{"word_count": 241, "character_count": 1645}
&#160;AbstractIn the current landscape of Digital Humanities and digital pedagogy, it is rare to see Master’s-level graduate students fully engaged in the process of building Digital Humanities projects, especially at large, underfunded public universities. The BeardStair Project is one such effort, housed at San Jose State University (SJSU). This article, conceived and written by graduate students on the BeardStair team, provides a detailed, reflective history of that work. It started when five rare Modernist books were left, anonymously, in San Jose State University’s library drop box, and were discovered by one of the four SJSU students who became the original BeardStair team. Working independently in a process of scholarly inquiry, with guidance from SJSU’s Digital Humanities scholar Dr. Katherine Harris, they began working on what they called the BeardStair Project—named for two of the books’ artists, Aubrey Beardsley and Alastair. Several semesters later, a spring 2013 course in modern approaches to literature, composed of eleven graduate students, set a research agenda of producing a scholarly digital edition of these rare books. This scholarly digital edition would be focused by the claim that “these books act as autonomous literary and artistic objects that can be valued for their merits outside, and in spite of, their original purpose as salable commodities.” The BeardStair Project is an ongoing experiment in the Digital Humanities, yielding unique implications for administrators, faculty, and students who are interested in building Digital Humanities projects and fostering collaborative digital pedagogies. 