Faculty Spotlight

Natalie Houston awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grant

Natalie Houston, associate professor of English, was awarded on a Digital Humanities Start-Up grant of $49,955. She will direct “Visual Page,” a book history project that seeks to identify and analyze visual features of books, such as margins, spacing and typeface.

“CLASS is fortunate to have scholars and teachers such as Dr. Houston ...,” said Kathleen Brosnan, the College’s associate dean of faculty and research. “(Her)work is innovative and important and I am not at all surprised that the NEH has chosen to honor (her) efforts with this grant.”

Dr. Houston will use the NEH funds to develop an open source computer program to do a digital analysis of the graphic elements specific to Victorian-era texts. She will start with a test case of approximately 60,000 page images from 300 books of poetry printed between 1860 and 1880.

“Graphical aspects of the printed page convey information about the book’s historical period, genre, form, cost, audience, function, organization, scope, and design,” Dr. Houston wrote in the grant application.