Modernist Magazines Project

The critic Michael Levenson warned that “A coarsely
understood modernism is at once an historical
scandal and a contemporary disability”. The Modernist
Magazine Project aims to refine and enhance the record
through the production of a scholarly resource and
comprehensive critical and cultural history of modernist
magazines in the period 1880-1945. So-called ‘little
magazines’ were small, independent publishing ventures
committed to new and experimental work. Literally
hundreds of such magazines flourished in this period,
providing an indispensable forum for modernist innovation
and debate. They helped sustain small artistic communities,
strengthened the resolve of small iconoclastic
groups, keen to change the world, and gave many major
modernists their first opportunities in print. Many of
these magazines existed only for a few issues and then
collapsed; but almost all of them contained work of outstanding
originality and future significance.
The project aims to document and analyse the role of
both fugitive and more established magazines and to
consider their contribution to the construction of modernism
in Britain, Europe and North America. It will result
in a 3 volume Critical and Cultural History of Modernist
Magazines, an Anthology and an online resource,
comprising an index of magazines, bibliographical and
biographical data, selected contents and web links.
What this paper wants to focus on is the design and actual
implementation of the online resource together with
all the critical and technical thinking involved in defining
every step of workflow.
The first part involved thinking about the proper formats
and standards which would best suit the project needs
and at the same time would be able to be conformant
with the current best practices and the widely advocated
interoperability and preservation issues. Therefore a natural
choice has been the adoption of Library of Congress
standards related to the implementation of both general
descriptive metadata and specific solutions for the domain
of digital libraries. In particular the standards involved
are MODS1, METS2, MADS3, having also a look
at PREMIS4.
All these standards at the same time provide for and
prefer an XML serialization, which, given the almost
ubiquitous support of this syntax by the current web
frameworks, allows for many different possibilities in
choosing the underlying technology. The final choice
consisted in the eXist XML Native Database5. Being
under open-source development for several years, this
database has been constantly growing in features, performance
and user base, becoming not only a mere data
storage layer, but, thanks to the integration with Apache
Cocoon6 which allowed for the possibility of creating
processing pipelines composed by XQuery and XSLT,
an actual and complete web framework.
A particular focus will be dedicated to the strategies
implemented for converting from non structured data
to MODS metadata, so to facilitate the work of the developer,
since the data collecting has been made by an
expert in modernism, but with few skills in metadata
management. A key point has been the preparation of
Excel forms, which allowed for the gathering of semistructured
data and the subsequent development of a
conversion program based on Apache POI7 and JDOM8
API for the direct creation of MODS compliant metadata.
In particular the difference between the tabular
structure of Excel and the nested tree structure of XML
required the implementation of some particular algorithmic
strategies.
What will be discussed next is the use of MADS for recording
the different name versions and pseudonyms, the
creation of a MODS extension, compatible with METS,
for recording the information about the digital images of
the magazines pages, and the subsequent display of these
images using the YUI framework9.
The last part of the presentation will be about a proofof-
concept integration between the Modernist Magazines
Project and the thematic-related Modernist Journal
Project, based on the use Web 2.0 techniques, in particular
Ajax and REST Web Services10.
Notes
1Metadata Object Description Standard <http://www.
loc.gov/standards/mods/>.
2Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard <http://
www.loc.gov/standards/mets/>.
3Metadata Authority Description Schema <http://www.
loc.gov/standards/mads/>.
4Preservation Metadata Maintenance Activity <http://
www.loc.gov/standards/premis/>. 5eXist <http://exist-db.org/>.
6Cocoon <http://cocoon.apache.org/>.
7<http://poi.apache.org/>.
8<www.jdom.org/>.
9The Yahoo! User Interface Library <http://developer.
yahoo.com/yui/>.
10Costello, Roger L. Building Web Services the REST
Way. <http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.
html>