The Yale Modernism Lab is an virtual space dedicated to collaborative research into the roots of literary modernism.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  Thus wrote T.S. Eliot in his poem “Little Gidding,” the fourth of his Four Quartets. Much the same might be said in the most modern of senses about the Yale Modernism Lab, the brainchild of Yale Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Pericles Lewis.  Recipient of a John and Yvonne McCredie Fellowship grant to support development of the Modernism Lab, Lewis has long experience in the use of computers for the creation of new knowledge so we might again “know the place for the first time.”

“I remember the first computer I used as a grade school student,” muses Lewis.  “It was an Apple II, and, like any kid, I played a lot of games before I realized its value for instruction and communication.” Lewis, for example, recalls vividly how when he started at Yale he required his students to send him by email their questions about the last class’ reading assignment before the next. This means of improving the experience and effectiveness of each class for student and teacher alike spurred him to consider more broadly the potential upsides of computer-enabled collaborative research in the humanities.

The Modernism Lab includes a wiki where students post interpretive essays on Modernism.

“When I taught Modern British Novel,” Lewis notes, “I had some grant money to support a traditional web-based approach, one that pointed students to a website loaded with images of modernist art and archival material from the Beinecke Library.”  This access to original documents, such as drafts of pages illustrating the writer at work, let him push students to make use of this archival material in their research assignments. Shortly afterwards, however, he decided to move to a Web 2.0 model, one that was more interactive and dynamic, where students could contribute as well as respond.

Visiting the Yale Modernism Lab, a collaborative research environment dedicated to the study of literary modernism, is a unique experience.  The Lab relies on Ynote, a user-generated research database developed by Yale’s Instructional Technology Group and MediaWiki, the same open source software that powers Wikipedia, to support the collaborative research environment Lewis sought. Under the tab labeled “Wiki,” visitors will find a short feature article and links to over 150 others on modernist authors and their individual works. Lewis make clear, however, that he was not interested in “just-the-facts-ma’am” presentations like those found in Wikipedia, articles that, in his view, deliver little more than a “bland consensus.” “I wanted to see more in the way of interpretive essays with greater authorial voice,” Lewis explains.

The Modernism Lab includes a user-generated database containing information on the activities of 24 leading modernist writers.

But the Modernism Lab is more than its steadily growing collection of essays on everything from Rebecca West to Wyndham Lewis’ Time and Western Man. It is a true “laboratory,” where information is not only housed but continues to be added on a regular basis and can be manipulated for multifaceted analyses of literary modernism.  The links under the “Database” tab tell the story.  Users can sort portions, if not all, of the 2,200-plus facts in the Lab’s database by year, place, keyword, notable people, and source. Over a year old, the Lab has already seen scholarly results.  Lewis has two articles in press from research using the Lab, hardly a surprise when users can instantly locate every reference to psychoanalysis by Virginia Woolf or every work published by James Joyce in a given year.

Much depends, of course, on the information entered, but, Lewis is ready with his set of editorial guidelines, a plan for further development, and ongoing financial support.  Funds from the McCredie Foundation Fellowship and other sources helped get the ball rolling by supporting nearly 400 hours of work from research assistants in the genesis of the database. Data entry is handled primarily by research assistants and the students whom they train. Graduate students, often as part of Lewis’ courses, enter up to 50 or so items and, although areas that need coverage may be suggested, students are often encouraged to propose their own.

Lewis, who sees the Lab as an opportunity to deliver a radically different research experience, points out that humanities research has always been collaborative, with scholars revising or adding to the pool of accumulated knowledge but often only after publication by their peers has occurred.  “In an online environment, that type of collaboration assumes a real-time character that pre-Internet research just didn’t offer,” adds Lewis.

Lewis envisions a number of potential developments. In addition to the regular meetings with the Lab’s Managing Editor, Sam Alexander, Instructional Technology Group Manager, Ken Panko, and Web Technologies Manager, Ioannis Yessios to improve the site’s design and functionality, he is exploring adding more primary sources from the Beinecke Library, using it for collaborative writing assignments (such as in his spring 2009 class on James Joyce’s Ulysses), enhancing the “Undergraduate Gateway,” extending the years covered from 1914-1926 to 1901-1939, and expanding access beyond the Yale community.  In fact, Lewis has already received queries of interest along these lines, and his editorial board of twenty-four experts in modernism from the across the United States had seeded the ground for a more public push to turn the Lab into “the first place scholars turn when researching modernism.”