ABSTRACT
This article examines Mina Loy's poem 'Mother Earth'. It does so within the context of her archive. It uncovers the different frameworks of value imposed by publication and by archival settings and highlights the ways in which digitisation affords us new insights into the open nature of archived literary manuscripts. While archives are often figured as domestic spaces, digitisation has overturned the familiar distinctions between the private space of the archive and the possibilities for public circulation previously associated only with the published form of a literary work. As I outline with respect to Loy's poem 'Mother Earth', this means that documents that once sat neatly within boxes and within firm categories or classifications now sit within networks of connections and become accessible via pathways that previously were not possible. Extending the metaphor of the archive as house I argue that in the digital archival environment the archivist is now more readily understood as akin to the architect than the housekeeper.
