Bonnie Ha on Collaborating with UW Special Collections for Online Exhibition of Historical Anatomy Books
Over the summer quarter, UW Textual Studies student Bonnie Ha completed her Capstone project and, with it, the undergraduate Minor in Textual Study and Digital Humanities. The Capstone is a culminating project, undertaken during any quarter of the academic year, that brings together the minor’s learning goals with the skills gained during the course of the program. In her own words, Bonnie describes her collaboration with UW Special Collections and her work researching and digitizing historical anatomy books. Read on to find out more!
Digital Project Documents Rare Materials in the History of Science
This summer I worked with Special Collections on an upcoming anatomy exhibit. The end-product of my capstone project was a website featuring anatomy illustrations from different texts spanning a date range from the mid 1700s to late 1900s. To start, I did background research on the history of anatomical drawings to get familiar with the subject and found some notable figures, including Henry Gray and John and Charles Bell. During the course of my research, I found that anatomical drawings of this period towed the line between being extremely accurate and having an artistic style of their own. This was interesting to me because the mixture of precision and style was something I had never thought about before when considering scientific illustration.
Since the exhibit was in the early stages of production at the time of my collaboration, I got to go into the basement of Special Collections to help select the texts that would later be digitized. One of the texts I selected caught my eye because I could see the grain lines of its paper and the signature marks for the book’s binding. Overall, the selection process was quite a neat experience for me, as I was surrounded by a bunch of old books and rare materials.
After picking the books that would go into the exhibition, I used a Bookeye Scanner, which is a special high-powered scanner designed for use in libraries, archives, and museums, to digitize the pages of the books to be put on the website. When building the website, we used WordPress, which was a bit of a technical hurdle for me to figure out at first. In the future, I hope to work in the museum space where I can use the skills I learned over the course of the Textual Studies minor and my work on this capstone project.
Digital Scans of Scientific Illustrations from UW Libraries’ Special Collections
Congratulations to Bonnie on completing her Capstone project, as well as the Textual Studies minor! To find out more about the Minor in Textual Study and Digital Humanities, Capstone requirements, and upcoming TXTDS courses, you can explore our website or email text@uw.edu. You can also sign up for our mailing list and follow us on Instagram and X.