SOPHIE:
A Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women
This question is particularly critical in the field of German Studies, where women artists and authors have traditionally been excluded from the canon; until recently, relatively little scholarly effort has been invested in the study of their works. Thus, when scholars and teachers in German Studies desire to investigate works reflecting the experiences of women and other traditionally marginalized groups, they are often frustrated by the lack of access to very basic materials and information. Until a marginalized text is broadly available to academics, it often remains hidden in European archives, beyond the reach of most potential researchers. Particularly in the classroom, teachers often shy away from early women’s work because they are unfamiliar with the historical and cultural contexts conditioning the artistic production, and do not have time to re-tool from the ground up.
In the 1998 Boyer Commission report, research universities were challenged to
However, as
Wendy Katkin observes, follow-up studies indicate that “research
and creative endeavors are still not central to the undergraduate
mission at most institutions. A major challenge is how to involve
more students.” (Katkin 25) Katkin further reports that
“The question of how to engage humanities faculty and
students has emerged as a major concern...” (26)
However, David W. Chapman, while
ostensibly supporting undergraduate research, sets a negative
tone when he remarks that “undergraduate research takes
place not in the designer’s showroom of new ideas, but
in the bargain basement of existing materials and methods.”
(Chapman B5) As he asserts, “even in the humanities, few
students go beyond familiar texts and predictable theses.”
(B5) In a patronizing tone, he insists that undergraduate research
“is like role-playing” (B5); that is, just as children
learn to be adults by imitating their parents, so undergraduate
students imitate their professors in their research involvement.
As Chapman concludes, “In one sense, the research is a
pretense...” (B5).
As a mentored research project,
Sophie: A Digital Library and
Resource Center for Early German-Speaking Women’s Works
1740-1923 directly addresses the problem
of how to involve undergraduate students in significant research
in such a way that they make meaningful contributions to scholarly
research and benefit in ways that will enhance their future
careers and lives.
At the same time the Sophie project
also directly addresses a second problem, which arises from
the current debate on the role of marginalized authors, texts
and creative works in the academic curriculum and in scholarly
research agendas. This question is particularly critical in
the field of German Studies, where women artists and authors
have traditionally been excluded from the canon; until recently,
relatively little scholarly effort has been invested in the
study of their works. Thus, when scholars and teachers in German
Studies desire to investigate works reflecting the experiences
of women and other traditionally marginalized groups, they are
often frustrated by the lack of access to very basic materials
and information. Until a marginalized text is broadly available
to academics, it often remains hidden in European archives,
beyond the reach of most potential researchers. Particularly
in the classroom, teachers often shy away from early women’s
work because they are unfamiliar with the historical and cultural
contexts conditioning the artistic production, and do not have
time to re-tool from the ground up.
If the problem of involving undergraduate
students in meaningful research is envisioned as a circle, and
the equally challenging problem of making early German-speaking
women’s work accessible is seen as a second, intersecting
circle, the area at which these two circles overlap is the space
in which the Sophie Digital Library and Resource Center
offers a viable solution to both these problems. Although undergraduate
students usually cannot produce scholarly work at the level
of sophistication expected of professional scholars, they can
be extremely effective in recuperating lost works and producing
foundational materials and information. In this area we have
established a valuable, productive niche for undergraduate students
in the broader realm of academic research.
In the past two years, we have
trained 49 students to fluently read Gothic script and have
assisted them to a strong level of competency in archival, research
and computer skills. We have mentored them in the recovery,
editing and glossing of early texts, which were then published
on the internet, and in the collection of biographical and bibliographical
information on the authors and their historical periods. We
have contributed funds to help fourteen of these students participate
in the German Department Study Abroad Program in Vienna, through
which, under our direction, they worked in archives and libraries
in Austria and Germany, collecting works by significant German-speaking
authors, journalists and composers. We have four Honors Theses
and four Master’s Theses completed or underway, all based
on original research undertaken as a part of the Sophie project.
Twenty of our students have submitted some aspect of their Sophie
work as research proposals to the Brigham Young University (BYU)
Office of Research and Creative Activities (ORCA) office. Many
of these students have received funding, which they have used
both on campus and in Europe to complete unique research in
areas relatively untouched by contemporary scholarship. The
works in the library represent the literary, musical, dramatic
and journalistic work of more than 100 German-speaking women.
