Cover of ‘The Pale King’ by David Foster Wallace

A digital preview of archive materials relating to David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King is now live on the Ransom Center’s website. The preview, a collaboration between the Center and publisher Little, Brown and Company, includes a series of drafts of the “Author’s Foreword,” which eventually became chapter nine of The Pale King. Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s longtime editor, provides context about the pages and elaborates on the publication of the novel.

In 2010, the Ransom Center acquired and made accessible Wallace’s archive. The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace’s books, stories and essays, research materials, Wallace’s college and graduate school writings, juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters, teaching materials, and books. Materials for…

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Under Pressure Screen Printing creates custom t-shirts for members with images from the Ransom Center windows. Photo by Pete Smith.

Members explore the ‘Culture Unbound: Collecting in the Twenty-First Century’ exhibition at Wednesday’s New Member Open House. Photo by Pete Smith.

Ransom Center staff shared copies of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ during its ‘60 Books in 60 Minutes.’ Photo by Pete Smith.

Some of the students and general public who responded to ‘60 Books in 60 Minutes.’ Photo by Pete Smith.

Meagan Samuelsen, a volunteer with costumes and…

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The report 'Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections' was recently published by the Council on Library and Information Resources

Computer storage media have begun to arrive in archival collections with increasing frequency over the last 20 years. Approximately 50 of the Ransom Center’s holdings contain floppy disks, CDs, or personal computers. Faced with the daunting task of capturing files from these media and making them available to researchers, archivists have begun to investigate fields such as computer science, engineering, and computer forensics for advances that may facilitate this work.

The Ransom Center recently participated in a Mellon-funded project, led by Matthew Kirschenbaum at the University of Maryland, designed to explore the convergences between computer forensics and the preservation of…

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Inkyung Youm, a third-year graduate conservation intern at the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin, measures the pH of an alkaline water bath for a fragmented circus poster from the Ransom Center’s performing arts collection. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

Junior Isaac Benavidez, an English major and student worker at the Ransom Center, assembles archival boxes for collection storage. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

Government and German major Caren Garcia, a second year student working in the Ransom Center’s archives and visual materials cataloging department,…

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