Author: Nikita Willeford Kastrinos

Beatrice Arduini and Julie Tanaka on New Illustrated 1544 Dante Comedia Acquisition

This week on the blog, we’re detailing a recent Special Collections acquisition! Adding to the breadth and depth of UW Libraries’ rare books holdings, UW Special Collections has purchased a new item to add to its inventory of Italian works—a 1544 edition of Dante Alighieri’s “Comedia,” or the Divine Comedy. We talked with Beatrice Arduini, Associate Professor of Italian, and Julie Tanaka, Associate Dean of University Libraries for Distinctive Collections, to find out more about this volume’s place in UW’s Special Collections and in the publication history of this famous author. Read on to learn about this newly acquired rare work!

16^th Century Illustrated Edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy

One of the things that makes this Dante volume special is the illustrations that accompany the commentary. Housing 87 total woodcuts, this 1544 edition features Alessandro Vellutello’s commentary with an accompanying suite of pictures that speak to his interpretation of Dante’s text. This marks a significant moment in the printed history of Dante’s “Comedia” for the way in which its woodcuts are supposed to be read in concert with the text and, in particular, are intended to enhance the reader’s comprehension. For example, consider this illustration of Paradiso cando 18:

In the end, Alessandro Vellutello’s commentary did not become a huge success, never being printed in this format again, however his involvement in the design of these woodcuts remains noteworthy. Setting his project apart from previous illustrated editions of Dante’s work, the emphasis of Vellutello’s interpretive aim makes its woodcuts historically unique. 

Woodcut is a relief printing technique in which an image is carved into a block of wood that is then used to impress an image onto the surface of a page by means of ink and pressure. Featuring 87 total woodcuts, La Comedia di Dante Aligieri con la nova espositione di Alessandro Vellutello, represents an important moment in the print history of Dante’s Divine Comedy and in the development of the scholarly treatment of this Italian writer.

Text and Image in Alessandro Vellutello’s La Comedia di Dante Aligieri

Vellutello’s illustrations were meant to not only reflect the commentary’s aims but help convey them in a non-linguistic manner, adding to the illustration of the text of the poem. This feature is especially important for the way the woodcuts function from a topographic and narrative perspective. This “hybrid” nature of the 1544 illustrations is, ultimately, the most significant feature of Vellutello’s project.

According to Beatrice Arduini, one of the most notable places Vellutello’s blending of text and image comes into play is in the interpretation of the topography of Dante’s inferno and in the illustration of the content of multiple cantos compressed into one woodcut. For example, the Inferno 25 illustration, pictured below, compresses elements of three/four cantos (the latter part of Inferno 24 and cantos 25-27) and two groups of sinners, the thieves of the seventh bolgia, and the fraudulent counselors of the eighth bolgia, or subcircle of circle 8:

Though scholars are certain of Vellutello’s personal investment in the conceptualization of the woodcut designs, the artist who actually carved the woodcuts remains unknown. However, some have suggested the name of Giovanni Britto. What is certain is that the woodcut’s appearance in this volume would go on to inspire a tradition of reprintings, later combined not only with Vellutello’s commentary but also Cristoforo Landino’s, first printed in 1481, in 1564, 1578, and 1596.

“The illustrations are closely related to Vellutello’s commentary, an innovation in the printed illustrated editions of the poem, and strive to explain accurately the literal meaning of the text, just like Vellutello tries to do in his glosses. Examples can be found in images like these, where Vellutello graphically represents an explanation of the three angles (left image). They can also be seen in the woodcut where Vellutello provides a measurement line and explains in the commentary that readers are supposed to multiply it by 6 to visualize the unit of length, “braccia,” which he is using for his calculations (right image).”

– Beatrice Arduini

1544 Dante Edition Adds to UW Special Collections Rare Italian Books

According to Julie Tanaka, this 1544 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy is exciting because it is not one of the Dante editions most widely known. In this case, the draw of the volume is the way it presents an opportunity for scholars of Dante and those working on the history of the ‘Comedia’’s illustrations to view an artifact which changed the way illustration, text, and commentary spoke to one another. 

“The images in the 1544 Dante make this a significant edition. Vellutello has radically altered our understanding of hell’s landscape, describing its exact location, size, and shape. Coupled with Dante’s text and Vellutello’s commentary, the images allow readers to visualize all aspects of the descent through the nine circles of hell like travelling down a funnel.”

– Julie Tanaka

Vellutello provides the diameter and depth of each circle.

This 1544 Dante edition also has the opportunity to become an important object to the study and instruction of the history of the book, as well as in the technical and art history of printed illustration. In fact, while the Liber Cronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle; 1496) was the first relatively successful integration of text and image in printed books in Europe, the Vellutello’s 1544 “Comedia” images set a new precedent for the way in which image and text related, making it an important specimen in the history of text illustration. As such, the volume is a valuable addition to Special Collections holdings for the way it offers opportunities for teaching about the historical evolution and function of textual illustration, as well as for teaching about early printed works, early modern binding practices, and developments in the history of woodcut. 

“This edition provides so many opportunities for teaching and learning. For people interested in printing history and practices, the volume shows the addition of hand-stamped lines in the lower margin to correct the omission of lines 64-66 in Canto II of Purgatory (II.64-66, leaf V7 recto) in the original publication. The illustrations invite study for both studio art and art history students; the physical object invites textual studies students to examine paper, threads, leathers, and binding practices. Students of history can examine the role historical context played in Vellutello’s commentary in contrast to earlier commentaries. This work invites students of mathematics and engineering to study the structure of Hell. These are just a few of the possibilities.”