As forgotten works are edited,
annotated and made readily available, more sophisticated theoretical
and critical research becomes the natural byproduct. The Sophie
Website has received 23,607 hits to date, with an average of
200-300 per week; likewise, messages from around the world indicate
that scholars, students and teachers are actively using the
works in their research and classes. This fruitful scholarship
and discussion, with the accompanying broadening of the German
literary canon, rests on a foundation of work performed by bright,
competent, creative undergraduate researchers who are accomplishing,
not a pretense of scholarship, not an imitative role-play of
“the real thing” (Chapman B5), but real, significant
research.
There is currently no other project
being undertaken that is similar to the Sophie project. Both
in Germany and the U.S., some groups, such as the Gutenberg
Library and the Saur Microfiche Library, have begun to assemble
collections of early works on the internet, microfiche or CD-Rom,
but these collections contain merely a token representation
of women’s writing, often including only works by a few
prominent women, which are already available in print. While
the Digitale Bibliothek Deutsche Literatur von Frauen
CD-Rom and the Belser Wissenschaftlicher Dienst German Language
Women’s Literature catalog offer a broader selection
of women’s texts, the works are entirely unedited, and
are difficult to obtain in the U.S. None of these projects includes
other genres, such as music, journalism or science, and none
of them afford the interactive, on-going dialogue with users
presented by the Sophie project. Far more than a mere repository
of texts, the Sophie library is a clearing house of artistic
works, information and resources which encourages and enhances
active scholarly exchange.
In order to clarify the unique characteristics of the Sophie
Digital Library and Resource Center, we will present an
expanded description of the project, followed by the work plan,
a discussion of the methodology employed, a history of the project,
and a list of the staff involved, along with a description of
the resources they bring to the work.
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The Sophie Digital Library
and Resource Center project is a complex entity which,
through its flexibility and dynamic internal life, offers numerous
resources and endless possibilities for students, teachers,
scholars and interested non-academic individuals. The success
of the Sophie project is the happy fruit of its unique combination
of core components: 1) student involvement as mentored collaborators
in meaningful research; 2) significant materials to be recovered
and researched; and 3) broad dissemination of materials, information
and resources through the Sophie website. In the following essay,
each of these components will be addressed separately.
Student Involvement
When the Sophie project originated,
the work of editing texts for the internet library was performed
entirely by professors, while students were hired only to input
texts. The challenge to adopt a mentoring approach to the project
required a major shift in our thinking as we transformed student
employees from mere typists to research colleagues working with
us to fill the website with texts, music and resources for users
world wide. Our foundational mentoring goals are:
*To bring undergraduates into
active, dynamic participation in significant research which
will broaden their understanding of German-language literature
and culture, while allowing them to perform meaningful service
for scholars and students across the globe.
*To provide undergraduate students
the opportunity to work closely with faculty mentors in cutting-edge
research on the Sophie project.
*To help undergraduate students
develop portable skills in preparing and editing texts, researching
in archives and libraries, publishing on the internet, and writing
journal-quality articles, skills which will be of ongoing value
as they graduate and move on into the next stage of their personal
and professional life.
*To challenge students, through
capstone papers, to develop their own analytical skills and
insights into works which have previously been little known.
In the two years since we began
mentoring, the creativity and fruitfulness of our collaboration
with student researchers has had a phenomenal effect on the
Sophie website. Originally the Sophie library focused solely
on literary texts. However, in following their individual research
interests, the students soon developed the project in new and
very productive directions, such as German-speaking women composers,
journalists and scientists.
The cumulative effects of the
student mentoring process employed by the Sophie project can
perhaps best be illustrated with the example of one story, “Das
Skapulier des Sklaven” (The Scapular of the Slave)
by Maria Theresia Lédochowska.
After carefully training our first
group of student researchers, we helped to subsidize several
students who traveled to Europe with the German Department Vienna
Study Abroad program during Spring/Summer 2002. One of these
students, Betsy McFarland, had received a research grant from
the BYU ORCA office to research the Empress Maria Theresia.
