Archival Group
From The Waste Land Wiki
Katie Boul (Talk | contribs) (Created page with "For our portion of The Waste Land wiki, we dealt with original copies of ''The Dial'' and ''The Criterion''.") |
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| − | For our portion of The Waste Land wiki, we dealt with original copies of ''The Dial'' and ''The Criterion''. | + | For our portion of The Waste Land wiki, we dealt with original copies of ''The Dial'' and ''The Criterion'' from McFarlin Library's Special Collections. Our first step was to visit Special Collections and actually examine the magazines. We carefully looked through both magazines, noting differences in paper quality, amount of advertising, and print format of ''The Waste Land''. We also took interest in the other pieces (both written and visual) that appeared in the magazine along side ''The Waste Land''. |
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| + | For her portion of the project, Katie initially planned to focus on any differences she would find in ''The Waste Land'' between ''The Dial'' and ''The Criterion''. As a result, she rewrote the portion titled, “Publication History” and composed the sections on the epigraph and the dedication. She then turned to the section on “Internationality.” In addition to condensing and breaking up the previous writing into two sections, one that focused on ''The Criterion'' and one that focused on ''The Dial'', she created images using Google Earth that give a visual representation of the international nature of the magazines. She also composed the section on T.S. Eliot’s autograph and added a picture. Finally, she edited the “Thematic Coherence” section, making it more accessible. Though much of the writing had already been composed by previous students, she added new information to the WWI subheading. | ||
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| + | Hope focused on two things: the materiality of the poem in its two original sources and the internal structure of the Archival Evidence wiki page. Though she had some challenges finding good sources for discussing bibliographic coding and some of the material aspects – and thus the sections on the wiki she contributed regarding these are shorter than she had originally planned – she enjoyed the process of examining original texts and then writing born-digital reference materials based on them; she contributed material about advertising, paper quality, and the Robert Delaunay painting found opposite ''The Waste Land'' in ''The Dial''. She also concentrated on reorganizing the Archival Evidence page started by previous students by subdividing sections, building new sections and subsections, and editing content for clarity. | ||
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| + | Caitlin worked on the poem’s relationship to the culture of the world at that time. Comparing ''The Waste Land''’s structure to a cubist painting of St. Severin’s cathedral, and making connections between the various fragments of European culture scattered throughout both Eliot’s work and similar works at the time. Reading through the two magazines in which Eliot published ''The Waste Land'', the culture of post-World War I Europe and America made itself clear. The content of ''The Dial'' imported European culture to the United States. Post-WWI Americans were confident and proud; ads for European imports, expensive products, and entire anthologies of literature filled the pages of ''The Dial''. ''The Criterion'', on the other hand, was more focused on literary works condemning the culture that led up to the war. A poem by William Butler Yeats follows Eliot’s Waste Land in the 1922 edition of The Criterion; Yeats’s The Player Queen held similar images of Eastern religion and Christian allusions, much like Eliot’s work. Yeats also makes allusions to works in English culture; the title itself being a reference to Shakespeare’s ''Hamlet''. This eye on the past is evident throughout The Criterion, and emphasizes the feeling of disillusionment with modernity felt after World War I. | ||
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| + | We found the wiki project similar to other humanities work in its emphasis on interpretation, summary, and close analysis of literary texts. However, we also noticed some major differences. Some of these differences include the collaborative nature of the project and the experience of building upon a pre-existing foundation. Weaving in new pieces of information and refining text already present was daunting at first, but eventually became quite enjoyable. When we stopped thinking about the project as a typical paper, and instead as a dynamic collaboration, everything flowed with greater ease. | ||