– Julie Tanaka

Textual Studies Courses in the History of the Book and Special Collections

The UW Textual Studies Program has a long history of collaborations with the UW Libraries and UW Special Collections in particular. Many of our courses utilize their holdings and feature visits to the Special Collections classroom for hands-on instruction. If you’ve ever wanted to explore the rare books and materials housed in the UW Libraries, check out TXTDS courses.

Stills from materials consulted during TXTDS 402 Book Arts: Proseminar in Special Collections, Bibliography, and Letterpress Printing from its first iteration in Fall 2023.

This spring, TXTDS 402 Book Arts: Proseminar in Special Collections, Bibliography, and Letterpress Printing will allow a small group of students interested in material books studies an opportunity to work in close quarters with all the UW Special Collections has to offer. Bringing together various faculty working in different periods, language traditions, and geographies, this course puts students in direct contact with rare and archival materials from the UW Libraries’ collections. Covering histories of the book, reading, and the technological process of printing, the proseminar’s sessions bring experts in various printed cultures together to create a crash course in the production, handling, evaluation, and study of these historical materials. 

Additionally, students in this class, which runs once a year as part of the Textual Studies Program course offerings, will get hands-on instruction in printing techniques, including letterpress printing with the help of Seattle-based letterpress printing nonprofit, Partners in Print. 

UW Textual Studies and UW Global Literary Studies Spring Printmaking Social Hour: Bookplates and Bookmarks

Want to try your own hand at printmaking and relief illustration? Stop by our spring quarter event, hosted in conjunction with UW Global Literary Studies–the upcoming Printmaking Social Hour: Bookplates and Bookmarks. After a successful Printmaking Social Hour in fall quarter, we’re bringing the presses out again to design, carve, and print linocut bookplates and bookmarks! A bookplate, also known as an ex libris, is a mark of book ownership that can be printed or pasted into a volume. For this session, we encourage you to BYOB—bring your own books, that is—so you can print your own personalized ex libris into its pages. You can also design a personalized printed bookmark or anything else you can dream up! 

Mark your calendars for Thursday, April 24! The event will take place from 3-5pm in the Husky Union Building, room 332!

You can find out more about this and other upcoming events, Textual Studies courses, the Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, or the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies by contacting us at text@uw.edu. 

Be sure to also sign up for the TXTDS mailing list to keep up to date on all things TXTDS! And don’t forget to follow us on X and Instagram! 

Linocut Printing with TXTDS and GLITS: Fall Quarter Event Recap

To close out the fall quarter, the UW Textual Studies Program and the UW Global Literary Studies Program partnered up to host a Printmaking Social Hour. Held at the HUB, the event gave students enrolled or interested in the Textual Studies minor and Global Literary Studies major the chance to make their own linocut prints, socialize with fellow students, and learn about the TXTDS and GLITS undergraduate and graduate programs.

In this blog, we’ll recap the event, share information about TXTDS and GLITS, and showcase some of the linocut artwork we made during the event. Plus, we’ll preview more upcoming events for spring quarter, so make sure to mark your calendars!

Linocut Printing at the HUB with UW Textual Studies and UW Global Literary Studies

For the inaugural event of the 2024-25 academic year, UW Textual Studies partnered with UW Global Literary Studies to offer students enrolled or interested in either program to gather with fellow classmates to take part in a Printmaking Social Hour. During the session, event-goers learned how to linocut print. This is a type of block printing in which you carve a design into linoleum using a linocutter, roll ink onto its surface, and print onto paper using pressure to impress the illustration.

Linocut printing is a relief illustration technique, meaning that it achieves an impression through a raised design that is made by cutting away from the printing surface. Other examples of relief printing include wood cut, anastatic printing or relief etching, and metal cut. Relief printing holds an important place in the history of print, being the process of letterpress printing, or printing with moveable type.

From designing to cutting to pressing the linocuts, students got to engage in the full process of relief printing during the session and, in turn, experience some of the techniques they could learn about and make use of in UW Textual Studies classes.

Thank you to all of our 50+ event attendees who made the event such a success!

What are the UW Textual Studies and UW Global Literary Studies Programs?

While at the event, students had the chance to learn more about the UW Textual Studies and UW Global Literary Studies programs.

UW Textual Studies is an interdisciplinary program, housed in the French & Italian Studies Department that focuses on the history, present and future of texts, from scrolls, manuscripts and printed books to archival documents, digital texts and textual data. Offering an undergraduate minor and graduate certificate, students in this program can explore how texts have been written, published, read, circulated and archived from antiquity to today. In TXTDS classes, you can experience hands on work with historical texts, archival sources, and artists’ books, as well as instruction in printing techniques, such as letterpress! Courses also explore methods for editing, digitizing, and publishing texts, as well as for building and analyzing text oriented databases, archives, and exhibits.

Hosted in the Slavic Department, Global Literary Studies (GLITS) gives students the chance to learn about works of literature from around the world. Offering an undergraduate major, students in this program can explore a rich array of literatures in various language traditions, genres, periods, and geographies, taking classes in subjects like Classical Mythology and the Ancient Novel, 20^th Century Surrealism and the Avant-Garde, or Arctic Literature, just to name a few!

