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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!

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.

Gian Duri Rominger Awarded 2026 ACLS Fellowship

UW Textual Studies is proud to announce that Dr. Gian Duri Rominger, TXTDS faculty and Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, has been selected by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) as a 2026 ACLS Fellowship recipient. Below, we showcase Dr. Rominger’s work, detail the history and focus of the ACLS Fellowship, and celebrate this fantastic accomplishment!

ACLS Fellowship Program

The ACLS Fellowship Program is the American Council of Learned Society’s longest running program. It recognizes excellence in humanities and social sciences research on topics covering any periodization, world region, or humanistic methodology. Supporting outstanding scholarship, the program aims to select fellows who represent the variety of humanistic scholarship across all fields of study. It is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since the organization’s founding in 1919.

Researching Sound in Language Use in Ancient Chinese Texts

While these texts are studied primarily as philosophical treatises, this project shows that their literary form was just as important as their content. Challenging the idea that philosophy and literature are separate, this project shows that early Chinese texts often blur these boundaries.

It combines philological close readings that draw on recent historical reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology with a custom-built computational tool for detecting recurrent sound patterns across a large corpus of transmitted and excavated texts. Moreover, it argues that early Chinese thinkers used sound-based techniques not just for style or memorization, but to build arguments, coordinate textual units, and express complex ideas.

Dr. Rominger is one of 63 scholars selected from a pool of over 2,000 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process. ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing. 

“We are proud to award ACLS Fellowships to 63 outstanding scholars across a range of fields,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “Deep understanding of humanity and human endeavor doesn’t come out of thin air: it rests on the work of generations of scholars who need time to do research and develop their arguments. We salute the new fellows’ contributions to knowledge and to society, and we celebrate their expertise and dedication.”

Join us in congratulating Dr. Rominger on this incredible accomplishment!

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.

Karalee Harris on Research Fellowship with UW Humanities Data Science Summer Institute

Today on the blog, we’re highlighting UW Textual Studies student, Karlaee Harris’ Capstone research undertaken with the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute (HDSSI). HDSSI is a program at the University of Washington that brings together undergraduate and graduate students with UW faculty and staff in collaboration on humanities data science research. Over summer quarter, Karalee worked with a team of students led by iSchool and Textual Studies faculty, Melanie Walsh. Together, they completed a data-analytical study of the Seattle Public Library’s checkout data, which asked the question: Which canonical American authors are the public reading, and why?

In their own words, Karalee describes the collaboration with HDSSI and the process of researching and digitizing Seattle Public Library’s checkout data. Read on to find out more!

Textual Studies Capstone with Humanities Data Science Summer Institute

My capstone was completed through the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute, which is a research fellowship that supports digitally-centered humanities research. I worked on a small team under the guidance of Melaine Walsh. Our goal was to identify trends in library check-outs for postwar American authors that were mentioned in the Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Visualizations of top reading trends from 2005-2025.

Additionally, we specifically looked at check-out trends for James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Sandra Cisneros, Chris Kraus, and David Foster Wallace as well to develop a deeper understanding of these trends which we could compare with a broader variety of authors. We used check-out data from the Seattle Public Library (SPL), which is one of the only publicly available sources on library check-out data in the United States.

Cleaning and Visualizing SPL Data

I was primarily focused on cleaning the SPL data so that our data will be easier to make visualizations with and so that it can be used easier by other researchers. Library data frequently has redundancies in “author” and “tile” fields. For instance, if you were looking for the checkout data for every copy of every book by Toni Morrison in the SPL, you would have to search “Toni Morrison,” “Morrison, Toni,” “Morrison, Toni, 1931–2019,” and “Morrison, Toni, 1931–2019.”  These inconsistencies cause problems when we are looking at many authors at once, or many titles at once, which was necessary since a major deliverable of this project was a visualization of an author’s monthly checkouts over time. I spent a lot of time on this project writing code to remove these inconsistencies and manually going through the data to ensure that no inconsistencies remained.

Working with Seattle Public Library Checkout Data

I am deeply interested in data surrounding libraries in particular, so this research project was a perfect introduction to professional research, and it made me want to continue pursuing similar research in the future. I think that it is really important to consider how humanities and textual research is changing as the world becomes more and more reliant on online technology, and I believe that this experience prepared me well to make research contributions to this field in the future.

