Digital découpage: reading and prototyping the material poetics and queer ephemera of the Edwin Morgan scrapbooks, 1931-1966

Abstract

My thesis takes as its object of study sixteen scrapbooks compiled between 1931 and 1966 by Scots Makar Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), which are currently housed in the University of Glasgow Library Special Collections. I focus on reading the Morgan scrapbooks through two paradigms. Firstly, I approach the scrapbooks as materiallyspecific texts that demand close readings not only of their content, but of their forms and format. Specifically, I read the material practices and poetics of Morgan’s scrapbooking through queer theories of ephemera and temporalities, even in cases where the contents of the scrapbooks are not themselves overtly queer, and argue that these queer poetics extend as an influence throughout Morgan’s broader literary corpus. I also argue that the scrapbooks speak through “language[s] of juxtaposition” (Garvey, Writing with Scissors 131) that can be productively unfolded through close readings informed by Bruno Latour’s sociological theories. Secondly, I approach the Morgan scrapbooks as a test case to demonstrate the value of using digital humanities and visualization methods to engage ephemeral archival items in ‘research through design’ processes. My thesis interprets the Morgan scrapbooks through the creation of custom-built databases and prototypical interfaces that make discoverable the scrapbooks’ rich metadata, while also arguing that Morgan’s scrapbooks are particularly open to such digital interventions due to their reliance on intermediation and their documentation of technological innovations. The three visual prototypes resulting from my project are not intended to reproduce faithfully or replace the scrapbooks, but rather to experiment with how the media specificities of the digital can be put into conversation with Morgan’s materially-complex and technologically-aware scrapbooks. The prototypes also enable explorations of the productive points of contact that exist between scrapbooks, databases, and prototypes as forms of information management and tools of interpretation. Collectively, these two approaches demonstrate the value of, and need for, close readings and innovative digital remediations for scrapbooked (hi)stories like Morgan’s, as well as for many other ephemeral and marginalized material archives.