Bookplate Making with TXTDS and GLITS in Spring 2025

Stay tuned for more TXTDS and GLITS events on the horizon! In spring 2025, UW Textual Studies and UW Global Literary Studies will be hosting another joint event, this time focused on the printing of personalized bookplates. Bookplates, also known as ex libris (Latin for ‘from the books’), are printed or decorative labels pasted into books to indicate ownership. Historically speaking, bookplates are a rich source of information about book ownership and the printed cultures in which these object circulated. At the meeting, you’ll have the opportunity to design, carve, and print your own ex libris.

Don’t miss out on information about this upcoming event! Sign up for the TXTDS mailing list and the GLITS mailing list to keep up to date on future courses, events, and news from each program, and be sure to follow TXTDS and GLITS on Instagram!

Graduate Student Spotlight: Molly Porter on Creating a Digital Anthology of Seattle’s Regional Poetry

Along with its undergraduate minor, the UW Textual Studies Program offers opportunities for MA and PhD students enrolled in any program at the UW to earn a Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies. Designed for students researching cultural and literary materials, working in archival or digital formats, or for those considering careers in editing, publishing, libraries, or archives, this graduate certificate program helps students explore their interdisciplinary interests while building the skills necessary to work with a variety of textual and historical materials and media forms in both analog and digital environments. 

In this post series, we’ll be shining a light on some of the recent work of UW Textual Studies graduate students. For this inaugural feature, we talked with Molly Porter, PhD Candidate in English and alum of the UW Textual Studies graduate certificate program, about her work on a digital humanities project featuring poetry of the Puget Sound region, as well as how her time in Textual Studies has informed and enriched the research of her dissertation. In her own words, Molly describes her current research and its relationship to her Capstone project digitally anthologizing Seattle’s regional poetry.

The Poetic Signage of Seattle’s Public Lands

Hi there, I’m Molly Porter! In pursuing my Ph.D. in English, aided by the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies, I research what I consider to be an overlooked textuality in literary studies—poetry quoted on signage, such as in parks. I think that studying this tangible intersection of poetry and public lands is crucial for understanding how literature shapes place, and vice versa. It also sheds light on a key readership of poetry we miss out on in focusing exclusively on the traditional media of books (or the new digital media of Instagram poetry). 

While this isn’t the conventional domain of textual studies, my focus on the physicality of this poetic signage and their geographic placement in public lands has been instrumental in pushing me to think beyond the symbolic domain of poetry to consider poetry’s materiality–a consideration aided by my coursework in the Textual Studies graduate certificate program. For example, it was so rewarding to get to write with oak gall ink on parchment in a medieval romance class. In a digital media class, I enjoyed finding a Mountaineers poem about an alpine landscape pasted in a scrapbook alongside an inscribed piece of wood in the UW Libraries Special Collections and relished the challenge of considering how to translate this specimen’s tangibility and ecological significance into a digital environment, leading to my culminating Capstone project.

Digital Humanities Capstone on the Poetics of Seattle’s Bioregion

Textual Studies and the Ecological Archive

My subfield of ecocriticism focuses largely on how literature portrays or responds to the natural world, like in a novel’s description of a park. But a focus on textual studies encourages me to ask the reverse: how about considering more tangibly how “nature” portrays literature, as captured in an inspirational quote in a sign within a park? And what would it mean to consider how the natural world responds to a literary text? For example, we can see the material landscape portraying literature in this quotation inscribed onto the steps of the Mount Rainier National Park, but we can also see behind it the tangible way the “natural” world is roped-off and is shaped by the aesthetics of ecological preservation lauded by quotations like these.

The interdisciplinarity of my research has encouraged me to take a wide view of what counts as “textual evidence,” as I’ve moved outside the conventional archive of the library to the public lands populating our region. It’s important to remember how this landscape of Tahoma, while influenced by these poetic plaques, is also deeply shaped by oral stewardship traditions from local tribes one can miss out on in a hyperfocus on print-based textual evidence. Paying mind to the materiality of these texts–printed, inscribed, and spoken–helps me to draw out such signage’s varying historical scales from the local to the global and helps me to unearth the sometimes circuitous routes of their textual transmission that, occasionally, bring my outdoor wanderings back into the UW library’s archives.

Researching with UW Special Collections PNW Archives

After many internet rabbit holes, I found that this famous phrase’s first publication can actually be traced to a 1928 University of Washington Book Store chapbook “translation” of the Confucian classic “The Great Learning,” a first edition of which is housed in a specially-dedicated collection of the UW Libraries’ holdings on the Pacific Northwest. Begun in 1905, the collection comprises thousands of library materials and archival collections that document the people, history, and culture of this region. 

I had no idea our seemingly provincial region had such a key hand in carving out this piece of literary history until a close reading of this plaque prodded me to trace its origins. It turns out that Glenn Hughes, an early twentieth-century UW English professor and founder of our School of Drama, commissioned the chapbook publication which featured this phrase while here in Seattle. The phrase was written down in a footnote of the chapbook by Pound while in Italy, which he drew from a French translation of the work, which took its source material from an inscription on an ancient washtub in China.

In attending to this smorgasbord of textualities across the globe in research for my dissertation (which analyzes authors like Pound, Muir, and other writers quoted on local signage), I’m starting to trace the localized history of this phrase “make it new” to dig up eco-literary connections between the regional and the planetary, between the traditional indoor archive and the outside, public realm of inscribed literature in an exploration of the “where” of modernist innovation.

Graduate-Level Courses in Textual Study, Special Collections, and Digital Humanities

Congratulations to Molly Porter on completing the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies and many thanks for sharing this exciting research with the Textual Studies blog! The Textual Studies program offers an array of courses at the graduate level that reflect the program’s dedication to the study of diverse texts across time, place, media form, and language, including non-anglophone and non-alphabetic corpora, computational and digital approaches to textual study, and the ability to experience hands-on learning with materials in UW Special Collections and the UW Libraries’ archives. 

