Mina Loy descends on D.C.

On February 9, 2018, Suzanne Churchill and Linda Kinnahan attended an Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) Project Directors Meeting in Washington, DC. The day-long meeting helped us focus, manage this project, and get the word out. We also watched more than forty 3-minute lightning presentations, where we learned about all the amazing DH projects NEH is funding. By the end of the day, our heads were full things to do, including:

  • enter the project schedule into our Outlook calendars, including deadlines for submitting reports.
  • keep track of media coverage, write press releases, and write about our project in journas such as the American Scholar and Digital Humanities Quarterly.
  • communicate with our congressional representatives to tell them about what we’re doing so they know what they’re paying for.
  • make creative use of social media, e.g. Tweet, post to Facebook, Snapchat, create an Instagram story, and swipe it to Medium.
  • think about who your audience is and identify them where they are, using different hashtags to join different conversations.

The best part was learning that the terrific ODH staff have resources, expertise, and eagerness to help. We are definitely going to open those channels of communication.

During the talks and lightning presentations, we also got ideas for ways we can develop Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-garde:

  • use the “news/events” blog to update our advisory board and other interested people about what we’re doing and when, and allow users to subscribe to updates.
  • link the site to our new social media accounts so people can follow and share us.
  • create an interactive “Guess the date?” quiz for Loy’s writing and art, encouraging users to interact with her work and experience firsthand the difficulty of situating it in a linear chronology.
  • explore the updated Omeka S and CurateScape to see whether either platform can help us create a more effective way of showcasing selected texts by Loy and providing searchable metadata about each item.
  • contact project directors who are using WordPress to see if they’ve found a way to enhance the platform’s metadata functions.
  • contact project directors who are using split-screen technology for side-by-side viewing of texts and transcriptions to see if their tools would work for us.
  • contact ModNets about the SHARE tool for harvesting metadata, which could help them—and us.
  • try Tesserae, a free open source search engine used to detect allusions in literary texts, on Loy’s writing to see who she’s alluding to.