At the heart of this project are the following eight datasets, which add new information about contributor locations to the MJP’s existing datasets for Poetry and The Little Review while relating that info to the existing data in various ways. Below you’ll find descriptions of each dataset; by clicking on the dataset’s title, you’ll be able to download a csv file that then can be opened and saved in Microsoft Excel or some other spreadsheet software. All eight files can also be downloaded at once, here, by clicking on the ChicagoModernism.zip file at the MJP Lab File Repsoitory on Sourceforge. Finally, click here for some instructions on manipulating the datasets in a spreadsheet and on building a pivot table from the data.
File 1: Poetry Contributors and Where They Lived
This file—the first of three “master files” for this project—consists of eight columns of data about Poetry contributors and where they lived at the time of their contributions over the first 123 issues of the magazine (volumes 1-21, October 1912 through December 1922).
- Column 1: “contributor” Every contributor to Poetry through 1922 is listed just once, in alphabetical order, by last name followed by first name(s) and initials. The name recorded here for each contributor is my unique, authorized name for that contributor in this project (see column 7 below and file 5 for more information about how I’ve handled name variants).
- Column 2: “# of contributions” This column records the overall number of discrete contributions made by each contributor through 1922, regardless of their size, importance, or genre. The specific titles represented by these contributions are recorded in file 7 below.
- Column 3: “Chicagoan: y or n” This column indicates whether a contributor can be considered a “Chicagoan,” which is a broader category than whether someone resided in Chicago at the time of his/her contributions (see Section 4 for more about this distinction). A question mark in this column indicates that I did not find sufficient information to decide “yes” or “no.”
- Column 4: “residence” This column indicates the country, state, and city where contributors were living at the time of their contributions: e.g., “USA, IL, Chicago.” For 64 contributors, I have identified more than one residence, marked with (1) the location that may be considered the contributor’s “primary” residence over the period of his/her contributions, and listed that primary residence first (which allows it to sort): e.g., for Emanuel Carnevali, “USA, IL, Chicago (1); USA, NY, New York.” Contributors whose residence could not be determined are marked in this column with a quesiton mark.
- Column 5: “source” This column indicates the source of my information about where contributors lived. For most Poetry contributors, my source is the “Notes” section in the magazine itself: e.g., “P 17.4.231” = Poetry, volume 17, no. 4, p. 231. For contributors who changed residences during the period of their contributions, the multiple sources for this information are listed chronologically, following the contributor’s movement over time, which may not coincide with the order of their residences in column 4 (where the primary residence is always listed first).
- Column 6: “notes from source” This is any information from the source that I felt was useful for clarifying the contributor’s residence.
- Column 7: “variant or alternative names (# of contributions with variant)” This column indicates whether the contributor is identified by some other name in the journal. If the contributor published items using this alternative name, I also indicate within parentheses the number of contributions made under that name: e.g., for Julia Cooley Altrocchi, “var: Julia Cooley (2).” These two contributions by Julia Cooley have already been added to the total number of contributions recorded for Julia Cooley Altrocchi in column 2.
- Column 8: “in Monroe’s index” This column indicates if the contributor appears in the index of Harriet Monroe’s book, “A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World” (1938).
File 2: Little Review Contributors and Where They Lived
This file—the second master file for the project—offers the same kind of information recorded in file 1 above but for the first 73 issues of The Little Review (volumes 1-9, March 1914 through Winter 1922).
File 3: Locations for All Contributors to Poetry and The Little Review
This file—the last master file—brings together the contributor residence data from files 1 and 2 and also adds a column, “journal,” that indicates if the data relates to Poetry or The Little Review.
File 4: Sortable Locations for Poetry Contributors
This file, which I’ve used to create the maps for Poetry contributor residences in Section 3, contains mostly the same data from file 1 above, but with these differences:
- Contributor locations have been spread out into three columns—”country,” “state,” and “city”—which allow for more detailed sorting of the data in a spreadsheet.
- Contributors whose residences are unknown have been deleted (so 13 fewer contirbutors are represented in this file).
- Since only one residence per contributor can be recorded in this file, I’ve selected the residence that I indicated in file 1 as the contributor’s primary residence, marked with (1).
- I’ve deleted all information from columns 5-8 of file 1 that relates to source information and variant names.
File 5: Sortable Locations for Little Review Contributors
This file is the equivalent of file 4 above but for The Little Review. File 5 contains 51 fewer contributors than file 2, due to the many authors in The Little Review who signed their contributions with pseudonyms or initials.
File 6: Name Variants of Poetry and Little Review Contributors
This file is essentially an authorities document for the 275 contributors to both journals (96 from Poetry and 179 from The Little Review) whose contributions appear under more than one name or whose authorship has been masked by initials or an alias. The file consists primarily of these three columns:
- Column 1: “name variant” This column lists any alternative or non-authorized name for a contributor as well as any initials and aliases that I have not yet been able to decode.
- Column 4: “genre” This column identifies each alternative name by type:
- “alias” indicates contributors who published under an assumed name
- “initials” indicates contributors (often book reviewers) who signed their contributions with initials
- “LR mistake” indicates a mistake (e.g., in spelling) that the Little Review editors made when referring to the contributor
- “MJP goof” indicates a mistake that the MJP staff made representing the contributor in the MJP catalogue records and that may not yet have been corrected there
- “reconciled with Poetry” refers to those contributors who published under different names or spellings in Poetry and the Little Review and whose different names I have reconciled in the authorized contributor names for both journals
- “variant” can be any alternative name or spelling of a name, e.g., a contributor’s married name
- Column 5: “authorized name” This is the unique name that I decided to use to refer to the contributor in this project. In the other datasets, the authorized name includes all contributions made by the contributor under any of the variant names listed in column 1. A question mark in this column indicates that I was unable to track down the identity of an alias or set of initials.
File 7: Locations for All Signed Contributions in Poetry
This file adds residential information about Poetry contributors to the MJP’s “every contributor” dataset for Poetry, which is availabe for download here from the MJP Lab File Repsoitory on Sourceforge (also click here for information about the contents and structure of the “every contributor” dataset). Here’s how this dataset is important:
- Unlike files 1 and 4 above, which record merely the number of contributions that contributors made to the magazine, this file identifies all of the contributors’ signed contributions, which allows us to relate their residential information to the specific titles, genre, volume, issue, page, and date of their contributions.
- Unlike files 1 and 4, this file also contains two lists of names for each contributor: column 1 lists the contributor’s name as it appears in the magazine, while column 2 lists the contributor’s authorized name for this project.
- Finally, whereas file 4 records merely the primary residence of each contributor, this file records most every residence recorded in file 1, relating contributors’ different residences to the different contributions they made to the journal over time.
File 8: Locations for All Signed Contributions in The Little Review
This file is the equivalent of file 7 above but for the Little Review. The MJP’s “every contributor” dataset for The Little Review is availabe for download here from the MJP Lab File Repository on Sourceforge, and here again is information about the contents and structure of the “every contributor” dataset.