Lives Written by Hand: A Digital Exhibit

Principle investigator: Julie Park, PhD

DLA advisor and developer: Jennifer Isasi, PhD

In this online exhibition, “Lives Written by Hand,” students tell stories about the life writing that emerges in diverse forms and formats of eighteenth-century books, in both print and manuscript held in Penn State University’s Special Collection Library. The exhibit was built with a personalized metadata schema and the Collection-Builder framework.

In Spring Semester 2024, Julie Park, Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and Professor of English, taught an English Department graduate seminar, “English 597.001: Writing Lives by Hand,” on the materiality of life writing in eighteenth-century England. Alongside more traditional examples of life writing, such as memoir, autobiography, epistolary correspondence and diary writing, this seminar considered life writing as a material practice of recording and documenting the experience of living. Students engaged directly with commonplace books, almanacs, miscellanies, and annotated or extra-illustrated books held in Penn State University’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library to uncover how life writing is deeply entangled with the bibliographic materials, tools and techniques used for producing it.