Professors, Undergraduate Students, Grad Students, Scholars and anyone else interested in German-speaking Women:

     As colleagues of the Sophie Digital Library, we have limited time and funds. We often find exciting potential projects and simply do not have the means to complete all of them.  We therefore invite scholars and friends to participate in these projects, thus helping the Sophie Digital Library fulfill its role as a facilitator of good academic scholarship surrounding works by women. Some of our most exciting Sophie Library projects have been suggested by our students and colleagues. We look forward to working with you!

     We also invite you — whatever your student status or professional affiliation —   to submit your articles, theses, Power-Point presentations and other projects to the peer-reviewed  Sophie Journal.

How to Use the Sophie Library for your Research
Suggested Research Projects
Suggestions for Instructors
   

1.    We invite you to look through our bibliography sections and through all of our holdings—including literature, music, journalism, etc.—and to look for works that would stimulate your own research and scholarship.

2.     We are always looking for scholarly articles that will make these women’s works a central part of German studies. We encourage you to submit your academic work to the peer-reviewed Sophie Journal. If you publish your work about women’s works elsewhere, let us know where you published the article so that we may cite your work in a bibliography associated with the literature you write about.

3.     We encourage you to submit to the peer-reviewed Sophie Journal those academic works that fall outside of the regular narrow guidelines for publications: Syllabi, Lesson Plans, Undergraduate Theses, Master’s Theses, Seminar papers, Bibliographies, Archivalia, Pictures, Web-links, Power-Point Presentations, etc. As scholars from around the world contribute to our bibliographies, collections and journal articles, the Sophie Digital Library will become an increasingly valuable tool for research and teaching. We will, of course, give you full acknowledgement and credit for all of your work.

4.     If you notice a work that is a glaring omission from our library, let us know. We are always happy to receive (copyright-appropriate) copies of texts to add to our library. We also invite you to digitize these texts for us, even to gloss them and edit them. We will be happy to give you all of the credit you deserve for your donations of time and texts to the library. Providing a digital critical edition of these texts is the best way to ensure their use by other researchers and instructors.

5.     There are many works which we have only heard of or read about, especially when it comes to women’s films, dramas, journalism, art, music, etc. We encourage you to consult our bibliographies in order to find little-known texts that might serve as a subject of research. When you do find an obscure work in libraries or archives, we invite you to submit a digital copy of them so that we may expand the collection. This way, when you publish your article, monograph or book, you can refer your readers to the Sophie website so that they can find an easily-available copy of the original text and better understand your arguments.

6.     If you are in an archive doing research and run across a project that looks interesting—let us know. All of us have a list of those projects for which we simply do not have the time or the resources. We would like the Sophie Digital library to function as a clearing-house of ideas and collaboration, and we will post your suggestions for other scholars and instructors.
   

Visual Arts:

     We are looking to expand our collection of works by women in the visual arts: painting, sculpture, crafts, textiles, architecture, etc. The nature of these items makes them a challenge when it comes to copyright, but there are many people out there willing to have their collections photographed and made available on the web for academic purposes. Writing about these women is usually a challenge because their works are unavailable to other scholars. We suggest collecting images and copyright permissions, sharing them with us, and then we will make them available on-line. You then can refer your readers to this website.

Film:

     We have a short bibliography of women who were film directors and screenplay writers, and even a few camera operators, set-designers and film score musicians. At this time we do not have anyone researching the works of these women, and we invite you to participate in the formation of a sub-library for women and film. The peer-reviewed Sophie Journal solicits good academic articles about women and film. We will link these articles to any applicable primary sources that you will make available to the library. Any research you can do in this area will be greatly appreciated by film scholars who are interested in women’s films.

Drama:

     Several Women received the prestigious Kleist-Preis for literature before 1933, and many of these women were dramatists. The dramas of some of these women were produced by very prestigious theater companies, and even Piscator included women’s dramas in his production schedule. We invite you to look at the Women and Drama Bibliography. Help us find these works, and help us fill out the list with more dramatic works by women. The peer-reviewed Sophie Journal solicits good academic articles about women and drama. We will link these articles to any applicable primary sources in the library.

