A short class for day 2, only 90 minutes. (Our mini Spring Term is quite crammed.) This was a really fun day since we met in Special Collections and looked over a lot of material relating to the Thomas Carter Collection, which will be the focus of the students’ DH project. Most of this material we just acquired in the last few weeks. Lots of fascinating stuff including zines from the 1940s and 1950s that Carter collected (and occasionally published in). Also examined a set of rare editions featuring Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. As a bonus, the students got a tour of the vault by our Head of Special Collections. He never takes students into the vault, so that was quite a treat. He starts pulling out a letter from George Washington, and more goodies. What does all this archival material have to do with DH?
We asked the students to watch a video talk by Jeffrey Schnapp, who posed the question, “What if cultural asssets could live in a browser environment and not in storage?” For the class project, the students have to conceptualize, design, and implement a digital research environment for the study of liteary networks, particulary focused on the Shenandoah literary journal published by Washington and Lee. That’s a tall order for within 4 weeks. Obviously, they won’t complete all of it. Part of the challenge is narrowing the concept to something manageable in the available timeframe. We wanted them to have the base understanding and experience of directly handling archival materials. Seeing the actual letters that Ezra Pound wrote to Thomas Carter with advice about editing literary journals makes the project real.
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