Monday, March 20, 2017

Monday Muse: The Digital Joyce

Anyone who has ever struggled with James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will be pleased to learn of the excellent Digital Multimedia Edition (DME) at JoycePortrait100*. 

The DME is the work of a research team from University College Dublin's Nation, Genre and Gender Project, which undertakes brilliant comparative social network analysis to gain new insights into literary works, and Athena Media, an international multimedia production and consultancy company in Dublin that specializes in online audio publishing. It is supported by the Irish Research Council and UCD Research and Innovation.

Visitors to the DME Website will find brief information about the novel's history and the DME project; an Introduction to the DME; a chapter-by-chapter facsimile of the original 1916 text, accessible via the site's main page, with each chapter supplemented with a map of social networks (see the characters visualization below) and audio that can be accessed at the site or via Soundcloud; archival photographs; notes on the text; and a free, downloadable, full-length audiobook recorded by Irish actors Same and Barry McGovern. The e-book is available for Kindle and Epub reader, as well as in pdf; plain text also is downloadable (see Downloads page).

Also on the DME Website is a section titled Stephen Dedalus's Dublin; the maps there orient readers to the Dublin that existed in Joyce's time and place the major locations described in the novel in a contemporary context. In addition, a section titled Joyce's Dublin, created by Athena Media, features a podcast series about Joyce's short story "The Dead" and other Joyce resources.

Here's a social network visualization for the protagonist Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:


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* The 100 is a reference to the Decade of Centenaries, a national cultural program commemorating significant events in Irish history in the period of 1912-1922.

NGG Case Study of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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