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)…

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…

“Color Matters: How Will 18th-century Color Print and Textual Meaning Survive Mass Digitization?”

This talk on January 27, 2022 is part of the Animating Text Speaker Series, sponsored by Newcastle University. I’m grateful for this opportunity to share my work and draw attention to 18c color print and digitization matters. My talk is based on a recently published article: “Particularly Red, By a Woman: Anne B. Poyntz and the Printing and Digitization of Her Je ne sçai quoi (1769)” in European Romantic Review 32:5-6 (2021), 601-618, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2021.1989877. Here are my slides: Thanks: James Cummings, for the opportunity to speak, and the following people who helped me puzzle through the research and/or who read…

New pub alert: “Particularly Red, by a Woman: Anne B. Poyntz and the Printing and Digitization of Her Je ne sçai quoi” in ERR 32.5-6

https://doi-org.libproxy.scu.edu/10.1080/10509585.2021.1989877 I want to thank the following people for helping me puzzle through this research and writing project and make deadlines during a pandemic year. Ben Albritton, Phyllis Brown, Michelle Burnham, Benjamin Colbert, Paul Conway, Danna D’Esopo, Andy Garavel, Katherine D. Harris, Andrew Keener, Michelle Levy, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Amy Lueck, Lisa Maruca, Nick Mason, Nadia Nasr, Kate Ozment, Rebecca Shapiro, Emily Spunaugle, and students who read Je ne sçai quoi with me.This project was what I dove into to escape the news last year, and working with you all is one of my favorite parts of my job.

Coptic Binding Core 1 Class, San Francisco Center for the Book (SFCB)

Yesterday, I attended a day-long class on coptic binding at SFCB, taught by Nina Zeininger. I registered for the class to help me gain confidence with and knowledge about working with paper: folding paper, finding the grain, and binding. These all serve letterpress and book arts work in the letterpress studio and course I developed this year with Kathy Aoki. I won’t be able to describe the full process we did yesterday, but here are some of the steps, in brief. Alternatively, skip down to the photos below! we painted our paste papers, at least 3 each, and let them…

Romanticism on the Net, 2 Contributions

Romanticism on the Net (RoN) has relaunched, and with its reissue I’m proud to have two contributions to the new site, both DH-related. The first is my essay on Romantic London – Mathew Sangster’s wonderful project that maps the sites of London as depicted within various Romantic era books upon a base map of Richard Horwood’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (1792-99). My essay is billed as a “Digital Review,” but my editor for the project requested an essay that does more argumentative “close reading” of a project than one usually sees in a review, and I’m proud of that. Read the essay to learn about…

Undergraduates in the Archives at SCU

On June 7, 2018, the students of three Spring term classes presented collaborative book and digital exhibits in Special Collections and Archives at Santa Clara University. For their part, my students in ENG 144G, “18th-century British Women’s Writing,” curated an exhibit celebrating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).  Students wrote an introduction to our exhibit, short essays about each book, captions for each item, and reflections. Visit our digital exhibit here: https://scufrankenstein.omeka.net/. Our course foregrounded questions of what it means for women writers to be canonical, who is solidly in the canon, and perceiving the long continuum…

Siobhan Senier @ SCU: Decolonizing archives, Dawnlandvoices.org

Grateful to have Siobhan Senier at SCU today talking about decolonizing archives, Dawnlandvoices.org, Native American writing, and Digital Humanities. Her talk is at 4pm, Learning Commons, 3rd Floor Gallery (310). With accompanying Special Collections materials on display, thanks to Nadia Nasr. Thank you to my collaborators Michelle Burnham and Amy Lueck; the Faculty Collaborative for Teaching Innovation; DH Working Group @SCU; University Library; and Departments of English, Ethnic Studies, Art and Art History, and History.

A Negress in Stainforth’s Catalogue

My research partner, Dr. Kirstyn Leuner, understands that my initial interest in the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing DH project was to recover the works of long forgotten women. Shortly after launching ourselves on this path, a narrower interest grew and I wanted to identify women of color in this 19th-century book collector’s holdings. Imagine my delight when I “discovered” a second mention of an African American woman writer in the Catalogue of the Library of Female Authors of the Rev. J.F. Stainforth.  An entry for Ann Plato appears in the catalogue on page 356 as “P.5 Plato (Ann –…

Vignette: Alice Flowerdew, Robert Bloomfield, and VIAF #Fail

It is stunning to me that Alice Flowerdew does not have a record in VIAF.org, the Virtual International Authority File. I started searching for Flowerdew while spot-checking our person authority records completed by new student editors (they’re amazing!) at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Flowerdew (A)” appears on page 161 of the catalog and has 3 entries, lines 19-21: Poems 1803 2d Ed 1804 3d Ed 1811 “Poems” is Stainforth’s abbreviation for Flowerdew’s full book title, Poems, on moral and religious subjects. The 1803 edition was published and printed in London by C. Stower and sold by sold by H.D. Symonds; Mrs. Gurney;…