In collaboration with the MLab, the Modernist Versions Project’s Year of Ulysses (YoU) initiative introduced James Joyce’s novel to a wide audience, provoked people to read it, supported them as they did, and brought this account of the everyday back into everyday life. Thanks to the remarkable efforts of MVP associates, Patrick Belk and Matthew Kochis (both at the University of Tulsa), as well as the generosity of the McFarlin Library, the MVP now owns high-quality scans of the first edition of Ulysses as it was published in February 1922 by Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare & Company bookstore. In the spirit of the Liberate Ulysses movement and in honour of the 90th birthday of Joyce’s masterpiece, the MVP and the MLab serially published these scans online—just as Ulysses was originally serialized in the pages of the Little Review—and provided a robust framework for (re)discovering the novel. YoU involved not only the public release of these scans but also lectures, Twitter chats, an art competition, and various other events anchored in Joyce’s novel.
Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships
The research leads for this project were Stefan Krecsy, Stephen Ross, and Jentery Sayers. Organized largely by the Modernist Versions Project (MVP) and its director, Stephen Ross, Year of Ulysses (YoU) involved well over fifty contributors, all of whom are listed on the MVP’s website, which was originally designed by Clea Cosmann with support from the MLab. During the initiative, the MLab maintained and visualized data gathered from YoU-related communications, and it provided the MVP with basic infrastructure support. In and beyond the MLab, Amanda Hansen facilitated all lectures, Twitter chats, communications, and research related to the initiative. YoU would not have been possible without support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the University of Victoria’s Work Study Program, and the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library.
Project Status
Year of Ulysses (YoU) was completed in August 2014. It began in June 2012, and regular activities continued through June 2013, after which Stefan Krecsy aggregated materials emerging from the initiative, contextualized them, interpreted them, and bundled them together—in a single publication—for public use and remixing.
Screen grab of the archive of tweets published during the #yearofulysses. Image care of the MLab.
Post by Stephen Ross and Jentery Sayers, attached to the YearOfUly project, with the projects and versioning tags. Featured image for this post from mvp.uvic.ca, care of the Modernist Versions Project. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)
