DH “Book Talk” on the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing with ARC

For International Women’s Day 2023 #IWD2023: Just released, the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing‘s “DH book talk” with ARC (Advanced Research Consortium), 18thConnect, and NINES editors featuring Kirstyn Leuner, Deborah Hollis, Chad Marks, and Susan Guinn-Chipman of the Stainforth project; and Emily Friedman, Laura Mandell, Lauren Liebe, and Elizabeth Brissey of ARC. This conversation was an absolute delight for me personally, having so many collaborators and inspiring scholars in the “room” at the same time talking about a project that our team has been collaborating to build and peer-review for the last decade. We are so proud that our project…

Printer’s Valentines, 2/8 CAH Open House Letterpress Event

On Wednesday 2/8 SCU Letterpress helped co-host the Center for Arts and Humanities Open House held on the 3rd floor of Dowd. The many people who contributed to putting on this event included Michelle Burnham, Amy Randall, and Britt Cain of the CAH; and myself, Kathy Aoki (AAH), Renee Billingslea (AAH), and Heather Turner (English) of the DHI and SCU Letterpress. We had a great array of participants and visitors at the Open House and printing event, from our CAH Frank Sinatra Artist in Residence Mark Duplass, to groups of students, staff, and faculty from across campus. Visitors started in…

MLA 2023 slides: “Blood Type: Printing Battlefield Labor in the 18th Century”

If you’re at MLA this weekend, please come to our New Directions in Book History panel! Session 264, Friday January 6, 12-1:15pm in Moscone West 3000 (level 3). I’ll be presenting on the labors of making eighteenth-century printing ink, especially red ink, and how that work matters when you read texts printed in colors other than black ink (but black ink, too). Here are my slides – they may change slightly before tomorrow, but these are a final draft. I’m concerned that the red text pages may be hard to read or inaccessible to some, so I will provide a…

Stainforth News: Rare Book Dealer Catalog Citations and New Stainforth Bookplate Sightings to Map!

The Stainforth project got two unexpected, new kinds of citations recently — in a rare book dealer’s catalog. The https://www.19thshop.com/ catalog contains a listing for a first edition of the auction catalog for the Stainforth library. I’ve laid hands on one of these only at the British Library, so this is cool! The dealer’s description cites both my article in SEL as well as a description of the Stainforth library from the project website, http://stainforth.scu.edu. It’s certainly nice to know that both print and digital scholarship on the Stainforth library are receiving a variety of kinds of traffic and use….

Forge Garden Meets Book Arts!

Yesterday (Wednesday 11/16/22) SCU Letterpress hosted a really fun afternoon holiday gift making event with new collaborators! Maria Judnick (English) dreamt up this event, which she called “Forge Garden Fun,” to marry her recent training in letterpress printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book with her new role at the Center for Sustainability at SCU. Maria teamed up with Becca Nelson, Sustainable Food Systems Program Manager at the Forge, to design and set a quote by Robin Wall Kimmerer from her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Further, they created decoration stations in the room next to the press (Dowd 310)…

“Moving Beyond Pandemic Pedagogy: Meeting Learning Objectives, Having Fun” workshop by Katherine D. Harris

On Tuesday October 18 from 1-2:30pm, Katherine D. Harris, Professor of English and Director of Public Programming at SJSU, led a workshop in University Library room LC 205. The DHI organized and sponsored this workshop. Special thanks to Kelci Baughmann McDowell, Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson, and Jess Gopp for helping me organize the event. I had been envisioning a workshop on this topic for a long time for several reasons. We had a good group of around 15 faculty and staff from across campus who joined us. First, it would address an opportunity that I saw pandemic teaching create to deepen…

Slides: Stainforth Project conversation hosted by Keats-Shelley Association of America, 9 Sept. 2022, Zoom

Thank you to Kate Singer, Mariam Wassif, and the Keats-Shelley Association of America for inviting us to present in an inaugural virtual event, and to Michelle Levy for being our moderator and interlocutor. I’ve included my slides here, which is just one half of the program, as Deborah Hollis (CU-Boulder) gave a presentation following mine on the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing from a collections and librarian’s research perspective. We were thrilled to have almost 60 registered attendees and a great discussion in Q&A. Helpful links: Slides: For links to many of the projects in my last slide, see https://stainforth.scu.edu/related-projects/.

MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions Awards Its Seal to The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing

I am excited to share that the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions awarded its Seal to The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing (stainforth.scu.edu) on Monday, July 11, 2022. This award and seal mean that our project will be indexed with MLA’s CSE Approved Editions here, https://www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-and-Professional-Guidelines/Publishing-and-Scholarship/CSE-Approved-Editions. Additionally, we will receive a prize at the 2024 MLA meeting in Philadelphia. It is an honor to be listed among the editions in this index, and it means that we (the Stainforth editors) did our job of meeting the highest standards in the field for a digital scholarly edition that is…

Making Sonnet Books in Letterpress Composition

This Spring term I was grateful for the opportunity to team-teach Letterpress Composition once more, this time with Renee Billingslea (Art & Art History). After first teaching this course in Spring 2019, with Kathy Aoki (Art & Art History), we decided to put the course on hold during remote instruction since team teaching was made possible by a Dean’s grant (thank you!), and we did not want to use that on a remote teaching experience. For the final run of the course, we added a binding element to take advantage of Renee’s strengths in binding. Our last assignment brought writing,…

7th Annual DH Student Showcase, May 31, 2022

On Tuesday, May 31 the 7th Annual Digital Humanities Showcase featured 9 student projects in the St. Clare Room of University Library for a 2-hour interactive exhibit. Special thanks to my co-organizers Meg Eppel Gudgeirsson, Kelci Baughmann McDowell, and Nadia Nasr for helping to make this happen. Each project added its unique content to the field of DH by thinking critically about the relationship between technologies and the humanities. The theme of the event was: “Finally! Celebrating the Digital in the Physical,” and each project had their own table at the event. The projects included “Mexican Immigration” by Daniel Longaker…