Methods:
Although this project employs new technologies, at its most basic, it represents the philological research of traditional literary studies, employing those methods for editing and annotating a definitive version of a manuscript text, assuring its accessibility to future scholars and making it available to casual readers. Jerome McGann's work on the Rossetti archive provides a model for this work. Please also see the work of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and a good article on XML coding for the humanities in Computers and Humanities (the free May 2001 issue) http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0010-4817/contents. The ability of a web-based data base to house text, images, facsimile versions of archival documents, sound, and film making them searchable and accessible to scholars assures a greater accessibility to a wide variety of documents that have not been stored together before.

Significance:
By creating access to these important documents, this project has the potential to impact at least three diverse fields of study: architectural history, gender studies, and literary/rhetorical criticism. Moreover, because some these documents are unstable and deteriorating, the time to undertake such a project is now.

Overall Research Plan and Significance
Architect Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961) practiced architecture in a career that spanned six decades and three continents. During her lifetime, her intellectual collaboration with Frank Lloyd Wright and her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, shaped modern architecture’s preoccupations. Her 1000+ page autobiographical manuscript, The Magic of America, functions both as a polemical architectural treatise and an explication of her life. The manuscript contains over 200 illustrations, many of which are unpublished, original drawings from her work with Wright and her husband. Although architectural historians beginning with James Weirick in 1988 have called for the document’s publication, the lengthy typescript, neither edited nor indexed, has presented a daunting task for scholars and an economic impossibility to publishers. The microfilm version of these documents is available, but not easy to use as a research tool because it is not indexed or edited. Moreover, the many available secondary sources and archival holdings concerning the Griffins have not been collectively described for scholars. This project will begin the process of cataloguing those sources as well.

Purpose:
The purpose of this project is to make an important archival resource generally available to libraries and in a form usefuland accessible to scholars, architects, and cultural historians around the world. In addition, the materials themselves are unstable and deteriorating—in the late 1940s Mahony Griffin typed her manuscript on the backs of old letters, junk mail, and inexpensive paper. Even the most careful attempts at preservation cannot prevent the deterioration of such ephemeral materials; the manuscript must be reproduced in a more stable medium.

Objectives:
This project has several closely related primary objectives: 1) to ensure that this important document and its supporting visual materials (including never- published architectural drawings) are preserved. 2) To provide access to these ungainly documents through searchable, annotated web interface for a relatively low cost. 3) To annotate this complex document, providing explanations of the manuscript’s content and developing (hypertextual) links to existing secondary research. 4) To compile an edition of Mahony Griffin’s text that includes all available illustrations as well as both the scanned original manuscript pages and an edited, annotated, searchable version of her text.

Methodology:
Although this project employs new technologies, it represents the philological research of traditional literary studies, employing those methods for editing and annotating a definitive version of a manuscript text, assuring its accessibility to future scholars and making it available to interested readers. Although this project necessitates gathering, analyzing and reformatting a vast amount of data, the project’s actual research component requires the traditional tools of literary studies: a close reading of texts, meticulous research into the author’s life and social milieu, and a familiarity with the range of available archival and secondary resources.

Significance:
Successful completion of this larger project will impact scholarship across several disciplines.

1. Architectural history: Mahony Griffin’s text supplements the autobiographies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan to better define the cultural context that gave birth to architectural modernism in America. Moreover, her work adds insights into changing architectural practices over a 60 year career. In addition, it will reproduce many original drawings that have never before been available to the general public
2. Women’s history: Mahony Griffin is already considered a pioneer as the first woman licensed to practice architecture in the US. The addition of her text to available scholarship on women’s culture provides a new understanding of the ways in which women have engaged with and revised American philosophy.
3. Literary/rhetorical studies: Finally, an accessible version of this text will impact the fertile field of autobiography studies, where Mahony Griffin’s polemic approach to autobiographical expression supports recent calls for rhetorical (rather than literary) readings of autobiography.

Although many studies of Mahony Griffin’s work with her husband have reached press in recent years (see bibliography), this central document describing their lives in her own voice has remained nearly inaccessible.

Background:
Perhaps because of the growth of interest in women and collaboration in architecture, scholarship concerning Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin has increased exponentially in the past ten years. There is more and more research describing Griffins, their lives and philosophies, and their prolific architectural practice—they produced between 350-500 projects across three continents. Though most of what is known about the Griffins comes to us through their actual architecture and through secondary interpretations of their work, Mahony Griffin was a prolific writer. Her manuscript, The Magic of America, is over 1000 pages long, and contains hundreds of illustrations. However, because this text is not easily available to scholars, what we really know of these architects and their work together comes through secondary sources—sources that were dismissive of Mahony Griffin’s contributions.

Since its first mention in secondary sources, The Magic of America has proven itself difficult for scholars to evaluate, to read and even to use. Anna Rubbo, in "Marion Mahony Griffin: A Larger Than Life Presence" writes:

Even the most sympathetic reader could leave the text feeling unfulfilled by the many questions it raises and the few questions to which it offers easy answers. As James Weirick writes, "It offers not a totality of vision, but an endless array of possibilities" ("Vision and Text" 14).