If you’d like to find out more about opportunities for graduate students in UW Textual Studies, our upcoming courses, or the certificate program and its requirements, you can explore our website or email text@uw.edu.

For UW Textual Studies news, upcoming events, and updates on faculty and student research, sign up for the Textual Studies listserv and don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and X.

Upcoming Classes in the Textual Studies Minor and Graduate Certificate Programs

The UW Textual Studies Program has unveiled new courses for Spring 2025! In this blog, we’ll give you all the details of these upcoming classes. From book arts to manuscripts, to Scandinavian mythology, there’s tons to explore in TXTDS courses. Read on to find out more about our spring quarter offerings. 

Courses in the Undergraduate Minor and Graduate Certificate in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities

The UW Textual Studies Program encompasses a wide range of courses in a variety of departments and subject fields. Covering topics such as book history, bibliography, digital humanities, print cultures and more, there is sure to be a Textual Studies course that fits your interests. 

The UW Textual Studies Program offers programs for both undergraduate and graduate students. The UW Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor is a 25-credit program in which students take courses from two distributions: the Core Courses and the Electives. They additionally complete a Capstone course, TXTDS 405, which can be taken in any quarter and is a culminating project conducted under the guidance of a faculty advisor or a librarian. 

The Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies is based on the completion of 16 total credits, including two classes from the Core Electives, one open elective chosen in consultation with the student’s TDS advisor, and a Capstone course, which connects the students primary program and graduate work with their work in TXTDS.  

For spring 2025, Textual Studies has introduced a series of new and returning classes that fit each of these requirements. Continue reading to find out more about the courses on offer. 

Spring 2025 TXTDS Core Courses

TXTDS 402 Book Arts: Proseminar in Special Collections, Bibliography, and Letterpress Printing

Have you ever wanted to learn about working in archives, handling historical materials, or the process of letterpress printing? This small seminar will allow students interested in the Textual Studies and Digital Humanities minor an opportunity to discover UW Libraries’ Special Collections and get hands-on experience with the historical and archival materials housed therein. Plus, students enrolled in the seminar will also learn about printing techniques, including instruction in letterpress printing with the help of Seattle-based letterpress printing non-profit, Partners in Print.

TXTDS 404/504 Texts, Publics, and Publication: Digital Editing and Publishing

Instructor: Professor Geoffrey Turnovsky

We’ll study the history of editorial and publication processes, from early print-shops to the impacts of digitization today. How does editing and publishing shape and reshape texts along with the publics that read them? How is digitization now impacting our writing, reading, archiving, and preservation practices? What is the future of publishing in the age of AI and social media? We’ll learn techniques in digital editing and publishing, including transcription (manual and automatic) and text encoding using the XML-based guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). We’ll learn to query and process TEI-encoded texts using XPath and XSLT, and we’ll explore web publishing, including an introduction to HTML and CSS, and other web publishing tools.

Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of XML before. No prior experience with encoding or transcription is required or expected! You’ll be walked through the process step-by-step and will gain a host of new skills by the end of the quarter.

Spring 2025 TXTDS Electives

TXTDS 220 Making Manuscripts: Manuscript and Handwriting Technologies From Antiquity to Today

Instructor: Professor Beatrice Arduini

Quills, pens, pencils, vellum and paper: we forget in our digital age that the most enduring writing technologies have been the tools we use to write by hand. We still often sign, now with a stylus or our finger on a screen. In this course, students will explore the rich history of handwriting and manuscripts, from medieval manuscripts to handwriting today.

During the quarter, students enrolled in the course will also get to visit UW Special Collections and see rare manuscript fragments and books up close, some even dating back to the 12th century!

ENGL 322 Medieval and Early Modern Literatures of Encounter

Instructor: Professor Rhema Hokama

This course focuses on cultural encounters across medieval and early modern worlds. We will explore medieval and early modern travel writing and the dramatic and poetic responses to these tales of global travel–focusing especially on European travels to Asia and the Americas. In our readings of writers like William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, Thomas More, John Donne, Luís de Camões, and Marco Polo, we’ll reflect on how European discourses about race, religion, and geopolitical power were shaped by the global exchange of goods and ideas. 

SCAND 330 Scandinavian Mythology

Instructor: Professor Timothy Bourns

During this course, students will have the chance to explore and study religious life in the pre-Christian North. You’ll explore various source materials, including the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda, and will discuss historical, archeological, and folkloric evidence. 

MELC 211 Introduction to Myths of the Ancient Middle East

Instructor: Professor Kathryn Medill

Throughout this course, students will explore myths from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, and Israel. How did the world come to be the way it is, and how did these myths shape ancient peoples’ views of themselves? How and why did ancient people use myths as part of their religious practices and daily lives? Why did some myths stay in circulation for over a thousand years? And how did ancient scribes edit and reframe myths over time to serve new purposes? No prerequisites. Final project instead of final exam.

ART H 400 Art History and Criticism: Haiti and Print Culture in the Age of Revolution

Instructor: Professor Jennifer Baez

This course considers printed material and ephemera that circulated in the Black Atlantic during the runup to and the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Our goal is to trace how print media created affective networks. Each week centers different topoi leading to The Burning Plantation theme; that is, images produced to activate anxiety over the threat of revolt. Students will engage a variety of printed imagery including imperial cartography, portraits of revolutionary leaders, and depictions of the laboring Black body. Paired readings will highlight the role of print in forming readerships. The final project is a digital, student-led exhibition that reflects on Black Atlantic print culture and its circulation, manipulation, translation, and re-purposing.

