Megan S Morris and Dr. Robert McFarland, Germanic and Slavic Languages
The purpose of my research was to help with the development of the Sophie Project. It was conceived by members of the Germanic and Slavic Languages Department who had been confronted by the difficulties of the lack of usable German-language texts written by early women authors. Finding the texts of eighteenth and nineteenth century writing by Germanlanguage women authors seemed to be difficult enough, but finding texts in modern print that could be used in the classroom was even more difficult. The Sophie Project aims to ease this difficulty. As self described by its home page, it is a “digital library that will contain approximately 245 titles (295 volumes) by German-language women writing between 1740 and 1923. These texts, which have previously been out of print and difficult to access, cover a broad spectrum of genres, including novels (often with multiple volumes), stories, dramas, autobiographies, letters, travel journals and poetry. The library also presents several significant nineteenth-century reference works pertaining to women authors.”
The project has provided a unique opportunity for students to work alongside faculty mentors in doing our research and inputting. In addition to meeting with the faculty, we met weekly as a group which allowed us to interact with the other students and get input or help in our individual research. Our addition to the project was mainly to help get the texts inputted and onto the website. Specific duties and features of the website include:
- Complete German texts in modern print
- Printer-accessible for scholarly use
- Editorial essays introducing each text
- Biographical sketches of the authors
- Bibliographical information on the authors
- Glossing of archaic words and unfamiliar persons and places
- Facsimiles of original title pages and illustrations
- Bibliographies of secondary materials pertaining to women’s writing in German-speaking countries
When I started out on my research I aimed to study Thekla von Thurn: Scenen aus dem dreißigjährigen Krieg. Instead I chose to work on a fascinating text by Theresa von Bacheracht called Novellen. I inputted a few acts of this work onto the computer. This involved typing and interpreting the Old German font. Old German is fairly hard to read as the characters are written differently. We were provided with a guide of the Old German letters and we inputted. After finishing a section we would proofread the text going over each line carefully and marking in a red pen any mistakes. Then we would return to the computer file and change any mistakes we had made. After that stage came the glossing. Using our knowledge of German we read through the text and pulled out any unfamiliar German terms, persons or places. Once we had a list, we would research in a number of different places to find suitable definitions for the unfamiliar terms. After this our initial work on a particular text was finished and we turned them in to our faculty mentor, who would do the secondary and final proofreading before the text went on to the website. I also worked on the biography of Bacheracht to be posted on the website.
The main difficulty I experienced was finding time to do the work. It wasn’t for lack of time, but rather organization. I should have scheduled specific times and hours dedicated to working on the project. Instead I simply worked on it hit and miss usually when I found a free moment or two. This project is in progress. I only wish I could have done more. I also wished to submit an article to the Sophie Journal, a journal created specifically for the project. It is a peer-reviewed e-publication. I still hope to finish an article to be submitted.
For the most part, this is an excellent research project that will continue on for some time. The main points that I had focused on had been realized if only in a smaller quantity than I had intitially anticipated. I really enjoyed working with my faculty mentor and the other students. In the process I learned great research skills and gained knowledge on German-language women authors.