ABC Books

The ABC Books project makes available for research and analysis an interactive digital archive of rare children’s alphabet books. The archive has been the centerpiece of ENG 385: Children's Literature since Spring 2014, when the Center for Digital Humanities staff helped develop a beta version of the archive for use in the course. During the semester, students were given opportunities to work with the archive and also to learn the basics of text encoding. All students in the course completed an initial, archive-based assignment in which they had to select one of the books and analyze its morphology. At the end of the semester, students completed a second assignment: identifying “three or more specific ways” a future version of the archive might help them as researchers or writers. They provided over 150 pages of detailed advice on how the archive might be redesigned or augmented to maximize its benefit to students. With support from the CDH, the project team then worked to improve the interface, expand student interactivity, and enlarge the archive for use in the Spring 2016 iteration of the course. The archive has been augmented every year the course is taught, incorporating multilingual ABC Books in 2021.

Through course assignments, students not only to interact with the archive but also actively build and enhance it for future Children's Literature students. Students add searchable tags to pages, vote on morphological categories, write prose commentaries, and have the opportunity to complete a digital humanities project using the data in the archive.