Research and Encoding

The development of an online textbase is an extremely complex undertaking. In many respects it resembles the creation of a traditional anthology or edition: texts must be chosen, transcribed, proofread, and published. However, working in the electronic medium both complicates these basic tasks -- what is transcription? -- and adds new ones. How should we encode texts to allow them to be searched and analysed? What method of delivery best supports the work people want to do? How does traditional editorial theory translate into the new medium?

Because the Women Writers Project is one of the few projects of its kind -- and one of the earliest -- we have had to develop answers to many of these questions ourselves, in collaboration with the larger text encoding community. Documentation of this research forms an important part of our work, and we present it here as fully as possible: both for comments and feedback from our peers, and to help people who are interested in learning more.

WWP Documentation and training materials

The WWP has written extensive documentation, both for training and to record our research and decisions about our text encoding methods. This documentation has now been published in several forms. Our Guide to Scholarly Text Encoding provides an introduction to text encoding for scholars and digital projects with goals similar to those of the WWP. Our internal documentation database is also available for general use. A more general document describes our overall work process. Finally, our training tutorials are now accessible to the general public.

For those who are interested in documentation for its own sake, a brief description of our documentation methods is included here.

Workshops and Seminars

The WWP offers workshops and seminars on text encoding, aimed at academics, librarians, archivists, and anyone interested in using the TEI Guidelines to create high-quality digital resources. Materials from these events are available for reference.

Editorial Theory

When the WWP was founded, the field of electronic editing was virtually unexplored, but the past ten years have seen a tremendous explosion of interest in editorial theory generally and in its application to electronic texts. The WWP has developed its editorial principles in the context of these debates and the larger history of textual editing. We have also worked extensively on articulating our approach to editing and transcription. We have published a brief document describing our transcription and editorial principles. We also provide a selected bibliography for discussions of electronic editing and text encoding.

Text encoding research

The Women Writers Project is actively engaged in research on text encoding and its application to early modern texts. A brief bibliography of articles on text encoding and related topics is included here (with links to articles available electronically). We also include a summary of research by WWP staff, with links to online versions.

Encoding and the scholarly user

As more and more textual resources become available in electronic form, researchers and teachers find themselves using materials in unfamiliar new formats. The initial strangeness of this experience -- the sense of separation between the technical aspects of the electronic presentation and the humanistic content being conveyed -- is now starting to give way to a greater sense of understanding and even empowerment. What is becoming clearer is how closely intertwined the technical and scholarly issues are: how difficult, for instance, it is to separate issues of transcription and editing from issues of encoding, and how important it is that technical issues be addressed with scholarly imperatives in mind.

To equip themselves for a more powerful role, both as users and as creators, there is a great deal humanities users can learn about text encoding even without any technical background. Understanding the preparation of electronic resources can help people use search tools more effectively, assess the scholarly value of particular resources, and understand the kinds of choices that projects make. In this spirit, the WWP provides an introductory bibliography of readings on text encoding, SGML, electronic text theory, electronic editing, and related topics.