Line graphs depicting checkout data for Toni Morrison and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Karalee’s team drew on circulation data from 2005-2025 from the Seattle Public Library, focusing on the 93 authors included in the post-1945 volume of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Their analysis comprised data on 1,603 works by the 93 authors, which were checked out a total of 980,620 times since 2005. 

The team created an interactive tool which allows users to explore this data. You can also read more about their work and findings in their recently published article, “The Canon in Circulation: Tracking the Reception of Norton Anthology Authors in Library Checkout Data.”

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 an organization like HDSSI, students can explore their individual interests and build skills to support them in their future careers and studies.

Congratulations to Karalee for this fascinating work and for completing this Capstone requirement! 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.

Explore more recent Capstone opportunities on our blog.

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.

Book Arts and Rare Books Curator Completes 57 Years of Service

Today on the TXTDS blog, we’re celebrating the career of Sandra Kroupa, Book Arts and Rare Books Curator for UW Libraries Special Collections. Sandra was recently named Librarian Emerita by Provost Dean Simon Neame. In this post, we look back at Sandra’s distinguished career spanning 57 years of service to the UW Libraries, her lasting impact on Special Collections’ holdings, and her time working with students in the UW Textual Studies Program.

Building UW Special Collections

As Book Arts and Rare Books Curator for UW Libraries Special Collections, Sandra helped develop and guide the holdings of the university. Her work was vital in building UW’s nineteenth-century American literature collections, curating its historical children’s literature holdings, broadening its examples of historical bookbinding, and more.

Images of items from the Historical Book Arts Collection. From left: an embroidered seventeenth-century edition of The New Testament, a leather bound seventeenth-century edition of The Faerie Queene, and a nineteenth-century century edition of Sonnets and Lyrical Poems in Roman lettering with page design by William Morris.

Artists’ Books at UW

Sandra showcases rare artists’ books from the UW Libraries collections.

Over the years, Sandra’s influence was instrumental in developing the breadth of UW’s collections, but her special interest was in broadening its Book Arts Collection. Amassing examples of bookmaking that spanned historical practices all the way up to contemporary artists’ books, Sandra’s work grew UW’s Book Arts Collection into one of the largest public collections in the United States. It includes many unique works from now-renowned artists, which experiment with assumptions about the book form while challenging the book’s conceptualization through the mediums with which it’s made.

A selection of artists’ books from UW Libraries Special Collections that play with the conventions of the book form.

Sandra also helped to build the depth of UW’s Historical Children’s Literature Collection, which includes over 3,000 titles spanning works from the seventeenth- to twentieth-centuries, including alphabet books, fables, book series, and more. In addition to these holdings, Sandra oversaw the development of the Authors Collection, which encompasses nearly 10,000 titles. These primarily represent American, British, and European authors. For this collection, Sandra had a special endowment to collect nineteenth-century American literature, which she used to highlight the work of female writers, including Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and more.

Working with the UW Textual Studies Program

Sandra’s achievements in collections development has not only been important for the way it has helped to deepen the UW libraries’ holdings, but for the opportunities it has afforded scores of UW Textual Studies students who have gotten to work with items of her curation during TXTDS courses and Capstone projects.

Bringing her wealth of knowledge to TXTDS courses, like Texts, Publics, and Publication, Book Arts, and many more, as well as her generosity and insistence on ensuring students the experience of working hands-on, Sandra has left an enduring impact on the Textual Studies Program and its countless students who have been introduced to and inspired by the collections she helped to curate. Many of these students have been inspired to go on to pursue careers in librarianship and in related book arts fields. The program has been indelibly shaped by our long collaboration with her. We in the program offer Sandra the most heartfelt thanks for her wonderful service to the UW and the TXTDS program!

Want to learn more about how you could explore and learn with materials in these collections? Check out our upcoming courses and Capstone opportunities. 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.

Marin Tisdale on Conservation and Collections Internship with SAM

This past year, UW Textual Studies minor Marin Tisdale interned with the Seattle Art Museum learning about collections management and art conservation. Working with the team at SAM, Marin helped restore The Four Accomplishments, a set of seventeenth-century sliding door paintings from the Nara region of Japan. Below, Marin recounts this work, her experience interning in the museum setting, and how the skills of art conversation crossover with her coursework in the Textual Studies minor.

Art Conservation at SAM

During the internship, Marin worked with Tanya Uyeda, the Senior East Asian Paintings Conservator at SAM to restore a set of seventeenth-century sliding door paintings called, The Four Accomplishments.

Measuring over 68 inches tall, these large paintings are undergoing the process of being remounted in the Tateuchi Conservation Studio.

In order to restabilize the panels, which sit on a latticed, wooden core, they first deconstructed them and laid them out so that they could be individually analyzed. According to Marin, the paintings then went through a damage report, which allowed the conservation team to assess elements like paint loss, overpainting, tears, and mended tears that would be important considerations to the conservation process.

Images showing the conservation process, from a hole in the painting where a door handle used to poke through, to a close up image of the constitution of the painting’s pigments.

Previously being shown in Japan in the twentieth century, the paintings had undergone prior conservation efforts. The team documented these repairs and began their own process, working on elements such as consolidating the pigments of the painting, mending tears, and applying support layers to the panels so they can be remounted to a newly constructed interior lattice.

Materiality of Visual Texts

Marin tell us that part of what makes working on these paintings so interesting is the previous lives they’ve had. Starting as sliding doors which functioned as room dividers, and going through various physical changes throughout their histories, these paintings’ material construction is vital to understanding the uses to which they were put. The remounting work, because it requires dismantling the paintings in their current form, is key to accessing this past that tells about the function, uses, and meaning of the artwork over time.

Art History and the Textual Studies Minor

At UW, Marin has been pursuing both an Art History major and a minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. Combining these two subject interests, Marin says her work with SAM brought together the subject interests of her major with the hands-on and maker-oriented coursework of the Textual Studies minor. Going through classes which emphasized the physical aspects of texts, both visual and linguistic, helped inspire her to think more about the connections between artworks and their material forms, accessing the kinds of information that can be drawn from the histories of their creation. Culminating in her work at SAM, this internship allowed Marin to get closer than ever to the creation and life cycles of these paintings by delving in, hands-on, to the history of their materiality:

“Working with Tanya gave me a chance to engage with art in a way I had never experienced before. Interacting with the pieces physically allowed me to understand their materiality and connect with them, like more of their personality was revealed, and I could better understand the choices made by the artist.”

– Marin Tisdale

Textual Studies Courses in Book Arts

The Textual Studies Program offers a variety of courses and interdisciplinary  electives that combine fields of study, including the histories of visual arts, book arts, and classes in hands-on bookmaking and printing. Our upcoming TXTDS 200 – Books Unbound: Gateway to Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, debuting this spring 2026, is a course that allows students to experiment hands-on with the forms and technologies that bring texts to life. Held in UW Special Collections, you’ll get to interact with rare books and manuscripts in the libraries’ collections, as well as try your hand at printing and book-making, learn about illustration techniques, and the processes of writing and inscription technologies.

Thank you to Marin for sharing this exciting internship experience with us! You can find out more about opportunities for undergraduate students in UW Textual Studies, our upcoming courses, or the undergraduate minor program and its requirements by exploring our website or by emailing 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.

Blue Jordan on Digitizing Historical Materials from UW Special Collections

Over the fall quarter, UW Textual Studies student Blue Jordan completed their Capstone project, a digital edition of a 1901 volume of The Strand Magazine held in the UW Special Collections. In their own words, Blue describes the inspiration behind the project, working with rare materials in Special Collections, and the process of digitization. Read on to find out more about this fascinating project!

Digital Project Documents Rare Materials in UW Libraries

My Capstone Project centered around creating a digital edition of an article from the UW Special Collections 1901 volume of The Strand Magazine. 

Sir Robert Stawell Ball was an Irish astronomer and held the titles of Andrews Professor at Trinity College, Dublin, Royal Astronomer of Ireland, and Director of the Dunsink Observatory. He became famous for his work as a popular astronomical interpreter, and had a massive outreach as a lecturer and writer.

I found “Comets” working on the group digitization project for TXTDS 404: Texts, Publics, and Publications during Spring Quarter 2025. My group worked with the first installment of the Sherlock Holmes story “The Hound of Baskervilles,” which is in the next volume of The Strand. For our first Special Collections visit, my group requested the volumes around the one we actually needed, just in case. We stumbled upon “Comets” while we were perusing, and I was immediately struck by the beauty and whimsy in the first few paragraphs. It stood out in a magazine that we had mostly assessed as quippy nonfiction and short fiction stories.

