This week was about preparing for our presentation and also curating rebuses. Our group (thanks to PM Bianca) has come up with a rating system so that we can easily decide what gets added to the website and what gets cut. This will help us narrow down our selections and also think carefully about the criteria for selecting rebuses. We’ve expanded our scope to include more non-British and American selections. It’s so exciting to see Japanese and Chinese rebus artifacts represented! I only wish I was familiar with these languages to offer some scholarly interpretations. Not only is this a team curation effort, it’s also a process of curating and editing myself. I’ve collected so many links and resources since the beginning that I’ve had to carefully select what I put forth for the group to vote. Some of the rebuses that I found ‘way-back-when’ suddenly don’t seem so interesting compared to more recent finds. Ideally, we would include everything but the clock is ticking… And with most things, I find choosing quality over quantity is the best path forward.

As I was putting together the slides for the presentation and looking at the sources of our rebuses, I found myself being so grateful that there are publicly and digitally accessible archives for us to use, no questions asked, no fees requested. Library of Congress, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, NYPL, Smithsonian, DPLA, and more – what absolutely awesome resources we have available to us! It’s safe to say our project could not be done without these institutions, especially in a time of a pandemic when their physical doors are shut but the digital doors are open 24/7. That’s not to say that archives are perfect and without problems. But, in general, they have enabled us to create this project that we’re excited to reveal.