Old Books, New Technologies: UW Special Collections and the Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities

Thinking about a career in libraries and archives, publishing and editing, or in a field dedicated to preserving and making accessible cultural materials and documents, both physical and digital? Interested in learning to work with historical artifacts like early printed books, medieval manuscripts, and archival and cultural documents, and with digital tools for creating online editions and archives for such materials? Curious to explore the role of databases and search algorithms in shaping how, today, we find, access, and understand texts and documents and to discover skills for analyzing those databases and building your own?

Learn about the minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities from faculty, students and librarians involved in the program. Hear about current student work, current and upcoming courses as well as about resources in the libraries and other sites on campus for studying the history and future of how we write, read, archive, story, access, and analyze cultural texts, historical documents, and other materials. Coursework and capstones in the minor offer a range of possibilities for hands-on, projected-oriented work exploring the impacts of changing technologies and media forms on the writing, reading, editing, archiving, preservation, and transmission of texts across history. These opportunities include working with historical materials such as handprinted books and manuscripts, archival sources and artists’ books; using digitization tools to create and publish digital editions and exhibits based on those materials; and developing skills to build, analyze and understand text-oriented databases like Google Books, applying data science techniques in the humanities.