The Comet Rordame, July 13, 1893, featured in The Strand Magazine.

The article (and Ball’s work in general as a Royal Astronomer, professor, public lecturer, and writer) resonates with the ways I think about public-facing scholarship. The way my childhood curiosities were fed and expanded by kids’ books, PBS shows, documentaries, and museums like the Children’s Museum and the Pacific Science Center made me the learner, student, and person I am today.  

Making a Digital Edition using Text Encoding

The first thought I had about my capstone had to do with the net.art movement of the 90s, which I was exposed to at the first museum lecture I ever attended (at the Living Computers Museum). I got sidetracked during TXTDS 404 because I was so enamored by “Comets” and enjoyed the digitizing assignment so much. That being said, I think that something of the net.art ethos stayed with me during this project and will likely continue to haunt me throughout any future digital work. We focused mainly on the Text Encoding Initiative/XML side of the digital edition process in 404, but I was more excited about the HTML and CSS side. I came into this project with my biggest goal being “make a pretty website.” 

Designing in a Digital Environment using HTML and CSS

One thing we learn in TXTDS that I was certainly reminded of while working on this project is that the work is never really finished. There are still questions I haven’t been able to answer (if anyone knows what typeface The Strand used please tell me I’d do anything). There is a lot of background information about the article, the author, and The Strand that I’d love to include. I came into this project as a novice coder, pretty convinced I remembered how to do the things I had done in the spring (I was wrong), and I learned a lot. 

Not all of it I ended up using, and I brushed against other tools and languages, which I had to persuade myself I didn’t have time for, that I’d love to go back and explore. I really think that everyone should get a chance to learn HTML, CSS, and other web development languages. They feel like colored pencils to me now: it’s a tool I can grab and use for expression. I might not be great at it, but I know enough to have fun. It also demystifies the commodified, black-box world of products we use online. If you can convince yourself you could probably also piece together a word processor, you are no longer at the whim of big businesses you don’t understand.  

The Capstone Project and the Textual Studies Minor

The Capstone is a culminating project, undertaken during any quarter of the academic year, that brings together the students’ larger learning goals with the skills gained during the course of the TXTDS program. 

The Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the history, present, and future of texts. Instruction ranges widely, covering a broad array of subjects, periods, and objects in the long history of writing and communication. From scrolls to manuscripts, and printed books to eBooks, undergraduates can explore how texts have been written, published, read, circulated, and archived from antiquity to the present day. 

Congratulations to Blue on completing this exciting Capstone project!

You can access Blue’s digitization project here. And you can can explore our website or email text@uw.edu to find out more about the Minor in Textual Study and Digital Humanities, Capstone requirements, and upcoming TXTDS courses.

You can also sign up for our mailing list and follow us on Instagram and X.

TXTDS Fall Quarter Event Recap | Printmaking Social: Holiday Edition

To ring in the end of the fall quarter and the start of winter break, UW Textual Studies hosted a Printmaking Social: Holiday Edition. Themed around card making, this session offered students in the Textual Studies Minor and Graduate Certificate program the chance to print their own letterpress holiday cards and adorn them with personalized linocut-printed decorations. Plus, students got to test out wood type printing while they socialized with fellow TXTDS students and faculty.

Holiday-Themed Letterpress Printing with UW Textual Studies

UW Textual Studies hosts quarterly, student-centered events and has run our popular Printmaking Socials in conjunction with Global Literary Studies in the past. For this iteration of our printing social hour, we themed the session in line with the upcoming holiday season, making letterpress-printed cards with our recently acquired Vandercook Proofing Press.

During the event, we encouraged participants to decorate these pre-printed cards or run their own letterpress card through our Provisional Presses. We had linocut supplies on hand and some wooden type that students were able to experiment with as both a creative activity and a preview of printing methods they could further explore in the TXTDS classroom.

The Provisional Presses we had on hand are small, portable proofing presses, capable of engaging a variety of printing techniques, including linocut and other relief printing, letterpress printing, and wood type printing.

UW Textual Studies Printmaking Equipment

These are part of Textual Studies’ growing collection of printing equipment, which includes metal letterpress type, a platen press, wooden type, and our most recent acquisition of a Vandercook Proofing Press.

Thank you to all the students and faculty who came to celebrate the end of the quarter with us at our Printmaking Social: Holiday Edition!

