Teaching with Primary Sources Symposium

Session B Lightning Talks - Teaching with Digital Collections: Darwin: a First Edition in Print and Digital Contexts

For this one-shot library/archives session with a first-year seminar class, I framed the class visit to the archives to see a first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species with an overview of the textual history of the book. By asking the class about how we might identify and track changes from one edition to another, I helped them to identify the affordances of print versus electronic editions. We then viewed two different digital humanities projects that visualized changes to Origin of Species through its 6 print editions. Having established this context, we looked at the print first edition in the archives, along with a number of other rare books from Special Collections. This class session gave students an introduction to rare books and special collections together with digital resources, allowing them to see connections between these different contexts of textual production.