Nicole Yow Wei concentrates in History, with a focus on the History of the Book. During her term as Royce Fellow, Nicole will advance research toward her senior thesis. She will also complete a related Digital Humanities project, which aims to create a digital tool usable by researchers of Sinophone and Malay world studies. For her thesis research, Nicole will be conducting archival research in Singapore, where she is based. Her thesis is tentatively titled “Reading from the Margins of Print: Baba Malay Performance Text in Pre-war Singapore and Malaya”. By examining the ancillary features of printed texts written in the Baba Malay patois-- works such as translations of Chinese literature, poetry collections, and songbooks-- she attends to how the printed books of the Straits Chinese community were performed. She considers literary production as an embodied practice and situates Straits Chinese written and performance traditions as material participants in the wider linguistic and media politics of colonial Singapore and Malaya. Her Digital Humanities project, “Chinese Books of the Malay World”, broadly aims to uncover the relationship between Chinese literary works, books, and people in the Malay world. This project consists of a searchable database, as well as a network visualization-- both of Malay-language books produced by Chinese settlers in Singapore, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, during their respective colonial periods. By structuring large amounts of bibliographic data, one might be able to deduce commercial and literary connections between people across territorial boundaries in the Malay world. Users will also be able to form hypotheses about the many adaptational possibilities of a single literary work, or about the relationship between these adaptations. This Digital Humanities project will be made publicly available on the internet.