Exhibits

The Women Writers Project plans to launch a series of online exhibits organized around texts published in our Women Writers Online collection. As a new initiative to enhance readers' interaction with our published texts, these exhibits will serve both as brief scholarly introductions to important thematic or conceptual divisions and as explorations of the relationship between current scholarship on early modern women's writing and electronic texts. We conceive of the exhibits as an opportunity for individual scholars to explore parts of our collection through the lens of specific topics that interest them, to put selected texts in dialogue with one another and with other areas of their research, and to introduce readers to new and potentially unfamiliar authors and texts.

Scholars who contribute exhibits will bring their own interests and knowledge to bear on the texts they select. We imagine that most exhibits will incorporate a variety of content linked from our collection, and we will be designing a mechanism to extract or link directly to particular portions of a text while remaining within the exhibit itself. We also anticipate that contributors may want to incorporate specific searches and search results into their exhibits. For instance, an exhibit might reproduce a search in which a keyword or idea from one passage becomes the basis for searching for additional passages in other texts; portions of those texts might then be displayed as part of the exhibit, and perhaps suggest additional searches in turn. In this way, we hope exhibits will not simply provide new information to readers but also model the many different ways scholars approach literary and historical texts in the digital realm.

Exhibits will likely take a variety of forms, depending on their content and the specific aims of the contributing scholar. Some exhibits might look at a single topic across a broad historical period or a range of genres, others could examine the evolution of a particular literary form, and still others might focus more narrowly on a more limited set of texts or authors. Ideally, contributors will feel free to experiment with a range of these options.

We envision these exhibits as a form of scholarly publication that will remain a permanent, publicly accessible feature of the WWP/WWO space. Exhibits will be citable as publications, so that other scholars and students can reference them and include them in a CV as they would any other publication.

See the submission guidelines for general information. For more detailed information, or to propose an exhibit, please contact the WWP at WWP_exhibits@brown.edu.