This class is also open to those enrolled in the Textual and Digital Studies Graduate Certificate Program and satisfies one of the two required Core Elective courses.

UW Textual Studies and UW Global Literary Studies Printmaking Social Hour

If you are curious about any of these courses, be sure to stop by our upcoming Printmaking Social Hour, hosted jointly with UW Global Literary Studies. On Thursday, January 30th from 3:30pm to 5pm in HUB 337, you can come hear about these courses, make your own linocut prints, enjoy some snacks, and connect with people in the UW Textual Studies and UW Global Literary Studies programs.

If you would like more information about these upcoming spring quarter 2025 classes or the Textual Studies minor or graduate certificate programs, you can also email us at text@uw.edu.

Keep up with all things TXTDS, including news, projected courses, and upcoming events by signing up for our mailing list and by following us on Instagram and X. 

Cassidy Vierling Completes Capstone Project with Partners in Print

During the summer quarter, UW Textual Studies student Cassidy Vierling completed her culminating Capstone project as part of the requirements for the UW Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor. Working with Seattle-based letterpress printing non-profit, Partners in Print, Cassidy learned the ins and outs of letterpress printing, while researching and writing about the history and evolution of letterforms. In her own words, Cassidy describes her summer internship, reflects upon her work in contemporary letterpress, and describes what she learned through her research. Read on to find out more!

Letterpress Printing Internship with Partners in Print

My name is Cassidy, and I am a history major, currently minoring in Textual Studies and English. I am interested in literary history and printing history, which the Textual Studies minor allows me to learn about and explore in detail. For my Capstone this summer, I undertook an internship with Partners in Print, a non-profit printing company in Seattle born out of the School of Visual Concepts. As part of my internship I organized PiP’s wood type collection, helped run walk-up workshops at events where the public could print posters to take home, and assisted with logging volunteer information into their database. Interning at a printing company allowed me to learn more about the history of print and print technology, as well as take part in the letterpress printing scene as it exists in the modern world. 

Textual Studies Minor Researches the History of Letterforms

Inspired from my internship work handling and organizing moveable type, I wrote my Capstone paper on the history of letterforms, specifically analyzing significant technologies’ roles in determining the shape of letterforms. I studied how manuscript writing, moveable type, the typewriter, and the personal computer each created new sets of rules that constrained or expanded the art of letterform creation. In the end, I determined that the cultural and societal needs that accompany a technology do as much to shape the letterforms of that time or place as the technology itself does.

Capstone Opportunities in the UW Textual Studies Minor

The Capstone is the culminating project of the Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. It is undertaken during any quarter of the academic year and is designed to bring together the minor’s learning goals with the skills gained during the course of the program. Working alongside a faculty member, a librarian, or with an organization in the form of an internship, students can explore their individual interests and build skills to support them in their future careers and studies. 

Congratulations to Cassidy on completing her Capstone project! 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.

To keep up to date on all things TXTDS, sign up for our mailing list and be sure to follow us on Instagram and X.

Ayla Tanurhan Collaborates with UW Special Collections Exhibitions on Inclusive Design

Over the spring 2024 quarter, UW Textual Studies student Ayla Tanurhan completed the undergraduate Minor in Textual Study and Digital Humanities with a culminating Capstone project in collaboration with UW Special Collections Exhibitions. In her own words, Ayla describes her work on accessible and inclusive design for both physical and digital exhibits at the UW Libraries. Read on to find out more about Ayla’s Capstone project, her interests in access and inclusion, and her time in the UW Textual Studies Program. 

Inclusivity and Access in Cultural Institutions

Ayla Tanurhan (‘24) majored in Art History and Political Science and minored in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, additionally completing Interdisciplinary Honors and Art History Honors. She is particularly interested in cultural institutions, looking to increase access within these spaces through various means. As Henry Art Liaison at the Henry Art Gallery, she developed programs centered around rethinking the traditional museum experience. She also sat on the Accessibility Committee, supporting efforts to develop museum initiatives. In her future work, she hopes to continue to support cultural institutions in their efforts to provide opportunities for engagement for all. 

Capstone Project on Exhibition Accessibility in UW Special Collections

Working with support from Kat Lewis, Special Projects Curator in UW Special collections, I researched and developed a report regarding accessibility within exhibitions. As we were looking to expand accessibility within Special Collections Exhibitions, my research centered on various components including accessible design principles, digital humanities, and industry standards. This project sat at a niche intersection between the library and the museum, so I dove into both sectors, engaging with literature on accessibility in archives and accessibility in museums and exhibitions. Principles of Universal Design were also a key thread throughout my research, providing the grounding framework for the work we hoped to do within Digital Exhibitions. As stated within my report, it is imperative that we design these tools with Accessibility at the forefront, ensuring that our exhibitions are open for learning and engagement for all visitors and viewers. 

Universal Design Framework for Physical and Digital Exhibits

Through my research, we developed a framework for exhibitions centered on Universal Design. This is a strategy for creating spaces and environments which center accessibility for all. During the project, we took a twofold approach, in which we ideated initiatives for the physical exhibition space as well as produced a plan for the introduction and expansion of digital exhibitions. Within my role, I produced a research report, conducted a space survey, ideated physical and digital solutions, developed and edited checklists, and summarized our findings within a report. The emphasis on digital exhibitions allowed me to implement my learnings from my Textual Studies and Digital Humanities background. 

