CFP: A Field Guide to Lost Modernisms

“A Field Guide to Lost Modernisms” is a proposed edited collection seeking contributions that address the vulnerability and disappearance of digital resources related to modernist studies. The instability of the online realm has put digital archives, digital humanities projects, and crucial scholarly resources at risk; this collection aims to be a call-to-action that challenges the field to develop feasible and/or experimental approaches to preservation. The project, which has secured funding for Gold Open Access publication, is envisioned as a “quick, piquant, and eclectic collection” that will: “create awareness around this problem… identify some of the major causes… and brainstorm ideas about how to solve this massive problem.” From the call:

Contributions will help its readers “spot” at-risk assets in the wild—that is, on the Internet, in the Wayback Machine, locked inside a floppy disk or thumb drive, or only in one’s memory, a gap where a resource used to be. It does not aim to be complete or timeless, but an urgent, strategic set of case studies to be appreciated and methodologies to be emulated. Vivid accounts of at-risk or barely recovered sites of modernism would, in themselves, also mitigate loss in cases where description and documentation become advocacy.

While traditional essays of 7,000-8,000 words are welcome, contributors are even more welcome to suit their contributions to their own particular aims and peculiar sites for recovery or documentation. Experimental scholarly genres are encouraged, as are short, manifesto-like contributions. A Web Companion will be purpose-built to accommodate (within reason) datasets, code, images or other materials that contributors wish to preserve.

Types of contributions may include:

• Case studies of individual websites or other electronic resources related to modernist studies, devoted to reconstructing and describing a lost or at-risk artifact in the manner of an elegy or a scholarly introduction
• A first-person postmortem of a digital project or artifact that the contributor personally worked on or encountered in a unique or intimate way
• A taxonomical identification, classification, or definition of a particular type or genre of lost modernisms, accompanied by snapshots or descriptions of multiple exemplars
• Historical and/or causal analysis about the cause of these losses or the future of this trend toward broken sites
• Histories of pre-digital “lost modernisms” that investigate other, likely non-electronic kinds of modernisms lost before 1991, put into the context of digital loss or contemporary fears about the Internet as an unstable infrastructure
• Persuasive arguments about the value of digital scholarship and/or public representations of modernism online
• Methodological recommendations for approaching preservation
• Practical guides on specific strategies and processes preserving or otherwise testifying to lost modernisms (step-by-step how-tos, tutorials, or considerations of the pros and cons of using specific software or approaches to preservation)
• Theoretical treatises defining the “lost,” “digital modernism,” “preservation,” or another key term in the collection, or theoretical explorations of the relationship between digital materiality and modernist textuality

Proposals are due February 2, 2026 via this online form (see the call for details).