To briefly fill-in anyone just joining the conversation, the FLA is a project that seeks to understand the significance of literature written by foreign authors in the United States. (For a more extensive description, you can check out the project information page here.) The Modern British archive is a sub-project focused on the reception of modern British authors. Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland and eventually became a British citizen, is our first focus-writer. We began our work this past fall by organizing an enormous amount of print archival materials on the reception of Conrad that has been gathered by Peter Mallios and his students over the past several years. These materials covered the length of Conrad’s career and beyond, from contemporary reviews of Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), to personal reminiscences of individuals who met Conrad during his only trip to the U.S. in 1923 to reflections on the impact of his works written well after his death in 1924.

Our original efforts were put into scanning as much of this material into an OCR-able format. However, after learning more about sentiment analysis and what it can potentially do, and also after reevaluating our initial resources, some of which consisted of copies that we found would not produce OCR-able scans, we decided to adopt a new strategy. We both narrowed our data set in terms of years and headed back to the library to gather more materials. We decided to focus on the latter half of Conrad’s career, beginning with the publication of Chance, which first appeared in serial form in 1912. It was published as a book in 1913 and became his greatest commercial success to-date and marked an important milestone in Conrad’s transition from the relative obscurity of his early career to the widespread popularity he enjoyed later. Our data set will extend to 1926 to include reviews of and references to the last published original collection of Conrad’s short stories, Tales of Hearsay (1926). We are particularly interested in understanding Conrad’s shift from a lesser known to a popular writer in the United States. We are further interested in how the specific group of women readers contributes to this shift. Our work will build on that of Susan Jones, whose groundbreaking Conrad and Women (1999) explores Conrad’s relationship to women, both in terms of women within his personal life and women as a set of readers that Conrad’s works engage and respond to. In contrast, our research will focus on women readers as reviewers, as writers who actively create an idea of Conrad within the public sphere.

In compiling our new data set, we have drawn on our own previously mentioned collection, tracking down alternative copies of any materials that cannot create scans readable by our OCR software. We’ve also used Theodore George Ehrsam’s A Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (1969) as a resource for identifying materials not already in our collection. We now have an extensive list of six hundred and fourteen articles to track down, which continues to grow. We’ve located many of these articles at the Library of Congress and the University of Maryland’s own libraries. Numerous original journals from the early twentieth-century are stored in off-campus shelving at UMD, and the staff at McKeldin Library has been a wonderful help in obtaining these materials. We’ve begun the scanning process, and, as of this week, we have roughly one hundred and sixty-six files scanned, comprising just over eighty articles, although some of the earliest scans produced from our initial materials may not be OCR-able. We have not yet finalized our sentiment analysis questions, but we anticipate that many of them will be similar to those used for the Russian Author Initiative. (While we belong to the same fleet, we’ve got a somewhat smaller crew, and we’re not quite as far along.)

Obviously, we still have an enormous amount of work to do. However, while standing at the scanner, it’s hard not to think forward to what this archive might some day look like, and what it might potentially do. Two issues in particular have occurred to me that we may need to delve into as we proceed. 1.) With both the Modern British archive and the Russian Author Initiative, we’ve considered the issue of how much supplementary material to provide users. On the one hand, such material would serve to allow users to understand what they read in context. On the other hand, scanning supplementary materials takes up resources, both in terms of time and storage space. One comprise we might consider would be to include within the site descriptions of the journals and newspapers our materials come from, including political affiliations. 2.) A fair amount of the reviews we have found are either unsigned or merely initialed. If we are serious about tracing the role of women reviewers in Conrad’s reception, we are going to have to come up with a method for tracking down these names. (Any suggestions readers of this blog may have as to how we can go about this, beyond Google, would be greatly appreciated!) Identifying these reviewers will be an additional step in our process, but could dramatically affect our results.

Jennifer Wellman will receive her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland in May 2012. She is an Executive Editor of the FLA Project.

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Now, to be clear, I don’t mean that we are “storytellers” in terms of providing a traditional kind of narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end; but rather I am thinking of the ways that the decisions we make provide an interpretive framework through which our primary documents will be viewed and potentially understood by users. How will we organize the presentation of the reception materials we have collected? Should they be organized by genre (review, advertisement, letter to the editor, etc.)? By journal? By author? By author’s nationality? Or should we create an interface that allows the user a choice between these arrangements? How will we make the materials searchable? Will we use keywords, and what keywords will we identify? Will we annotate the materials, and what will we annotate? What kind of contextual information will we provide? Decisions such as these must be made so that our site can be useable; yet they will inevitably affect how the materials we offer are read. Moreover, much like a literary canon, an archive itself creates a kind of narrative by virtue of the materials the archivist chooses to include or leave out. Over the past few months we have discussed questions such as what authors we should focus on first and whether we want to proceed by looking at their reception in a specific journal or in multiple journals across a given time period.

This all goes to my point in claiming the necessity of consciously thinking of ourselves and acknowledging our function as storytellers presenting the primary materials of the FLA collection in a particular manner. There is great power in a skilled storyteller’s ability to communicate and to open a listener’s mind to new experiences and perspectives. Indeed, part of the value of the “story” the FLA project offers – that is the “story” of the fundamental significance of foreign literature to American identity – comes from the fact that it is a previously unrecognized narrative. For this very reason, however, we must proceed cautiously and self-reflectively, making as much as possible our intentions and process clear and accessible to users. This means documenting and explaining why we have made particular editorial and organizational decisions. I also think that acknowledging ourselves as storytellers makes the inclusion of some kind of a platform for user input – a platform through which users can post comments, questions, critiques, additional materials, and potentially their own discoveries and research – all the more important. For, in the end, it doesn’t seem to me that the “story” of foreign literatures in America is one that we can, or want, to tell on our own. It’s a collaborative story, one that we hope to see grow from the resources we make available.

Jennifer Wellman is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Maryland English Department. Foreign Literatures in America is a project directed by MITH Faculty Fellow Peter Mallios.

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