Editorial Policy

Transcription. Our approach to transcribing poems was informed by existing tensions between diplomatic transcription on the one hand and functionality and readability on the website on the other hand. Transcriptions are therefore not strictly diplomatic. Spelling, punctuation, capitalization, word division, double spacing between letters and words, italics, boldface, variant letter forms, page layout, apparent errors, and stanzas have been retained. Poems were encoded in Times New Roman font.

Line breaks of poems published in narrow newspaper columns were not transcribed diplomatically. We felt doing so would have made such poems less readable for website users, who would see a scan of the original. Furthermore, we wanted to anticipate using machine learning to look for rhyme schemes without first having to connect two parts of a broken line. Poem titles and authors’ names, when they appear in the original publication, were encoded using diplomatic transcription. In the case of a single-author anthology, when the poet’s name does not appear with each poem, we included the name in the bibliographic citation at the bottom of each webpage.

Poem selection. The poems currently in this project were written or published in the United States by German immigrants during the decade of the war. We used archival sources (periodicals) and anthologies held by the Max Kade Center for German–American Studies, print anthologies from KU Libraries collections, and digitized publications available from the Library of Congress and HathiTrust Digital Library.

Technical information. We encoded poems in XML according to TEI guidelines, using various versions of the Oxygen XML Editor. A RELAX NG (REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation) schema defined the structure and content of our XML documents. We wrote an XSL file to generate HTML from our XML files. To define the dynamic elements of our website, we used XSLT, JavaScript, and CSS. We initially used PyCharm to add final custom elements to each HTML file/webpage and then switched to the text editor Atom.

Licensing. The poems are free of known copyright restrictions.

All other content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.