Our Rare Books, Our SMC: An Exhibit of Items Held at Saint Mary's College

Our Methods

In the spring of 2024, a group of fourteen students enrolled in ENLT 265 (Digital Humanities Project Lab: From Medieval Manuscripts to Digital Texts) and collaborated to produce this exhibit of items held in the Rare Book Room at Saint Mary's College. Throughout the course, the Rare Book Room served as our laboratory, with students learning about the development of text technologies from cuneiform tablets and medieval manuscripts to early print and nineteenth century art house productions. An introductory project asked students to recreate medieval manuscript pages with parchment and quill pens and to consider the significance of material form to our understanding of a text's meaning. Our attention then turned to thinking about how that materiality might be translated into digital contexts, and how we could raise attention on campus about the rich collection of rare books held in the Cushwa-Leighton Library.
Students began their work on this exhibit in February of 2024 by surveying the items held within the Rare Book Room, with each of them selecting ten items that they found most interesting and creating short descriptions of those items. In March, from these 140 potential project items, students crafted presentations where they sought to identify the best potential candidates for project inclusion and explain their selections to their peers. Through these presentations, the structure of our project began to take shape, as students began to identify thematic through-lines that joined groupings of items together. In early April of 2024, images of our finalized project items were taken and metadata was drafted. The second half of April was devoted to the students' independent research into project items and the building of the Scalar site that was to house their work. Final edits to the site and project contributions were completed in May of 2024.

This page has paths:

This page references: