Project Lead: Prof. Carolyn Jacobson, Senior Lecturer in English
Vivero Fellow (2026-2027): Molly Ryan
My current research focuses on an extra-illustrated biography of Charles Dickens, which is owned by Grinnell College and is housed in Special Collections. “Extra-illustrated” means that at some point an owner has added material to the book, and in this case, over 1800 items have been added, including portraits of people mentioned in the book, views of placed mentioned, and over 300 letters signed by people in the biography. These people are often of historical significance: Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allen Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Victor Hugo. It’s an amazing treasure trove … and unlike most of my literary research, it has dramatic visual appeal.
I would like help creating a website to share this amazing object with the wider world. I imagine such a site would be helpful to scholars and fans of Dickens, of book history, and of the nineteenth century more generally. Furthermore, I’d like to be able to document and share the work done by me and my MAP students during the summers of 2024 and 2026. Part of that work has involved cataloging the contents of this extra-illustrated book. I would like the website to enable users to access and query our spreadsheet.
The Vivero Fellow will help design the site, from conceiving of its architecture to establishing design elements. They will help scan and/or edit images for the site, and they will explore how to share a searchable version of our catalog (currently an Excel spreadsheet). This is a project with an array of potential audiences, and the Vivero Fellow will need to be alert to the needs of those audiences and be able to develop the various parts of the site for its different purposes—purposes which, in some cases, have yet to be determined. I am looking for a creative partner, someone who can help me imagine the site and bring it to life.
