The Project
Admin
NEH Final Report, 1997-2000|
WWP
The Project
Admin
NEH Final Report, 1997-2000 |
During this grant period, the WWP achieved the central objectives described in our workplan, although in some cases the specific methods were different because of changes in circumstances. Thus for instance we were unable to collaborate with CETH as we had planned, because of organizational changes they suffered during this time, but we accomplished our beta-testing goals using our beta-testing group instead. Similarly, because we were forced to self-publish rather than working with a commercial publisher, more of our work had to go into interface design and the creation of a licensing system than we had expected. As a result, the total size of Women Writers Online when initially published was only about 200 texts instead of the 300 we had hoped for (although the total number of new texts encoded under this grant was as we had planned). However, the 200-text collection has proved large enough to attract subscribers, and we are now working to make up the difference as quickly as possible. Finally, although the workplan described a substantial corpus of writings by women of color as part of the new additions, in fact we encountered substantial delay in acquiring copies of many of the texts we had hoped to encode in this group. We have added a few of the texts in this category, but most will be encoded within the next few years. In their place, for this grant, we encoded a number of texts which amplify the cultural range of the textbase in other ways: for instance, discussions of midwifery, religious dissent, and travel narratives.
During this grant period, as planned, we added 50 new texts to the collection. A list of texts added is included in Appendix A. A full list of texts in Women Writers Online is included in Appendix B. We also amplified our TEI headers to include additional information, and in collaboration with the Brown University Library we created and distributed MARC records for all of our texts.
As reported in our last Interim Performance Report, the electronic publication of the WWP textbase was successfully accomplished in August 1999, and as of June 30, 2000 the WWP had amassed 160 institutional subscribers. A list of subscribers is included in Appendix E, and an internal report on our first year of licensing is in Appendix F.
During this grant period WWP staff also presented WWP research and did demonstrations of Women Writers Online at conferences. A list of project activities, including papers, demonstrations, and other activities, is included in Appendix G.