At the 288th Annual Dinner, the Library Company of Philadelphia launched the First Biennial Innovation Award to recognize a project whose urgency renews disciplinary engagements with broader social issues, chafes against disciplinary boundaries, and whose content or forms might not be legible as scholarship within the university rewards structures.

In this month’s episode, Dr. Will Fenton spoke with co-recipients of First Biennial Innovation Award, Dr. Sari Altschuler and Dr. David Weimer. Sari Altschuler is Associate Professor of English, Associate Director of the Humanities Center, and Founding Director of Health, Humanities, and Society at Northeastern University. David Weimer earned his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and has been the Librarian for Cartographic Collections and Learning at the Harvard Map Collection since 2016.

Dr. Sari Altschuler and Dr. David Weimer’s Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read embodies work that critically and creatively expands the possibilities of humanistic scholarship. Touch This Page not only enlivens issues of disability history through the widely shared experience of reading, but also illustrates how and why digital humanities projects must expand beyond visual forms. Notably, this project draws inspiration from the Library Company’s collections and 2016 Common Touch exhibition.

Samuel Gridley Howe, Specimen of Medium Type. Boston, 1841.