volumes II and III. The main results of our efforts during 2016 can be seen in the following:
In 2016, Gavin also began training Tatiana Rudolphi in all aspects of the InDesign program and E-book publication, as well as maintenance of the Sophie website and other Sophie-related technology, so that she will be ready to replace him as student editor when he graduates in April 2017.
Gavin Grant has built on the formatting developed by Alec Down for Volume I, in preparing the texts and Table of Contents for Volumes II and III 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 III E-book and the correction of previous formatting in Volumes I and II. 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 Volumes II and III have been formatted and prepared in E-book form.
In 2014 Katie Adams and Jenna Gwilliam worked together to organize, simplify and finish as far as possible 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. Katie Adams, 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 has continued through 2016, with Taylor Blanchard and Brock Mildon serving as the lead researchers in this area.
During 2016, Elisabeth Allred, Tatiana Rudolphi, Brock Mildon, Taylor Blanchard, Kate Carr, Mason Price, and Gwyn Kutschke continued the work of text preparation, including the completion of the second, and in some cases, the third proofing of the texts belonging to Volumes II and III. Elisabeth Allred and Kate Carr 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 during 2015. These new texts have now been formatted in InDesign by Gavin Grant and Tatiana Rudolphi and have received their second proofing.
In 2016, David Seay, who has extensive musical training, took up the work begun previously by Tara Austin and Aubrey Hatch, of transcribing the musical settings which have been composed to many of Recke’s poems, for inclusion in Volume IV. These transcriptions are now essentially finished, except for proofreading.
Another member of the Sophie research team, Tyler Boehmer, helped David Seay complete his 2016 ORCA project, when he accompanied David on the piano as they made a professional-level recording of a selection of the Recke songs, which will likewise be included in the final version of Volume IV.
In 2016, 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, Nathan Conder, and Luke Swenson have all completed their ORCA projects, and Carrie Cox completed her Master’s thesis, by preparing introductions to several different sections of the Recke Collection: the general introduction to the edition, Recke’s portraits, memoirs, travel writings, Cagliostro writings, and religious poetry, and significant texts written about her. 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 texts on the topic of missionary literature. During 2016, Gwyn Kutschke and Henry Davis continued to make progress in the selection of primary texts to be used in the final version of Dr. Brewer’s book.
In 2016 Gavin Grant, Tatiana Rudolphi, Kate Carr and Mason Price organized, selected, transcribed, and otherwise prepared a number of these missionary texts, which Gavin and Tatiana then added to the “Mission Literature” collection in the Sophie Digital Library (http://sophie.byu.edu). These works will increase the scholarly value of Dr. Brewer’s completed book, since readers will be able to access and analyze the primary texts discussed in the book. These texts would otherwise be essentially unavailable to interested scholars.
Eric Smith wrote his Honors Thesis based on the missionary texts he collected and analyzed for Dr. Brewer. He also used this experience of collecting recent theoretical and historical scholarship surrounding Mission literature in different languages and countries as he applied for a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University.
In 2014, Dr. Brewer presented a paper at the Women in German conference which included the work of Kristen Jacobson and Eric Smith. The paper was entitled “Bitte, Maria, für die armen Neger, auf daß sie mit uns würdig werden: M.T. Ledochowska’s African Dramas and the Troublesome Status of Mission Literature.“ This paper will become part of The Missionary Imagination.
Most of the missionary texts catalogued and prepared by student researchers have been posted to the Sophie Digital Library by Gavin Grant and Tatiana Rudolphi, thus expanding what is already the largest collection of German-Language Women’s Missionary Literature in America. More missionary texts will be posted in the future, as the formatting is completed by Sophie researchers.
Dr. Brewer has written an invited chapter on missionary women and war, which will soon be appearing in print in a book on women and war.
We anticipate that, under Dr. Brewer’s direction, future ORCA projects, Honors theses, and capstone papers will be drawn from this mission literature.
The work of student researchers has greatly accelerated Dr. Brewer’s progress on The Missionary Imagination, which she will submit for publication as soon as it is finished.
In 2015 and 2016, Rob McFarland worked with several students on Sophie projects. During the Summer of 2015, he worked with Aloe Corry, Eve Smith, Gavin Asay, Nicole Noyes, Nancy Eyre and Dianne Isom at the Austrian National Library and the Vienna City Museum in Vienna, Austria. He was working on two separate Sophie-related projects. First, he and a group of four students collected articles by female journalists writing for the Arbeiterzeitung and for the Neue Freie Presse. Many of those articles have been made available to researchers across the world as a part of the Sophie Journalism collection. With the other students, Prof. McFarland worked in the Vienna City Museum researching the art of a group of women who belonged to the Viennese Kineticism movement. This project was connected to the development of the Sophie Art and Artists collection which will be unveiled in the next few months.
In the Fall of 2015, Professor McFarland’s latest book appeared in print under the title Red Vienna, White Socialism and the Blues: Ann Tizia Leitich’s America. Many Sophie student researchers contributed to this book project, including Sarah Reed, Kelli Barbour, Ruth Seppi Hamilton, Brooke Wright, Daniel Shoop, Gentry Ensign, Sarah Jensen, Daniel Jacobs, Carl Hayden, Kari Stolzenberg and Emma Leigh Boone.
In 2016, Prof. McFarland oversaw the editing of the journalism collection, overcoming basic errors that had been entered in with the more than 1, 200 articles in the Sophie Journalism collection. Carl Hayden and Madeleine McFarland served as lead researchers working on this project.
Austen Arts has been working closely with Richard Hacken in the library to code, catalogue, and otherwise prepare the texts in the Sophie database for transfer to the library server, where they will be made available through the Library website, in addition to the Sophie website. This will greatly increase the use of the texts in the Sophie Digital Library.