While thus involved, Ms. McFarland came across publications
by Lédochowska, an avid anti-slavery advocate and missionary
to Africa. As she browsed through these writings, Ms. McFarland
became convinced of their value to the Sophie project, and brought
the author to the attention of her faculty mentor, Robert McFarland,
who subsequently photocopied several works, including the story
under discussion.
During Fall semester 2002, Professor
Michelle James taught a “Sophie Seminar,” in which
students studied literature from the website and were trained
in text preparation. All of the Feuilleton articles currently
available on the Sophie website were edited by members of that
class. As his text assignment, Mathew Duerden received “Das
Skapulier des Sklaven,” which he digitized, proofread
and glossed. The completed text was passed on to Lore Schultheiss,
a graduate student hired as an editor to perform the second
proofreading on texts prepared by student researchers. She in
turn gave the polished version of the story to Devin Heid, the
student technical specialist, who cast it into html format and
posted it to the library.
In the meantime, intrigued by
Lédochowska’s African writings, another Sophie
researcher, Jakob Jarvis, wrote an ORCA grant proposal to gather
further materials by this author. After receiving the grant,
in Summer 2003 he traveled to Salzburg, Austria, where he collected
lectures, pamphlets, periodicals, stories and dramas by Lédochowska.
Upon his return home, he donated the texts to the Sophie library,
many of which are now being prepared and edited by other students,
and which will constitute a solid core of the Colonial/Travel
page on the Sophie website. Mr. Jarvis is now writing an Honors
Thesis on Lédochowska, using the materials he collected
in Salzburg. In addition, a Master’s Candidate, Cindy
Renker, is currently writing a thesis using colonial literature
by German women, including some of the texts collected by Mr.
Jarvis.
Through chains of creative research
activity such as the one described above, the growth of the Sophie Library and Resource Center since we adopted
a student mentoring approach has far exceeded all expectations
we had for the Sophie project. In a very real way, an investment
in the Sophie project is an investment in students and the quality
of their educational experience.
Materials to be Recovered
As part of the many-faceted Sophie
Library and Resource Center project, Professor Ruth Christensen
(music) and Professor Janet Holmgren (Sophie Journal) are working
fairly independently in their areas, and are seeking their own
sources of funding. The NEH grant sought here will apply predominantly
to resource materials and literary and journalistic texts. Because
of this, this section focuses on texts, though the information
applies generally to other creative works by women as well.
Within the corpus of German-language
literature, the existence of a large, rich and varied body of
works authored by women has been until recently one of the best-kept
secrets of the centuries. Although women have authored and published
literature in the German language at least since the Middle
Ages, women as authors first came into their own around the
middle of the 18th century. From approximately 1740, ever increasing
numbers of German-speaking women took the pen, publishing in
journals and newspapers, and producing their own books. In many
cases, works by women authors enjoyed popularity among readers
equal to or surpassing that of contemporary male-authored works.
Unfortunately, regardless of how
popular literature by women may have been at its time, with
the death of the individual authors, the works most often have
slipped into oblivion. Various sociological and historical forces
have combined to create the silence surrounding literature by
women. For example, women had very limited access to the public
sphere of print, theater, university study, travel, and critical
renown. Until women were allowed access to the universities
in the late 19th century, they were hampered in learning traditional
aesthetics, and often developed their own forms of literature
and manner of expression which, in their difference, were considered
to be inferior to the work of male authors.
In addition, female-authored works
have been under-represented in the canon, since women's work
was considered to be the work of "dilettantes," or
mere “popular” literature. This occurred because
literature by women often dealt with themes of family, home
and relationships, which were not considered to be appropriate
themes for "real" literature. Since this literature
was dismissed as trivial, it was generally ignored by scholars
and members of the academy, which meant that it also was often
overlooked by publishers.
