What follows are reflections from three Research Assistants who worked with the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) for more than two years. Before that they were students in a senior modernism class at King's University (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) which used MAPP as a classroom resource. They have been part of a team that consisted of Research Assistants from various institutions including the University of Reading, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), the University of Oregon, and Stanford University with whom they shared questions, insights, and resources. These students have also worked alongside the six faculty members of the MAPP team—both virtually and face to face—researching biographies, writing new content for the site, seeking out Hogarth Press first editions or images of obscure figures, inputting data, and writing bibliographies.

The students were trained on MAPP's Drupal interface and engaged with the data model that underpins MAPP and to which they were contributing. Even inputting data into the system required an understanding, for example, that a “Work” is the abstract concept of the literary text, as distinct from specific editions of that work, each of which is made up of individual copies (in MAPP terminology called “Primary Objects”), each with their own provenance. The networks of modernism became visible in new ways as students entered this information into the digital system, as did the complexity of book production. Helping to build this resource has given them a sense of the team approach that such a project requires, and it has also helped them to see the impact of research, to more directly imagine the readers and users who might seek out and benefit from the work they have done.

Tyler Johansson

I would like in this short piece to describe some of the lessons I learned while researching an obscure modernist figure and to explain how this experience changed how I viewed researching, being a student, and collaborating. One of the most exciting and challenging tasks we have done as research assistants has been writing biographies of literary figures who have been associated in some way with the Hogarth Press. These figures have ranged from the obscure (like Frank Prewett and C. J. M. Hubback) to household names (like Sigmund Freud and T. S. Eliot).