Deep in the archives of the University of Chicago, Zak Sadak, a recent graduate, delved into boxes containing sketches of Chinese Buddhist caves and vintage art history slides. His work focused on the archives of Harrie A. Vanderstappen, a former professor at the university known for his contributions to East Asian art.
Sadak's project is part of broader undergraduate archival efforts at UChicago that include cataloging 19th-century almanacs and collecting ancient Chinese dictionaries. At the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, students like Sadak are engaged in sorting, digitizing, and researching diverse materials. This work not only aids their research but also makes complex texts accessible to future scholars through digital tools.
Sadak's exploration was tied to a retrospective series celebrating the Smart Museum’s 50th anniversary. He examined how Vanderstappen influenced the museum’s collections. "While other figures were building out the classical, modern and contemporary collection at the Smart, he established the Asian—and especially Chinese—collection," said Sadak.
Vanderstappen emphasized understudied paintings from late imperial China for their varied styles and used them as teaching tools. "He would deeply involve the scroll paintings in his classes," Sadak noted. His research contributed to reconstructing damaged Buddhist cave sculptures in China, leading to a digital reconstruction project at UChicago’s Center for the Art of East Asia.
Special Collections also offered insights for Arjan Batth, another student who explored literary miscellanies known as Taschenbücher from German-speaking regions. These texts contained poetry, music, biographies, and more. "These texts are unparalleled in Europe," Batth stated.
Batth worked with rare books curator Elizabeth Frengel to catalog these pocketbooks and focused on Swiss travelogues called Alpenrosen. These works depicted mountain landscapes with detail that helped forge an Alpine identity during political upheaval in Switzerland.
William Turner, a rising third-year student majoring in computer science and linguistics, is working on creating an online database of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese dictionaries. This project aims to make these resources easily searchable for scholars. "Essentially, you can use this data to synthesize a voice that sounds like it would have at a specific time period," Turner explained.
Turner has applied techniques from computational biology to transform ancient texts into searchable digital resources. His study of classical literature informs his enthusiasm for making textual patterns accessible through technology.
As these students continue their archival work at UChicago, they discover connections and patterns within historical materials that offer unexpected rewards. Batth reflected on this process: "When you’re browsing the collections, you don’t always know what you’ll find."
—A version of this story is published on the University of Chicago College website.