Consequent to the above, literature
by women has generally been absent from collections and anthologies
until well into the 1980's. In addition, publishers have tended
to shy away from the multi-volume novels which were so prevalent
within female-authored literature. Critical editions of works
by early German-language women are almost non-existent. Even
for authors such as Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, whose collected
works have been reprinted with some consistency, these collections
do not in fact contain all of her writing (the dramas have been
left out), and these are not scholarly, critical editions. The
works of well-known and influential authors, such as Sophie
von La Roche, Fanny Lewald and Benedikte Naubert have generally
appeared as isolated individual volumes, rather than collected
works. For all these reasons, readers, students and scholars
have remained largely unaware, not only of the existence of
this corpus of literature by women per se, but also of its richness
and value in complementing the more well-known male-authored
literature.
The Sophie project is helping
to alleviate a number of the problems noted above, both in preserving
and in making available to users a wide variety of significant
material previously unknown to all but a few, in a form which
can be easily accessed, without cost. Among the reasons why
the Sophie library is making a significant contribution to scholarship,
research and teaching are 1) value of the works; 2) accessibility
and 3) preservation.
1) Value of the works.
The texts we have collected for the Sophie library belong to
the finest writing by a number of the most significant women
authors who were publishing between 1740 and 1923. We have chosen
these dates as beginning and cut off points, since 1740 marks
the flowering of literature by women in the German language,
and 1923 corresponds to the end of public domain, which means
that texts published after 1923 are copyrighted and can only
be used with written permission. Quality literature in their
own right, these texts also provide an invaluable glimpse into
the historical, cultural, sociological and political developments
of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The texts engage
a wide variety of issues–relationships, family, education,
poverty, peace, work, gender and familial roles–as reflected
through the eyes of the women who wrote about them.
2) Accessibility. In
recent years, there has been a growing interest in literature
by German-language women writers. However, because of the difficulty
in accessing early texts, most attention has been focused on
work by women after 1945, since this literature is quite easily
obtained in print.
As an example, all of the texts
in the Sophie library exist as published books, but none of
them are available for purchase in print. For such reasons,
it often requires major sleuthing just to locate a copy of a
given work. Since most early German-language women’s texts
are not available in the United States, Interlibrary Loan cannot
be employed to access them; generally, interested individuals
must travel to Europe to obtain the work directly from a library.
With the most recent texts, where
the book is still in reasonably good shape, researchers can
photocopy the work, generally at a cost of $50-75 per volume.
Far more often, however, the book is too fragile, and library
staff must copy the book for the user, which increases the cost
of the copy. With older and less stable books, the library staff
microfilms the text, after which a hard copy may be made from
the film. In this case the books can average $100-$200 per copy.
Thus the high costs of travel
and copying often make it prohibitive to work with early texts.
Even if researchers can acquire a limited number of texts, it
is very difficult to assemble a critical mass of works large
enough to allow major comparisons between authors or within
genres. An additional complication for teachers is that the
texts are all in Gothic script, which is difficult for students
to read; also, because of age and damage to the books, the copies
are often of such poor quality that they cannot successfully
be duplicated for student use.
The Sophie library helps to alleviate
these problems, since it can provide a broad cross-section of
works authored by women, in modern print, which are easily accessible
at no cost through the internet. This is the first time that
such a large body of early works by German-language women writers
has been collected in one place. Currently we hold 369 titles,
which, as a reasonable sampling of the literature by early women,
will allow comparative work, cross-referencing, genre studies,
and other research which up to this time has been extraordinarily
difficult to undertake.
3) Preservation. Since
most early female-authored literature has not remained in print,
and has therefore existed only in private collections or in
libraries throughout German-speaking countries, this literature
has suffered a great deal of attrition due to losses in war,
as well as through Nazi purging works by women, especially German-Jewish
and socialist literature. As the surviving books become increasingly
frail and unstable, libraries are reluctant to loan them to
users, or to allow them to be copied.
The Sophie library is performing
a significant service in this respect, since it is preserves
a body of works by women in a stable and easily useable format.
The Sophie project is open-ended in that, after the initial
369 titles have been input and edited, we can continue indefinitely
to acquire texts and add them to the library, thus preserving
for future use an ever-increasing corpus of works. In this way,
the growing interest in works by early women authors will be
facilitated through easy access to texts which have previously
been extremely difficult to obtain.
