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In 2015, Pamela L. Caughie and David E. Chinitz, both past presidents of MSA and session organizer and session chair for this panel, launched Modernist Networks, a federation of digital projects in the field of modernist literary and cultural studies. “ModNets” is the modernist node in ARC, the Advanced Research Consortium directed by Laura Mandell at Texas A&M. ARC combines resources from its contributing nodes into a single catalog of metadata, images, and texts and promotes peer review of digital projects. ModNets has the dual goals of providing a vetting community for digital modernist scholarship and a technological infrastructure to support development of scholarly projects and access to scholarship on modernist literature and culture.

The field of modernist studies has thrived and greatly expanded in the 21st century, becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, transmedial, and geographically decentered. By concentrating, however, on a modernism conceived in historical terms as the response in expressive culture to the specific global modernity associated with such phenomena as late imperialism, the two World Wars, first-wave feminism, the emergence of the modern city, and the advent of technologies of mass culture, ModNets focuses on a historically rooted modernism.

Using ModNets as its test site, ARC is moving from Collex, an open-source collections and exhibits builder that currently powers the nodes, to Corpora, a data management studio developed at Texas A&M’s Center of Digital Humanities Research. The migration will be completed this fall and we are proposing to launch the newly configured site at MSA Brooklyn. Lauren Liebe, project manager for ARC and ModNets, will present the new features of the site; Caughie and Chinitz will showcase recently added projects, such as the MLA award-winning Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde; and, Niamh McGuigan, Associate Director of ModNets, will engage the audience in a discussion about modernist scholars’ research practices in relation to locating primary source material, to identify barriers, and generate ideas for future development of ModNets as site of research and discovery that addresses the unique needs of scholars in the field.