Digital Strategies for Accessible Collections

Digital Humanities is particularly useful in increasing Accessibility, and many institutions are introducing digital projects and tools as means through which audiences of all backgrounds can engage with cultural artifacts. In regards to digital exhibitions, much of this work relies heavily on digitizing projects, and we looked at OCR and HTA as technologies that could support this work. Alt text is another key component of this initiative, meaning that we need to ensure that there is ample metadata and collection data regarding artifacts in the exhibition. We were additionally hoping to bring interactive elements into the digital platform as well, so that all components of the physical exhibition space are also available in the digital space. Underlying all of this work is an important tenant, taken from the field of Universal Design. Our work within cultural institutions should always aim to encompass as many individuals as possible, continuously striving to design cultural experiences for all visitors rather than retroactively finding solutions.

Congratulations to Ayla 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 digital accessibility and inclusive design in our recent blog post, where we spoke to Elliott Stevens about his work on the UW Libraries Storytelling Fellows and his tips for accessible practices in digital scholarship. 

To keep up to date on all things TXTDS, sign up for our mailing list and be sure to follow us on Instagram and X.

Elliott Stevens on Digital Scholarship and Accessibility in Storytelling

Over the past four weeks, the University of Washington Libraries has hosted a program called Storytelling Fellows. Led by UW Textual Studies’ own Elliott Stevens (Research Commons and English Studies Librarian, UW Libraries), alongside Perry Yee, Kathryn Miller, Dylan Burns, and Jinny Sanders, this workshop helps students and faculty build the skills necessary to create and share a podcast episode. We sat down with Stevens to talk about the Storytelling Fellows Workshop and his interests in digital scholarship and accessibility. Read on to find out more!

What is Digital Storytelling Fellows?

Started in 2017, Stevens explains, the Digital Storytelling Fellows is a technical workshop designed for graduate students and faculty who want to learn about digital techniques for the creation of multimodal scholarship and composition. This fall, the 32 fellows enrolled in the program have focused on podcasting, a longstanding mode of digital scholarship, as they’ve worked through the production of a short podcast segment. Throughout this one-month workshop, participants gather for four synchronous meetings in which they learn about various tools, platforms, and strategies for developing and hosting a podcast while sharing their work in a collaborative space along the way. Between these meetings, fellows work on their digital creations and connect with the program’s instructors, who Stevens describes as coaches, cheering participants on and encouraging them to try new things while offering guidance and technical expertise. He sees this coaching approach as one of the unique benefits of the fellows program. Often, working with technology can involve hurdles and frustrations, but the coaches in this workshop focus on helping participants get through the ups and downs of tech-centric scholarship through their blend of support and technical knowledge.

UW Libraries Research Commons and Open Scholarship Commons Sponsored Digital Workshop

Digital Storytelling Fellows is supported by the UW Libraries Research Commons, Libraries Instructional Design, and the Open Scholarship Commons (OSC). The Research Commons and the OSC are two places on the UW campus where students, faculty, researchers, and instructors can connect across disciplines while doing technology-driven scholarship. This mission is echoed in the Digital Storytelling Fellows and its commitment to building an online community of interdisciplinary scholars, researchers, and students working on digital projects through their free, online workshop program.

Stevens and Perry Yee developed the program after realizing that, to their knowledge, there were no other free or low-cost workshops focused on digital scholarship methods that were totally online. For their inaugural session in 2017, the Fellows program focused on video creation and editing using the browser-based software WeVideo. After a successful launch, the Digital Storytelling Fellows took suggestions about what kind of scholarly modes participants would want next. They landed on podcasting after receiving much interest in the topic, as well as finding that podcasting was an underserved medium in this kind of free and online programming. 

The UW Libraries Podcast Workshop

There are four sessions throughout the workshop, Stevens tells us. The first meeting welcomes and introduces fellows to the program, getting them situated with Audacity, a digital audio recording and editing software, and setting them up with the tools they’ll need to complete the program. They also begin imagining an introduction for their podcasts, which leads them into the second session where they level-up in technical skills. In this second week, participants also listen to example podcasts and deconstruct them, learning how to layer audio files and build a world through the combination of different sounds. Session three is Stevens’ favorite: the draft workshop. During this week’s meeting, fellows bring whatever they’ve completed of their podcast, whether that be a full or partial script draft, raw recordings, or interview audio, and participate in a constructive feedback session that helps them to ascertain initial audience reactions. The fourth and final session is a reflection and a celebration for completing the workshop, where participants share their newly finished episodes, clips, or segments.

Over the four weeks, fellows receive individual mentorship from the program’s four coaches and participate in small-group learning, with eight or so participants in each session. This group-based model allows for the development of a small, supportive community, with lots of space for check-ins and one-on-one feedback. In addition to the larger topics of each weekly session, participants can also ask individualized questions aimed at their particular projects. Overall, the Digital Storytelling Fellows gives students and faculty the opportunity to work with others doing similar digital scholarship, creating an infrastructure of support and interdisciplinary community, while helping them achieve their research goals through a defined set of deadlines.

Digital Accessibility, Podcasting, and the Importance of Inclusive Scholarship

While in the Digital Storytelling Fellows program, participants also learn about the importance of accessibility in digital scholarship and podcasting, which is a particular interest of Stevens who, in his work as the UW Libraries Research Commons Librarian, has taken an active role in prioritizing inclusive materials and researching the accessibility of digital tools after working with Hadi Rangin, an information technology accessibility specialist for Accessible Technology Services (ATS). 