If you’d like to find out more about upcoming events and opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in UW Textual Studies, sign up for the Textual Studies listserv and don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and X.

Plus, explore upcoming TXTDS courses, the Textual Studies undergraduate minor and graduate certificate programs, and TXTDS-related news on our website.

Riley Hull on Helping UW Libraries Build English Studies Reference Holdings

During this past academic year, UW Textual Studies alum and current MA student in the history of the book at the University of London, Riley Hull, completed a Capstone project in conjunction with UW Libraries on collection development in the subject of English Studies. Working under the direction of Elliot Stevens (Research Commons and English Studies Librarian, UW Libraries), Riley researched and compiled recommendations for library purchasing that covered key topics of interest to UW faculty and students.

For my capstone, I worked with Elliot Stevens, the UW English Department Librarian, on a collection development project aimed at purchasing new books that would be relevant and useful additions to the UW libraries. I first performed a ‘scan’ of both the UW English department and various other academic departments across the country, researching which topics and themes were commonly studied and comparing how the UW fits into the larger academic network.

Then, I began to search for books to purchase that would both support the key topics of interest to UW faculty and students, such as books about environmental and Indigenous studies, and further the development of underrepresented research areas without an established collection, such as books about the craft of creative writing. Ultimately, I was able to create a list of 72 books that were purchased and added to the UW library collections. 

– Riley Hull

Scanning Orbis Cascade Alliance and Big 10 Academic Alliance

To begin the acquisitions research process, Riley surveyed both the interests of faculty and students in the UW Department of English and the Orbis Cascade Alliance, as well as the Big 10 Academic Alliance. This gave Riley a wide representation of interests both for academic institutions within UW’s geographic region and for those within the BTAA consortium of research institutions.

Among the Orbis Cascade Alliance member institutions, I noticed a strong interest in environmental humanities and ecocriticism, as well as a heavy American literature emphasis (with particular emphasis on rural America and Pacific Northwest Indigenous studies). For the BTAA institutions, I noticed a more significant presence of creative writing programs than among the Orbis Cascade Alliance members. Similarly, there was less of a focus on rhetoric, composition, and pedagogical studies, and more of a focus on literary studies and creative writing.

– Riley Hull

Armed with these statistics, Riley then made recommendations based on these findings to build out the UW Library’s collections, listing purchase suggestions for titles both from larger academic presses as well as from smaller presses, like the Kegedonce Press.

Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Capstone

The Capstone project is an independent, quarter-long research project designed to combine the interests of students’ major course of study with their work in the Textual Studies Minor. These projects take many forms, such as research papers, digital projects, and more. There are even possibilities for internships with local professional organizations, as well as opportunities to work on faculty-led research, or to participate in summer programs, like the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute.

You can read more about the Capstone requirement and see some examples of prior student projects here.

Many congratulations to Riley on completing this Capstone and the Minor in Textual Studies and the Digital Humanities. And, an additional congratulations for Riley’s acceptance to the Master’s program in the History of the Book at the University of London!

You can read more about Riley’s project here. And you can check out our website or email text@uw.edu to find out more about the Minor in Textual Study and Digital Humanities, Capstone requirements, and upcoming TXTDS courses.

You can also sign up for our mailing list and follow us on Instagram and X.

Aries Chen on Building a Digital Exhibition of Citation in Early Modern French Texts

During this past academic year, UW Textual Studies alum and current iSchool MLIS student, Aries Chen, completed a Capstone project that explored citation methods in French texts of the early modern period. Researching rare artifacts in UW Special Collections, Aries scanned, digitized, and compiled an exhibition tracking citation from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Read on to find out more about this exciting project, hear about Aries work with rare materials, and how this project brought together the skills of the TXTDS minor with Aries’ major area of study in the French language.

Researching Early Modern Works in UW Special Collections

To research for the project, Aries went to UW Special Collections, and worked with a number of artifacts, including historical works of botany, Les Essais by Michel de Montaigne, Les Provinciales by Blaise Pascale, and other selections spanning the histories of science and medicine, specimens from the libraries’ rare book holdings, and a few titles from its book arts collection.

“This project traces the reuse of pieces of information, examining how cited material is treated and how references to cited works are constructed. The majority of the research was conducted by looking at a source, finding a citation, and following that citation to the source.”

– Aries Chen

To record this trail of citation use, Aries utilized a KIC Click Mini overhead scanner in the UW Special Collections reading room, taking images of the works and processing them for display on the project website where the trail of cited material could be visualized.

