Networking women translators in Spain (1868-1936) and their presence in the Mnemosyne digital library

Abstract

PurposeStudies of Spanish literature during the late nineteenth century and the first one-third of the twentieth century are evolving from research on canonical writers to the study of “odd and forgotten” authors, themes and genres during what is now called the Other Silver Age. This paper aims to focus on the work undertaken in the field of literary translation by the women writers of this period.Design/methodology/approachMnemosyne is an open-access digital library that allows data modeling for specific collections (women translators, science fiction, etc.) in support of research and teaching on Silver Age Spain. The first version of the library is stored on the server at the Universidad Complutense Library, and it is linked to the collections of the digital library HathiTrust and Biblioteca Nacional de España. Behind the scenes of Mnemosyne’s public presence online, the project is developing with the aid of the tool Clavy which is a rich internet application that is able to import, preserve and edit information from big data collections of digital objects so as to build bridges between institutional and digital repositories and create collections of enriched digital content. See:http://repositorios.fdi.ucm.es/mnemosine/queesmnemosine.phpFindingsThe Collection Women Translators in Spain (1868-1936) inside Mnemosyne selects, categorizes and makes visible in digital format women translators and literary translations that belong to a forgotten repertoire to allow the historical review of the period. The digital collection of Spanish Women Translators pretends to be a field of international experimentation for the creation of interoperable semantic networks through which a large group of scholars could generate innovative research and theoretical reading models for literary texts. See:http://repositorios.fdi.ucm.es/mnemosine/colecciones.phpResearch limitations/implicationsClavy also provides a basic system of data visualization, edition and navigation. There are plans to integrate @Note, a collaborative annotation application, into Clavy. These two computational tools were developed by the software languages research group ILSA[1] at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.Practical implicationsIts been followed NEWW Women Writers’ categories concerning biographical categories as successful standard for ensuring interoperability in the near future: children, marital status, social class, religion, profession and other activities, financial aspects, memberships. See:http://repositorios.fdi.ucm.es/mnemosine/ver_documento.php?documento=208369Social implicationsThese women also showed their interest in the writings of contemporary women by translating their works into Spanish or glossing foreign ideas about how the modern woman should be, think or behave. This digital collection shows the first steps of the intellectual women in the South of Europe.Originality/valueTo incorporate specially tailored metadata for the women translators’ collection into Mnemosyne, it will be necessary to use of Clavy’s extensibility to account for the particularities of the women translators’ collection. This is where prior knowledge of this literature’s historical and cultural context proves indispensable. In particular, the specific metadata model for the women translators’ collection incorporates elements that reflect the literary, historical and cultural characteristics of the collections.