Digitizing David Jones’ letters to Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, as part of the David Jones Digital Archive
David Jones and Jim Ede
The friendship of the artist, writer and WWI veteran David Jones (1895–1974) and the founder of the Kettle’s Yard Museum, Harold Stanley (“Jim”) Ede (1895–1990), is a unique example of the relationship between artist and patron in the Modernist period. In addition to financial support, Ede helped many artists elucidate the ideas underlying their work — an effort recorded in his extensive correspondence with and criticism of artists. However, the correspondence of Ede and Jones records a special affinity: both painters, Ede and Jones both served in the First World War, shared connections with Wales, and had a profound thirst to understand the role that art plays in spiritual life.
The Letters
In addition to featuring Jones’ most candid discussions of his artistic philosophy and its underlying spiritual vision, the letters (spanning the years 1927-1971 and contained in their entirety in the archive at Kettle’s Yard museum) are crucial to our understanding of Jones’ place in the network of Modernist artists and writers. In addition, they offer unique insights in the place of artistic practice in response to trauma; nationalism between the wars; and the role of art to bring about fulfilment in a secular world.
As with all Jones’ letters, a significant obstacle to their publication has been a practical one: the letters’s visual component resists transcription in a traditional print format. Not only does Jones adorn and interlace his letters with colorful pictures and lettering, he constantly inserts, annotates, color-codes, wraps and marks his texts, augmenting his letters in a way which resists easy transcription. While facsimile can capture some of this intricacy, Jones’ texts seem destined for digital editing methods.
The Project
The project to digitize and create an open-access digital edition of the letters from David Jones and Jim Ede is the first of the David Jones Digital Archive (under the auspices of the David Jones Research Center at Washington Adventist University). It began in 2020, with a collaboration between the David Jones Research Center, the Faculty of English in the University of Cambridge, the Kettle’s Yard Gallery, and the Cambridge Digital Humanities Learning Programme.
The scanning and hosting of the letters, as well as an initial training workshop in digital editing methods (TEI) was funded by the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant Scheme and the U.S.-based David Jones Research Center. The 5-day hybrid workshop, led by Huw Jones and Yasmin Faghihi (of Cambridge Digital Humanities), Laura McCormick Kilbride (of the Faculty of English, Cambridge), and Thomas Berenato and Anna Svendsen (of the David Jones Research Center), not only gave an introduction to TEI (Text Encoding Initiative - a digital editing method that makes use of XML markup) but also included a practical application of digital editing by having each participant encode at least one Jones letter (using scanned images).
A team of TEI-trained scholar-editors has been working since then to encode the rest of the letters and aims to be finished with the initial transcription later in 2024. Images of the letters (and the transcriptions in progress) alongside 10 “deep-zoom” images of Jones’s visual works in the Kettle’s Yard Museum are now available to view publicly on the Cambridge University Digital Library. See them here.
To read more about the workshop (and a second Jones workshop that took place at the National Library of Wales), see Huw and Yasmin’s co-written article for The Journal of Open Humanities Data here.
Get Involved
The David Jones Research Center hopes to host more of these kinds of workshops and projects in connection with other collections and materials of David Jones. If you are interested in participating in a future workshop or being an editor with the David Jones Digital Archive, please contact us directly at djresearch@wau.edu.