The Project
Admin
NEH Final Report, 1997-2000|
WWP
The Project
Admin
NEH Final Report, 1997-2000 |
During the three years covered by this grant, the Women Writers Project has completed the goals which we formulated in our grant proposal, and--perhaps more significantly--we have completed the larger goals with which we began our work in 1988, with our first NEH grant. Those goals were twofold: first, we aimed to create a digital collection of early women's writing which would make it possible to teach and study the full range of women's literate culture in the pre-Victorian period. And in support of this work, we wanted to research and publicize methods of digitization which could open up new approaches to research and teaching of humanities texts. In our final three years we have successfully published an extensive textbase of early women's writing, we have articulated in detail the methods by which the underlying systems were designed and developed, and we have shared these methods with other projects. The Women Writers Project collection is viewed by scholars, librarians, and other text encoding projects as a model of its kind, for its scholarly value, the thoroughness of its encoding, and the intellectual rigor with which it addresses problems of editorial method and electronic scholarship. The NEH can be justly proud of having funded such an undertaking, as we are proud to have been supported so generously and for so long.
In particular, during the course of this last grant period, we have added 50 texts to our collection; we have designed and implemented an innovative system of electronic delivery; we have contributed substantially to the ongoing research in text encoding of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) community; and we have developed a system for licensing the textbase by which the WWP is moving quickly towards financial self-sufficiency. All of these achievements contribute to making the WWP a long-term research center which can continue to support and expand the WWP textbase, so that it can remain a vital research tool for the study of women's writing.