Building a Digital Exhibition of Citation Practices

To explore these historical citation practices, Aries completed a digital exhibition. This combines an overview of early modern citation with an information timeline that allows visitors to the site to track the appearance of cited texts and concepts across the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

“My capstone looked at citation in printed texts, mostly from early modern France, to describe citation forms, the information that citation contains, and how citation evolved. The work I did for my capstone tied together concepts from courses I’d taken across Textual Studies, from website-building skills to utilizing the resources in Special Collections, and even beyond that to work I’d done for my major in French.”

– Aries Chen

Aries Chen Pursues MLIS at UW iSchool

Building upon this project utilizing library resources and developing digital tools to showcase materials in library collections, Aries has continued on to the UW iSchool to complete a Master’s of Library and Information Science.

Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Capstone

Like Aries’ work bringing the interests of the French major and the skills of the Textual Studies minor together, the Capstone project is designed to combine the scholarly interests of students in the program over a quarter-long independent research project under the advisement of a faculty member.

These projects can take many forms and there are even possibilities for internships with local professional organizations, as well as opportunities to work on faculty-led research, or to participate in summer programs, like the Humanities Data Science Summer Institute.

You can read more about the Capstone requirement and see some examples of prior student projects here.

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Many congratulations to Aries on completing this fascinating Capstone project and, with it, the Minor in Textual Studies and the Digital Humanities. And, an additional congratulations to Aries for being accepted to the Masters in Library and Information Science program at the UW iSchool!

You can explore Aries project here. And you can check out our website or email text@uw.edu to find out more about the Minor in Textual Study and Digital Humanities, Capstone requirements, and upcoming TXTDS courses.

You can also sign up for our mailing list and follow us on Instagram and X.

Emily Backstrom on Applying Textual Transcription Methods to Interactive Media

Over this past academic year, UW Textual Studies student Emily Backstrom completed a Capstone project that experimented with text encoding to transcribe interactive media. Using XML and the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines, Emily transcribed video game scripts from Deltarune, a an episodic role-playing video game. Read on to find out more about this fascinating project!

Digital Project Uses XML to Encode Video Game Script

“My capstone is a TEI project dedicated to testing the limits of TEI and adapting it to a broader range of content— specifically a video game script. Using TEI to account for player input and choices while adding in notes that took on the role of stage directions shows how much supplementary text is needed to convey even a dialogue-heavy video game narrative and how much of the medium is based on experience. The portion of the game script encoded (excerpts from Deltarune) allows for an imagined full project where different aspects of the script, such as specific routes or character dialogue, can be queried using XPATH. This game in particular also has a distinction between the player and the player-controlled character, which added another layer to account for within the TEI.”

– Emily Backstrom

What is XML and TEI?

XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is a markup language for storing and transporting data, and the Text Encoding Initiative is a set of standards for using this language to encode texts. Usually, XML and TEI are used in humanities contexts to digitize textual materials and visual elements. It serves an important preservation function, translating physical textual resources into digital forms that can be shared. However, Emily’s project explores its applications for an interactive medium:

“Archiving and encoding media is a method of preserving it, and games are often shockingly ephemeral despite their popularity. This project highlights the need for accessible emulation and availability of legacy software for out-of-circulation games.”

– Emily Backstrom

Text Encoding Interactive Media

Translating texts and other media into TEI always involves editorial considerations, like choosing what information to include and how to encode it. These decisions influence the way people eventually read and interact with texts once they’re digitized. Moving TEI into the space of interactive media highlighted this editorial practice and the considerations to be made when translating complicated media forms into storable data:

“The amount of supplemental text needed to make sense of a video game outside of its plain text has illuminated how the medium is only able to be experience directly with visuals and how difficult it is to translate without inadvertently giving it some influence of my own.

Digital media at large comes with many challenges for retaining them in their intended form of experience, as well as translating them into machine readable text. As someone interested in archives, this is of importance to me and something I had in mind while creating this project.”

– Emily Backstrom

Congratulations to Emily on completing this exciting Capstone project, as well as the Textual Studies minor!

You can access Emily’s TEI project here. And you can can explore our website or email text@uw.edu to find out more about the Minor in Textual Study and Digital Humanities, Capstone requirements, and upcoming TXTDS courses.

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