Broad Dissemination of Materials
As stated previously, the digital
internet format of the Sophie Library and Resource Center offers
almost unlimited possibilities for users and providers. Although
it began as a set of literary texts, the site has developed
into a literal clearing house of works by and information on
early German-speaking women and their cultural, social and historical
environment. The Sophie Internet library currently provides
the following services:
*The literature page is in the
process of making a fairly large body (369 titles) of early
texts readily accessible in modern print. This library includes
out-of-print, out-of-copyright novels and shorter fiction works,
autobiographies, letters, journals and travel journals, works
dealing with women's lives and education during this period,
and some large bibliographic/biographical reference works. Beyond
this, we are providing other informative materials, such as
biographical sketches and bibliographies of the authors included.
We are also building a selection of English translations of
early texts. The site is currently available to Google searches.
At this time, 46 works are available on the site, with another
35 ready to be posted or in process of preparation.
*The music page is working to
make available a growing selection of previously neglected music
by early German-speaking women composers, including both the
scores themselves, and recordings of many of the pieces. At
this time 20 compositions are available on the site, with more
to be added after the Sophie’s Daughters concert
in November 2003.
*The separate pages for Journalism,
Film/Drama, and Colonial/Travel literature highlight aspects
of early German-language women’s work as it appeared in
newspapers and Feuilleton pages, on stage and in film, as well
as in texts reflecting the experiences of German women abroad
and in the colonies.
*The Sophie Journal is
a peer-reviewed on-line Journal which publishes works by undergraduate
and graduate students. It not only allows students the opportunity
to have their research published, but also provides a repository
of information concerning the lives and work of early German-language
women. Connected with the Journal is a Thesis library which
showcases theses drawn from texts in the Sophie library, or
connected with early women’s lives and experience.
*The Resources page provides users
with images, links, and bibliographies of cultural, sociological
and historical background materials valuable to students of
early German-speaking women’s works and experience.
Website Benefits for Users
1. Supplying materials to
users. From the beginning, it has been our concern to make
materials available to users as quickly as possible. However
users often contact us requesting texts which we have not yet
processed. When this happens,we put requested works on the priority
list and rush their digitization, or send hard copies when we
are not yet able to provide the online version. We are currently
experimenting with the possibility of putting facsimiles of
the texts on the site in (.pdf) format, so that the originals
can be accessed by advanced scholars while we are in the process
of digitizing and editing the works.
2. Archiving Materials.
Since we established the Sophie website, several prominent scholars,
including Patricia Herminghouse (University of Rochester), Ruth-Ellen
Joeres (University of Minnesota), Katherine Goodman (Brown University),
and Lora Wildenthal (Rice University) have approached us with
materials they have previously collected for research projects.
Since they no longer need the texts themselves, these scholars
are donating the texts to the Sophie library. We are now archiving
these valuable materials, and can provide users with hard copies
until we are able to make the works available on the site.
In addition, several significant
modern scholarly resources about early German-speaking women
and their work are out of print, and therefore often difficult
for students and scholars to access. In cases where copyright
permissions can be obtained, we can make these works readily
available to users through the Sophie website. This is the case,
for example, with Gisela Brinker-Gabler’s excellent collection
of poetry, Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis
zur Gegenwart,(German Women Poets from the 16th Century to the
Present) which has been given a second life through its
inclusion in the Library. We are currently negotiating for permission
to include other valuable reference works which are now out
of print.
3. Supporting Scholarly Research.
The Sophie library has been established as a service to scholars,
teachers and students. The immediate benefits of the library
are quite clear: through the website, researchers can become
familiar with composers, journalists, authors and works of whose
existence they have been previously unaware. In addition, because
the holdings span the period from 1740 to 1923, it will be possible
to do types of research which otherwise would be extremely difficult
and costly to complete: for example, tracing the development
over time of linguistic codes and conventions, aesthetic trends,
thematic emphases, and so forth, across the works contained
in the library.
There is another, less self-evident
way in which the Sophie library can assist researchers. That
is, often scholars invest great effort and expense into finding
early works for their research, but when the finished article
or book is published, the impact of the scholarship is diluted,
since other scholars cannot access the primary work. The text
is also inaccessible for classroom use, which means that the
scholarship remains in a sort of limbo.
