On 14 August 2014, Wai-te-ata Press hosted the launch of an exhibition and website based on the recent Marsden-funded digital history project The Printers’ Web: Typographical Journals and Global Communication Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Professor Charles Daugherty, AVC Research, regaled guests with an overview of the changing shape of eResearch in the humanities and thanked the project’s international contributors as well the family of Robert Coupland Harding, six members of which were in attendance.

Several facets of the research project were showcased. Lead investigator, Dr Sydney Shep, Reader in Book History and The Printer, Wai-te-ata Press presented a snapshot of the life and career of NZ’s pre-eminent nineteenth-century printer, typographer and journalist. MA in New Zealand Literature graduate, Meghan Hughes, led a curator’s talk about the exhibition that arose out of her thesis Books as Social Currency: Robert Coupland Harding and the Field of Book Collecting 1880-1920. Research assistants Sara Bryan, Esta Chiang, and Flora Feltham demonstrated their contributions to the project’s suite of prototype data visualisations: mapping contemporary reception of the journal Typo; visualising Harding’s correspondence networks; animating 1890s Wellington through digital storytelling.

More information about the Marsden project can be found here.

Photo credit: Leonardo Carta

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