In an effort to expand digital work in the humanities at Washington University, Arts & Sciences has hired a new associate director of the Humanities Digital Workshop this summer.  Amanda Gailey comes to WU from the University of Nebraska, where she recently earned a doctorate in nineteenth-century American literature and the theory and practice of digital texts.  She worked for several years on the Walt Whitman Archive and hopes to bring her experience to bear on digital projects at WU.

The HDW is placing new emphasis on supporting faculty who work on long-term digital research projects, such as scholarly editions or research tools and the new Digital Library Services in Olin Library is a key collaborator in these efforts. Additionally, the HDW will continue to be a place where students and faculty with immediate digitization needs, from film editing to scanning, can work on their projects.

Some of the projects currently in development that are supported by the HDW include the Spenser Archive, which will be an electronic scholarly edition of the works of Edmund Spenser, and Race and Children's Literature in the Gilded Age, which will be an interdisciplinary research tool for examining how American authors and illustrators depicted race in children's books from 1867 to 1913.

Gailey offers assistance in planning and maintaining digital research projects by helping faculty investigate funding sources, develop editorial procedures and workflow, and ensure that a proposed project adheres to metadata standards.  Essentially, she represents a new potential collaborator for faculty considering long-term digital projects. For more information, contact Amanda Gailey, gailey@wustl.edu or 935-8830.