     We also encourage enterprising dramatists to stage these dramas on and off of campus, and to provide the Sophie Digital Library with photographs, video-clips and detailed descriptions of your productions. Some of these dramas have not been performed in centuries or decades, and most have never been staged outside of Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Many of them will need some modernizing in order to bring them to life on stage, but some could lend themselves readily to post-modern interpretation.

Music:

     We have been very pleased at the overwhelming response to Sophie’s Daughters: A Digital Library of German Women’s Music. We have heard of the pieces in our collection being played in cultural history classes and in surveys of European music. We encourage you to use these pieces for instruction and academic purposes.

     We are in need of biographical sketches of the composers, as well as bibliographies, discographies and digitized copies of their letters, journals, etc. We also welcome scholarly articles about women’s music for publication in the Sophie Journal (we can offer peer-reviews by respected musicologists).

     If you would like to continue the process of finding music and texts by German-speaking composers, we urge you to contact the Archiv Frau/Musik in Frankfurt. The colleagues at this archive have been a constant source of friendly, competent collaboration with the Sophie Digital Library.

     If you are a performing musician, we would also be very pleased to receive digital recordings of works by women composers, as long as they are cleared for copyright. We will place these alongside our other recordings in the Sophie’s Daughters library so that others may use them for academic purposes.

Journalism/Feuilletons:

     Women’s contributions to journalistic literature have not been sufficiently studied. Luckily, it has proven quite easy to gather feuilletons and other articles by women: many research institutions have microfilm collections of early newspapers. Some of these microfilms are available through inter-library loan. We encourage scholars to copy or digitize these works (within copyright law) and to help us to flesh out our growing collection of these articles.
Scholarly articles about these Feuilletonistinnen are rare, and we encourage research and publications about them.. We invite you, as always, to submit your articles to the peer-reviewed Sophie Journal.

     We have found success using these shorter literary forms in the classroom, allowing our students to digitize, edit, research and gloss the articles as a semester project. We are happy to personally acknowledge students who submit their work to the Sophie Digital Library.
   

1.     The Sophie Digital Library is designed as a source for texts that can be used in instruction. You may use any of the texts on the website for instructional purposes. Having the text available on line makes it unnecessary to prepare packets, readers, etc. Just have your students access the texts on line; they may print out any text they wish for academic purposes.

2.     As an electronic text, each text can be searched for words, names, etc, and crunched for different kinds of analyses.

3.     We have kept the texts as close to their original forms as possible, allowing the students to experience original text-per-page, archaic terms and spelling, etc. We have updated the font, however, so there is no need for students to learn Fraktur-Schrift in all of its varieties.

4.     We have begun to focus increasingly upon shorter texts, which are much more appropriate to a classroom setting. For instructional use, we suggest essays, stories, and letters, as well as journalistic works and poems from Brinker-Gabler’s collection.

5.     Music and images can be downloaded and recorded for academic and instructional purposes.

6.     We encourage you to use the Sophie Digital Library as a training-ground for young researchers. The editors of the Sophie Journal will gladly review and web-publish your students’ well-written biographical sketches, bibliographies, introductions, etc. This will allow them to be a part of the research of Early Women’s Literature. There is no minimum age or academic degree for publication. We encourage submission from undergraduates, grad students, high-school teachers, lecturers, researchers, professors and all literature enthusiasts.

7.     Your lesson plans, syllabi, quizzes, study guides, Power-Point presentations, etc. are an important part of making these texts accessible to other instructors and students. The more supporting instructional material you can supply to the Sophie Journal, the easier it is for instructors to use these women’s works in the classroom, thus pulling the works and the authors out of obscurity. We will link your instructional aids directly to the work, making it more accessible to others who are looking for women’s literature to add to their courses.