Capstone – UW Textual Studies

This guest post is written by Linguistics, French, and TXTDS student Piper Thomas, who recently completed the Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (TXTDS) minor Capstone project. This story has also been posted to the French & Italian Studies website. Photos by Assistant Book Arts Librarian Kat Lewis.

About Me

I am majoring in Linguistics, and minoring in French Language, Literature, and Culture as well as Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. I have always been interested in how people choose to present and preserve information, and seeing evidence of people in the past simply being people never fails to make me smile. When presented with the opportunity to explore the vast collection of handmade records of individual experiences housed in the Special Collections, I knew I had to take it. I adore seeing how the technology of writing has developed throughout human history, and how people during every era used the existing technology in creative ways.

Capstone Project

For my capstone project in Textual Studies, I began with an annotated bibliography. It served to give me some background for who William Morris was and what he did – since that was to be the focus of my project. In addition, it was very helpful to me as an undergraduate student, because it was a chance to learn how to do research. It was very nice to go through the process of research while having a guiding hand there to provide feedback, and without the pressure of having to get it right on the first try.

After doing the annotated bibliography, we decided that it would be good for me to create an online exhibit about some of the things I had noticed. Unlike the annotated bibliography, the subject of the exhibit was largely left to my discretion so long as it was at least somewhat related to William Morris. I felt that it would be cool to compare some Morris books to books by modern book artists. After doing some further exploration, I decided to compare the usage of white space in three different books, one of which was by Morris.

It was honestly a wonderful experience. I was given freedom to follow whatever route piqued my interest, with a huge amount of resources available to me, and great support available when I ran into hurdles. I learned a lot about how to navigate the library and interact with delicate books, how to find resources for research, and how to create an online paper.

Online Exhibit: Whitespace in Illustrations and Book Arts

Are you a Textual Studies student and have a project you’d like to share? We would love to highlight your work! Email us at text@uw.edu.

Interested in the minor? See our page for more information.

On June 3, 2022 Francesca Colonnese and Nikita Willeford Kastrinos gave their presentations as part of the capstone for completion of the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

Rossetti’s poem in the Dallas Daily News

Francesca Colonnese, PhD student in English, presented “When I am Read: The Temporality of Christina Rossetti in the Newspaper.” Colonnese looked at posthumous reprints of Christina Rossetti’s poem “Song [When I am Dead]” in a number of different American newspapers and examined the temporality of the poem both in its lyrics as well as the experience of reading it, both in its original form in a collection of poems versus its appearance in the dense and chaotic newspaper page. Using TEI text encoding to apply structured metadata to the content, her project, she writes, “explores the spatiality of newspaper pages to ask questions about readerly attention and whether or not the periodical context alters the reader’s temporal experience.” The impact of attention on reading was further emphasized by Colonnese in that she came to this work via the limitations of conducting research remotely during the university’s physical closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nikita Willeford Kastrinos, PhD student in English, followed with “Intimate Threads: Text and Textile in the Pages of Pamela.” Kastrinos’ paper explored “the expansive material textuality of Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century novel Pamela by investigating the connections between bodies, clothing, and texts present in the novel’s rag pulp paper.” Kastrinos wove together a narrative of the titular character’s garment construction, letter writing, and the sewing together of the two, as well as the extreme popularity of Richardson’s novel leading to its reading and handling by multiple readers, and the role and presence of rag paper production in those readers’ daily lives.

Slide from Nikita Willeford Kastrinos’ presentation

Congratulations to our 2022 graduate certificate recipients and thank you to those who attended the event to support!