In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is an electronic edition of poetry by the Dadaist artist, performer, and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. This scholarly edition comprises digital surrogates and transcriptions of multiple manuscript versions of twelve poems by Freytag-Loringhoven. Work on this digital edition began as part of the dissertation entitled "The Makings of Digital Modernism" by Tanya Clement. A portion of the dissertation is included here as the essay "Knowledge Representation and the Networked Text in In Transition." The manuscripts are housed in the Papers of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, which are among the holdings in Special Collections of the University of Maryland (UM), College Park, Libraries. Tanya Clement created the digital surrogates of the manuscripts and transcribed and encoded them in TEI P5 XML. In addition, Clement augmented this instantiation with the free, open-source Javascript application called the Versioning Machine (v.4.0), which underlies the interface and allows for the cross-comparisons between these digital surrogates.

Freytag-Loringhoven created these twelve texts during a time of transition in her life, between 1923 and 1927, when she moved from New York to Berlin and finally to Paris. In Transition sheds light on a moment of transition in the culture of little magazines — it illuminates the changing technologies of conversation during the 1920s as well as those of the first decade of the twenty-first century. These twelve poems all participate in the performance of Freytag-Loringhoven's poetry by and through multiple and varied relationships within the textual network.