TXTDS Graduate and Undergraduate Students Recognized for Outstanding Work
Annually, the Textual Studies Program awards graduate and undergraduate projects completed as part of Textual Studies’ coursework. Each year, a committee of TXTDS faculty select outstanding projects from both graduate and undergraduate students. This year, the committee recognized six fantastic submissions. Read more about these projects and the students behind them below!
Undergraduate Projects Honored by TXTDS Annual Award
The Imitation Game, But AI Played by Archini Koushik
Archini Koushik won first prize with Evanora Pearce, Simra Jahin, and Blue Jordan selected as runners-up. Archini’s project was centered around the development of a hybrid test to evaluate AI’s humanness. It combined a Turing Test with social deduction games to probe what markers AI identifies as human and whether or not the models could successfully impersonate humans based on these criteria. Through a fascinating and elaborate overview of the game, the project creatively mediated on the notion of humanness, consciousness, and artificial intelligence.
Who Was Then The Gentleman? A Time-Traveling Analysis of William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and a King’s Lesson by Evanora Pearce
Evanora Pearce’s work featured a deftly explored book-arts analysis of William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and a King’s Lesson. Investigating the way Morris drew inspiration from the medieval period for its artistic styling and socio-political beliefs, Evanora argues that this book’s physicality demonstrates these influences in the intentionality of the book’s design, such as in the consistency of its ink, the substrate of its pages, and in its decorated drop caps, among other characteristics.
The Song of Thra: Mapping Character Relationships in “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance” Television Series and Novels by Simra Jahin
Simra Jahin’s submission is a fascinating analysis of the character relations in “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance” television and novel series. Using a text analysis methodology to investigate the connections among various characters within the series, Simra shows how their interactions demonstrate the narrative interconnections of the series’ world-building, mapping these in visual representations of the characters’ co-occurrences.
TEI-Encoding “Comets” by Blue Jordan
Blue Jordan’s project is a TEI-encoding and digital representation of “Comets” by Sir Robert Ball, published in The Strand Magazine in 1901. This impressive project drew upon historical materials in the UW Special Collections, and embarked upon a process of digitization by encoding and representing through HTML and CSS “Comets” as it originally appeared in print. The site allows visitors to flip between the XLST version of the text and the HTML version, which demonstrates the process and feat of taking the encoded text and using it to replicate the document’s printed appearance.
Graduate Certificate Student Submissions Honored by Textual Studies Annual Award
The Contemporary Korean Women’s Literature Dataset (1990–2025) by Xinyue Yu
Xinyue Yu was awarded first prize in the graduate submissions category, with Karthik Malli selected as runner-up. Xinyue’s work is an exceptionally detailed, hand-curated dataset of contemporary Korean women’s literature representing the years from 1990-2025. The digital resource combines 500 major works of fiction by Korean women writers and presents publishing and authorial information for each title. This project is part of a larger effort to continue expanding the database to enhance its completeness, as well as part of an analytical project to trace the development of thematic patterns and literary trends in Korean women’s literature in order to uncover a deeper understanding of the social, cultural, and feminist narratives present in Korean women writers’ works.
Indian Language Books in the UW Collections by Karthik Malli
Karthik Malli’s project compiles, analyzes, and visualizes library data from the UW collection’s holdings of Indian language books. These languages include Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, and Sanskrit. Karthik’s work takes a fascinating look at trends in these language collections, as well as tracks the geographic location from which these books were sourced. Based on the analysis of this data, Karthik was able to draw conclusions about the sourcing of the collections and the print history of Indian-language texts.
Please join us in extending a big congratulations to these awardees!
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