It is this "postmodern fragmentary quality" that makes electronic publication of this text such an interesting possibility. The medium and the message truly become enmeshed, illuminating the text’s "array of possibilities." Publishing the text in a fully searchable format exploits those possibilities far more than a traditional indexing project; a searchable manuscript can be literally reshuffled, allowing readers to examine every reference to "American practice" or to separate out all "letters." The ability to demonstrate these features to outside funding sources is as important as demonstrating the quick accessibility of annotations and secondary research through linked text. This project will enable me to develop and send to external funding sources a sample "product" to more clearly illustrate the breadth and detail of the project. In addition, such a "mini" project assures them enough work has been done to demonstrate researcher commitment and to clearly gauge the time and resources necessary for the project’s completion.

Objectives:
The objectives for this project, then, grow from its position as a stepping stone between an interesting idea and a federally funded project. The project must enable me to demonstrate to the NEH that this project is of wide scholarly interest, viable within a three-year time-frame, and is already receiving institutional support: from NDSU for research assistants and from the Burnham Library’s archivist and librarians. (My understanding is that the Burnham library is working independently on a similar, text-only project right now.) The project funding itself demonstrates NDSU’s institutional support, while producing the sample web-based text demonstrates the viability of the project. Because this text is so little known, but so potentially important to the work of several disciplines, part of the objective of this project is to bring a portion of the text alive in a way that will allow it to make its own argument; I need to let the text speak to its own importance. Specifically, though, I’ll elaborate briefly on the objectives mentioned in the abstract. I will need to: 1) catalogue and assess for historical significance the specific illustrations included with the microfilm manuscript (microfilm copies of the original architectural drawings). As far as I can determine, these drawings have never been accurately catalogued and assessed and are housed separately from the manuscript itself; 2) familiarize a research assistant with contents of the microfilm and the look and organization of the original text; 3) prepare a sample web-based version of a short portion of the text including illustrations to secure other interested scholars in such a project and to demonstrate to outside funding sources the utility of the project and the powerful voice of this relatively unknown author; and 4) gauge accurately the time commitment the larger project will require for multimedia authoring, potential archival work and document scanning, text editing, and research in order to submit to a funding agency an accurate budget that represents real staffing needs.

Methods:
As medievalist and textual scholar David Greetham writes, "the culmination of textual scholarship is in editing the text, in using all of this information to prepare a version of the author’s work for presentation to a reading public" (347). The methods of this research are the traditional methods of literary/textual scholars—these methods attempt to account for the materiality of the original text: what it looks like, how it feels, how it is structured. But in addition, through meticulous annotation, these methods offer readers insights into the social/historical context that both produced the text and kept it from publication in the author’s own lifetime.

Therefore, as this project brings the text to publication in an electronic format, I will pay equal attention to maintaining the integrity of the original text and providing that text in an edited, searchable version. The electronic format actually encourages this; the original scanned text can be placed side-by-side with the edited, annotated, searchable version and the accompanying illustrations. Because Mahony Griffin’s text includes many levels of handwritten editing, additions, and deletions, reproduction of the original text helps introduce readers to the indeterminacy of understanding the author’s intentions. The format reproduces the instability of the text, solving (or at least resolving) what is often the major methodological dilemma of the textual scholar. In this case, the medium in which the text will be reproduced maintains, rather than avoids or simplifies, the complex issues of which notations represent the author’s definitive and final statement on a topic.

Qualifications:
This accelerated timetable is possible because I have been working with Mahony Griffin’s typescript for over ten years; I am intimately familiar with this lengthy and complex text. Moreover, my dissertation research was a close reading and analysis of the history of secondary research on Mahony Griffin, and my present book project examines Mahony Griffin’s text within the history of architectural autobiography and treatise. This research history, combined with my interest in electronic writing and publication, has left me uniquely poised to take on this project, and the larger project that will grow from it.

Although architectural historians have been hoping for a published version of this text for years, the sheer page length of the manuscript, as well as Mahony Griffin’s diffuse and discursive (perhaps even hypertextual) writing style have persuaded scholars that finding a traditional publisher for the manuscript would be difficult if not impossible. However, new media provide a solution to these problems, offering the possibility of document scanning and web publication. My familiarity with writing in electronic environments will be an asset in this project.

Benefits:
Funding this project will provide both immediate and long-range benefits to my research program and to the larger university community. Immediate benefits include: 1) This Grant-in-Aid would provide an immediate focus for my research—it would work symbiotically with my present book project, as the research would feed both projects well. 2) By coordinating four years of research and two major publishing projects in my first year on faculty, the Grant-in Aid project places me in a better position to achieve tenure at this university. 3) The completed Grant-in-Aid project will demonstrate to outside funding sources NDSU’s commitment to this project; moreover, it allows me to write the outside funding grant with clear information about research assistant expertise, the time and materials such a project will require, and the historical significance and present condition of the documents this project is publishing. 3) The sample web project this Grant-in-Aid project produces will be an excellent tool for garnering letters of support from scholars outside this institution for both outside funding and publishing opportunities.

This investment offers the potential of an array of long-range benefits, as well: 1) This project could easily lead to long-range NEH funding; it is the sort of project (in methods and goals) that the NEH regularly funds, while also originating from an under-funded region and focusing on the work of an important, but overlooked woman architect. 2) A three-year project could bring in a research team of graduate and undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines, offering hands-on work doing multi-media authoring and editing, two of the skills most highly paid in the contemporary workforce. 3) The benefits of developing interdisciplinary teams to solve real-world problems has useful pedagogical as well as research applications. Using aspects of such a large project in a team-taught classroom would go far to develop student and faculty ties across disciplines. 4) Well-paid research assistantships are good tools for recruiting and keeping our best students, and such a long-term project could easily fund several positions, in not just the English department.

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