The Project
Admin
NEH Final Report, 1997-2000|
WWP
The Project
Admin
NEH Final Report, 1997-2000 |
Although publication of Women Writers Online brings an important era in the WWP's history to a close, it is much more palpably a beginning than an end for us. The completion of this major milestone opens up opportunities for new research and expansion, and the establishment of a small but regular funding stream gives us the wherewithal to pursue these possibilities. We see the WWO collection as an assurance, at last, that the WWP will continue to thrive.
Our plans for continuing the WWP's work revolve around several commitments and interests. Most important is the ongoing maintenance and expansion of Women Writers Online. This will remain the centerpiece of our activities and our identity as a project, as well as the key to our survival. We plan to continue adding texts at a rate which will depend on our revenue, but will be at least 30 texts each year, an increase of approximately 15% annually. We will also be writing future grant proposals to fund specific textbase additions--for instance, colonial texts, scientific texts, texts by women of color. Perhaps most significantly for the scope of our collection, we are planning to begin investigating the challenge of manuscript transcription, starting with a conference which will bring together medievalists, paleographers, and text encoding experts to discuss the best approaches.
We plan to undertake some basic improvements to the interface for WWO, but an opportunity for a thorough overhaul will probably come in a year or so as part of a joint initiative (with the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown) to develop a new XML delivery system, replacing the DynaText/DynaWeb suite we now use.
A number of collaborative partnerships have emerged over the past several years, and these hold promise for future endeavors. Most importantly, we hope to work with other online collections of women's writing--of which there are now quite a few--to investigate the possibility of integrated access or joint publication of some sort. We have discussed this explicitly with the Orlando project at the University of Alberta, and to a lesser extent with the Victorian Women Writers Project and the British Women's Romantic Poetry project.