Renaissance Women Online: A Final Report

Julia Flanders, Textbase Editor
Women Writers Project
Brown University
February 1, 1999

Table of Contents

Introduction

General design

Selection criteria

Publication

Encoding methods and delivery system

Early user response

Description and analysis of user survey

Academic research and electronic publication

Conclusion

References

Appendix A: Reviews and feedback

Appendix B: Survey results on use of electronic resources

Go to The RWO Online Collection

Introduction

"Never before in the academic world," asserts a recent article, "has there been so great a divide between technical capability and the actual culture of use" (Robinson and Taylor 1998, 283). According to this assessment, the average academic is still deeply reluctant to use digital resources for research, despite the growing number of such resources and their increasing accessibility and user-friendliness through the medium of the web. At the same time, within certain academic subcultures there is clearly a "culture of use" which encourages scholars to use digital resources and integrate them into their research (Hall 1998, 289). For publishers and producers of online materials, understanding academics' attitudes towards these resources is crucial to predicting the nature of the future market and the kinds of products which may succeed, but it can be difficult to get an accurate picture of these attitudes.

There is a growing body of research investigating the research needs of scholars--most in the sciences, but increasingly in the humanities as well. These have tended to focus on methods of retrieval, and on scholarly needs in the context of online bibliographies, indexes, and finding aids. Less studied is the question of scholarly usage of full-text resources: resources which provide direct access to materials rather than merely locating them. Such resources are only now entering the scholarly horizon, but already they raise distinct questions: How can such resources respond most efficiently to scholarly needs? How well do they fit in with scholarly habits and attitudes, and how well can they persuade the scholarly community of their desirability?

We can identify two contrasting views of the relationship between current scholarly practice--the "actual culture of use"--and the advent of digital resources:

1. The view that online research is profoundly different from the activities which literary scholars currently regard as belonging to their discipline, and that changes in behavior will be slow in coming.

2. The view that scholars already want and anticipate these functions, which in fact represent a more efficient or effective way of accomplishing what scholars already do (albeit more laboriously) in their existing research.

In some sense, this dichotomy recapitulates the familiar debate over whether technology creates new desires and new disciplines, or whether it acts only to enable what is already there in potential.

This report describes the research initiative entitled "Renaissance Women Online" (RWO), which was conducted by the Brown University Women Writers Project from September 1996 through August 1999. The aims of the initiative were, broadly, to gain an understanding of the intellectual and economic impact of electronic resources on scholarly research in the humanities. To this end, RWO included both a model digital resource project--a collection of primary source texts within the WWP's online textbase, with added materials specific to RWO--and a user survey. For both of these initiatives, our assumption was that the second view articulated above (that current academic work relies on activities which can be more efficiently accomplished in the digital medium) was true, and constitutes in effect an entry point through which digital resources will become firmly rooted in humanities research and teaching. Research in more experimental uses of digital resources, though, seemed to us to indicate the truth of the first view's suggestion that digital resources, once adopted, are likely to motivate far more profound changes in academic work over the long term. It is these changes which we consider most important to understand and assess, since they will represent the real conditions of academic work once digital resources are fully naturalized within the academic environment.

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