Jesus Espinoza and Pollyanna Macchiano at the Re: Humanities symposium on digital media in academia at Swarthmore College (Bryn Mawr/Jay Gorodetzer photo).
By Pat Lopes Harris, Media Relations Director
English majors Jesus Espinoza and Pollyanna Macchiano presented “Project Beard-stair” at Re:humanities, a symposium on digital media in academia held this spring at Swarthmore College.
The project focuses on three books Espinoza found while working at King Library. The books were dropped in the return bin, but were not part of the library’s collection.
After flipping through each volume, Espinoza was intrigued, and took the books to Assistant Professor Katherine D. Harris of the of Department of English and Comparative Literature.
The professor’s research and teaching interests include British Romanticism and Hypertextual and Digital Studies. She is an early proponent of a growing field known as digital humanities.
Espinoza’s find proved to be valuable, early 20th century art books. Using Twitter, Harris helped Espinoza pull together a research team, including Macchiano, Collette, English graduate student Doll Piccotto, and School of Library and Information Science graduate student Colette Hayes.
Project Beard-stair represents their collective effort to digitize, archive, exhibit and research the books outside the confines of a traditional research paper. They also participated in the SJSU Student Research Competition.
“The enthusiasm we share for this project is something that we want to translate to the classroom — a different way to experience coursework and a new and exciting way to experience scholarship as a whole,” the students wrote.