When the Fellows program first ran in 2017, it focused on video creation and editing, but the organizers found that there was a prohibitive cost entailed in using accessible video editing software and realized that accessible podcasting technologies were much more freely available. Currently, they run the workshop using Audacity, which not only has inclusive features built into its software but also makes its accessible documentation available for users. In addition to the technology they use, Digital Storytelling Fellows also teaches podcasters to incorporate best practices for accessibility into their creations. During the workshop, they learn about strategies, like captioning and transcripts, that can help enrich their storytelling by making it user-friendly for all future audience members. 

Best Practices for Digital Media Creation and Design for Assistive Technology 

Part of Stevens’ work at UW Libraries also includes visiting classes to share what he’s learned about digital media creation and designing for assistive technology. There are seven questions he proposes creators ask to ensure they’re creating with accessibility in mind:

1. Are you using headings correctly? 

When designing digital projects, especially website content, you’ll typically include headings (h1, h2, h3, h4). These not only affect the design and layout of your pages, but give your content an organizational structure that can be used by screen reading technology to understand the layout and organization of your content. Making sure you use headings and that you nest them properly is just one simple way you can improve the usability of your digital content. 

2. Do your colors have enough contrast? 

One simple way to make your design user-friendly is to make sure you have enough contrast in your color scheme. Incorporating an accessibility checker, like Lighthouse, can run an analysis on your pages and determine if your contrast is high enough.

3. Do you have appropriate alternative text for your images and do you include captions? 

Alternative text or alt text describes images that appear in digitally-created content. This information, alongside image captions, can be extremely helpful for users employing screen readers so that your images can be visible through text-based means. Alt text, alongside captions, should describe the content in a straightforward manner that is concise and specific. It should also place the image in the context of its purpose on the web page and in relation to the other written content it compliments. 

4. Is your link text descriptive? 

It might be tempting to link out to content with phrasing like, “click here,” but link text should actually describe where and with what the link is connected. For example, if you wanted to link to upcoming UW Textual Studies Courses, you should place the link within the text that best describes it. 

5. Have you included captions and transcripts for your media projects? 

When creating in audio or video modes, or if you’re incorporating audio or video files into your content, you want to make sure that you also include captions and transcripts that accurately reflect the audio and video files so that users deploying assistive technologies can experience it accurately. 

6. Are your PDFs accessible? 

Sometimes, digital content includes images or PDFs with textual content. You’ll want to make sure that, no matter what format you’re sharing in, your content can be read with screen readers. There are various tools that you can use to make your PDFs usable with screen reading, but an easy way to test either your images or PDFs is to try highlighting text with your mouse. If you can, great! If not, your files probably aren’t accessible. Even if this first test goes smoothly, it’s always worth checking your files with software like Adobe that can not only help make sure all your text is readable, but that the content also has a structural organization to help ensure  a screen reader goes through the text in a logical order. 

7. Is your digital content designed for use without a mouse? 

Not all users use a mouse to navigate digital content. One way you can check if your content is navigable without the use of a mouse is to test if you can move around your site with just your keyboard using the tab, shift + tab, arrow keys, space bar, enter, and escape functions. If you can’t, you might need to think about the underlying structure of your site or, if you’ve used a content management platform, whether you might consider another digital content tool that attends to accessibility in its template design. 

Digital Scholarship at UW Libraries OSC and UW Textual Studies

If you’re interested in learning more about digital media projects, keep your eyes out for future Digital Storytelling Fellows sessions! You can also check out the UW Libraries OSC and sign up for their listserv to keep up to date on exciting upcoming events centered around digital scholarship and interdisciplinary research. 

And don’t forget to check out UW Textual Studies courses. Many of our classes, as well as the culminating Capstone project, offer opportunities for you to experiment with digital projects and technologies! Many thanks to Elliott Stevens for sharing his work on the Digital Storytelling Fellows and digital accessibility! 

For UW Textual Studies news, upcoming events, and updates on faculty and student research, sign up for the Textual Studies listserv and don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and X.

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.

Hello everyone! My name is Nikita Willeford Kastrinos and I’m very excited to join the UW Textual Studies Program as a Research Associate this academic year. I’m a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and an alum of the UW Textual Studies graduate certificate program. In this blog, I’ll tell you a bit about myself and my research, as well as my role this year working with the program.

I specialize in British literature of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with concentrations in book history, the environmental humanities, media and material cultural studies, and the digital humanities. I’m currently completing my dissertation, Of Form(es) and Form(ats): Ecologies of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Novel. This project narrates an ecological history of print in Britain by examining the developing genre of the novel. Moving from its emergence in the hand-press period to its mass production in the machine-press era, this work tracks the novel’s literary development as it coincides with the shift from pre- to post-industrialized print and the rise of extraction capitalism, offering new ways to think about the relationship between literature and the environment.

Participating in the UW Textual Studies Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies was hugely influential in developing my dissertation research. My capstone project, “Intimate Threads: Text and Textile in the Pages of Pamela,” began my thinking about the materiality of the book object and its natural origins, and research support from the program helped me to visit library collections important to my chapters, such as my visit to Emory University, where I got to view first and early editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Most recently, UW Textual Studies support helped me to attend to Rare Book School at the University of Chicago for the inaugural session of “An Environmental History of the Book,” a course taught by Dr. Eric Slaughter (University of Chicago) focused on the way in which the natural world has shaped the book object and how book objects, in turn, shape our perceptions of nature and environment. From papyrus fragments to bookworm holes to arsenic-dyed bookcloth, we learned about the ecological origins and impacts of books and writing from antiquity to the present day.

This year as an Research Associate, I’m looking forward to contributing to the UW Textual Studies program by helping to reach new students and academic units who can join in and add to the interdisciplinary community of UW Textual Studies. I’m especially excited to work with programs within and outside the university, like the UW Humanities Data Lab, the UW Libraries, Open Scholarship Commons, and Special Collections, and the Seattle-based non-profit, Partners in Print, to help generate new possibilities for research collaboration with UW students completing their Textual Studies capstones.

But most of all, I’m gratified to be in a position to help encourage students in their own research trajectories, connecting them with classes and opportunities that can inspire them and enrich their time in the UW Textual Studies Program.

You’ll hear from me on the Textual Studies blog and our social media accounts where I’ll be sharing UW Textual Studies news, upcoming events, and updates on faculty and student research. Don’t forget to sign up for the Textual Studies listserv and to follow us on Instagram and X to keep up-to-date on all things TXTDS.

If you have work to share or events to promote, I’d love to hear from you! You can reach me by email at nikitaw@uw.edu.

Old Books, New Technologies: Textual Studies’ Dawg Daze Event Recap

Last week, the UW Textual Studies Program welcomed new and returning students to our Dawg Daze event, “Old Books, New Technologies: UW Special Collections and the Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities.” Held in the UW Libraries’ Special Collections, the event featured an overview of the minor program, a preview of upcoming Textual Studies courses from faculty, and insight from Textual Studies alums about their experience during the program and with their capstone projects.

If you didn’t get a chance to join us at Dawg Daze, don’t worry! We’re recapping the whole event and sharing some of the exciting items we viewed in Special Collections. Read on for more!

The Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities

At the event, students got to hear about The Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. This interdisciplinary minor focuses on the study of the history, present, and future of texts from scrolls, manuscripts, and printed books to archival documents, digital texts, and textual data—some of which were on display during our time at Special Collections!

When pursuing the minor, students complete twenty-five credits, with at least two of the courses being from the Textual Studies Program core sequence, two courses from the Textual Studies Program’s approved electives, and a final capstone course. Now, if you’re thinking that a minor sounds like a ton of additional classes, not to worry! Many of the undergraduate students who spoke at Dawg Daze said there was quite a bit of crossover with their other degree requirements, making the completion of the minor quite manageable. 

Interested students can email text@uw.edu with any questions about the minor, its requirements, or how to declare! You can also view upcoming courses and get more information about the capstone requirement on our website.

Courses in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities

Students also got to hear from faculty teaching in the Textual Studies Program. One of the faculty members we heard from was Anna Preus, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Director of the UW Humanities Data Lab. Dr. Preus teaches courses in the digital and data humanities, two interdisciplinary fields that use digital technologies and data science techniques to pursue humanities questions.

For winter, Dr. Preus and Melanie Walsh, another faculty member in the UW Textual Studies Program and an Assistant Professor in the Information School, are planning a course on Artificial Intelligence, TXTDS 321: Text Reuse, AI, and the Art of Stealing. This course will explore the concept of “text reuse” throughout literary history, putting AI text generation technologies like ChatGPT in the context of a broader lineage of literary phenomena such as allusion, quotation, remix, parody, and plagiarism. The course will use both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze text similarity, such as close reading and computational approaches. This course will count toward the minor’s elective requirements.

In spring quarter, Beatrice Arduini, Associate Professor in the French & Italian Studies Department, will teach TXTDS 220: Making Manuscripts: Manuscript and Handwriting Technologies from Antiquity to Today. This course will cover the long history of script, asking questions about the origins and lineage of communication in handwritten form. Also in spring quarter, Kathryn Medill, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures will offer MELC 211: Introduction to Myths of the Ancient Middle East. Both of these courses will count toward the minor’s elective requirements.

The Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Minor Capstone

The TXTDS Capstone is a five-credit course (offered as TXTDS 405) that can be taken in any quarter. It is a sustained project or experience relevant to the goals of the Textual Studies Minor. During Dawg Daze, we heard from a few students who had recently completed their capstones who worked with the UW Libraries on exhibitions and completed internships with Partners in Print, a local non-profit that promotes letterpress printing. There are many options for students looking to complete their capstones. You might choose to do a traditional research paper, a digital or data-science driven project, or you might choose to undertake other kinds of work, like collaborating with faculty on research projects, or working with an organization like a library, a bookstore, or a publishing house. 

Upcoming Courses in the UW Textual Studies Program

You will declare the Minor with your major advisor. But for other advising help, contact the advisors in Humanities Academic Services, who are eager to help students enrolled in programs in the Humanities. They offer student support and advising and can help you declare and negotiate the Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. You can make an appointment or stop by the HAS center in Padleford Hall during their drop-in advising hours every Monday and Wednesday from 2:30pm to 4:00pm and every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:30am to 11:00am. 

Having trouble finding HAS? No worries. Check out their walk-through video.

Thank you to all who made our Dawg Daze such a success! You can find more information about the UW Textual Studies Program, our minor and grad certificate, and our upcoming courses on our website.

Be sure to sign up for our mailing listserv to keep up to date on all UW Textual Studies news, courses, and events.

Don’t forget, you can also follow UW Textual Studies on Instagram @uwtextualstudies and on X @TextUW.