The Sophie Library and Resource
Center helps alleviate this difficulty, by collaborating
with scholars to make their primary materials available on the
site. These researchers are invited to provide associated editorial,
biographical and bibliographical materials, as well as bibliographical
references to their own work. In this way, when users look at
the primary materials on the Sophie site, they also find reference
to the scholars and their work. At the same time, people who
are utilizing the scholars’ publications can have immediate
access to the primary text through the library. A case in point
is Benedikte Naubert’s Geschichte der Gräfin
Thekla von Thurn (The History of Countess Thekla von Thurn),
which was donated to the library by Waltraud Maierhofer (University
of Iowa), along with significant editorial materials, in conjunction
with the publication of her own scholarly research on that novel.
The Sophie website offers another
type of scholarly support in a form which has, as yet, hardly
been explored. When Robert McFarland (Brigham Young University)
wrote his article on Anna Louisa Karsch’s poems “Die
Spazier-Gänge von Berlin”(The Promenades of Berlin),
he found that he needed to add supporting visual materials and
glossing which were precluded by the traditional academic journal
format. He solved this problem by including a reference to the
website with the article. Then, on the website, he prepared
a substantial grouping of materials, including the original
texts of the poems with their English translations, full glossing,
and maps of Berlin at Karsch’s time, on which he indicated
the various promenades described in the poems. In this way,
readers using his article from a published journal can immediately
access the supporting materials on the site.
As the possibilities of this type
of interactive support become clearer to researchers, the Sophie
website will be an increasingly valuable repository of materials
and information pertaining to scholarly publications and analyses.
4. Enhancing
Teaching and Pedagogy. The Sophie website offers numerous
resources which can be of great use to teachers and students.
The recordings of music, for example, can readily be played
to enhance classroom discussions. We are currently collecting
and scanning images related to early women, which can also be
used freely in classes. On the literary page, we have made a
particular effort to include short forms such as poetry, stories
and novellas, which, together with the Feuilleton articles,
are of a length that can be utilized easily in various classes,
including culture courses, second and third year language classes,
survey courses, and literature seminars.
The website also supplies bibliographies
of topics pertinent to women in the early periods, which, though
not yet complete, can at least give a beginning point for students,
as well as for teachers unfamiliar with the history and culture
surrounding early women. Likewise the articles which will appear
in the Sophie Journal, and the shorter pieces available
through “Additional Materials” can give interested
readers insight into these works and periods.
The pedagogical possibilities
of the website are as yet quite open and unexplored. Currently
we are working with a Master’s candidate, Lore Schultheiss,
who is writing a thesis investigating ways in which materials
from the Sophie site can be successfully incorporated into classroom
experience. With her assistance, we are developing a pedagogy
component for the site which will soon be made available to
users.
5. Expanding the Time Period.
The present boundaries of the Sophie project extend from 1740
to 1923. For the Sophie Journal, we have extended the limit
to 1939, since from 1940 on, women’s works are often available
in print. We have, however, now collected sufficient materials
to extend the earliest boundary backward toward 1500. As student
researchers and scholars collect or donate materials from time
periods not yet represented, we can easily expand the site to
accommodate those interests.
2. Expanding the Topic/Genre.
The Sophie site currently offers literary texts in various genres.
Because of current scholarly activity on these topics and the
relative dearth of materials available to researchers, we have
constructed separate pages for colonial writings, journalistic
texts, drama, music, and film-related publications.
However, based once again on the
interests of our student researchers and site users, we can
expand these holdings to include other topics and works as well:
women scientists, choreographers and dancers, artists, and many
others.
As can be seen from the above,
the flexibility of the internet format makes it possible for
us, not only to provide a repository of works and resources,
but also to work in an interactive way with users, in assisting
them in their research, publications, teaching and studies.
Works Cited
The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates “REINVENTING
UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION:
A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities.”
30 Oct. 2003 <http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/webform/images/$File/boyer.txt>
Chapman, David W. “Undergraduate Research: Showcasing Young Scholars.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 12, 2003): B5.
Katkin, Wendy.”The Boyer Commission Report and Its Impact on Undergraduate Research.” Valuing and Supporting Undergraduate Research. Joyce Kinkead, ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003.