Women Writers Online
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About
The Brown University Women Writers Project has been working for over fifteen years on building an electronic collection of early women's writing, and on researching the complex issues involved in representing early printed texts in digital form. As the publisher of Women Writers Online, the WWP now supports the work of innumerable faculty, students, and readers at hundreds of institutions from around the world, by providing access to rare materials by women that otherwise would go unread and untaught. Our staff are engaged in ongoing research into the technical and theoretical challenges of this work, and they share their expertise both at Brown and within the larger digital humanities community through papers, consultation, training workshops, and standards development.
Current Projects and Plans
The WWP is always engaged in expanding the scope of the Women Writers Online collection. In addition to this regular capture of new material, however, we also undertake more specific projects that offer enhancements to the functionality of WWO, or provide opportunities for us to involve our readers in new ways. Some of these plans are described below; some are now under way, while others await funding.
Women in the Archives To mark the 20th anniversary of the WWP's first funding, we launched a series of discussions under the rubric of "Women in the Archives." These discussions began with a research group and colloquium funded by the Cogut Humanities Center, and continued with a conference in March 2009 in celebration of Women's History Month that convened a broader discussion of the role of archival research in the study of early modern women's writing. "Women in the Archives" is now planned as a regular spring event—typically a colloquium or small conference—and planning is now under way for an event tentatively scheduled for April 2010. A call for participation will be issued in early summer 2009.
WWP scholarly workshop series The WWP staff have been offering workshops on scholarly text encoding for the past five years, typically to an audience of digital librarians, archivists, and digital practitioners. More recently, however, we have found an increasing number of humanities faculty taking these workshops, as faculty become more directly involved in text encoding projects. In 2006 we received funding from the NEH to support a two-year program of workshops and seminars on text encoding, aimed specifically at humanities faculty, held at humanities centers across the US during 2007-2009. In 2008, we received a second NEH grant to support a continuation of this work, providing a smaller set of more advanced workshops on special topics in scholarly text encoding. This program will begin in July 2009 and run through June 2011. As part of this program, the WWP also provides consultation and other followup services to participants. The goal of the program is to enable faculty to play a more intellectually engaged role in digital projects, and also to undertake text encoding projects on their own.
WWP Exhibits The Women Writers Project is planning a series of online exhibits organized around texts published in our Women Writers Online collection. As a new initiative to enhance readers' interaction with our published texts, these exhibits would serve both as brief scholarly introductions to important thematic or conceptual divisions and as explorations of the relationship between current scholarship on early modern women's writing and electronic texts. Exhibits would offer an opportunity for individual scholars to explore parts of our collection through the lens of specific topics that interest them, to put selected texts in dialogue with one another and with other areas of their research, and to introduce readers to new and potentially unfamiliar authors and texts.
Early Modern Women's Manuscripts The WWP has submitted a proposal for a three-year project to explore the digital representation of women's manuscript materials. This project would support between five and ten manuscript encoding and transcription projects, to be undertaken if the grant proposal is successful. Once transcribed and encoded, the manuscripts would be published as part of Women Writers Online. The deadline for proposals is now past, but for more information on this grant, please see the call for proposals.
Internships in Digital Humanities The Brown University Women Writers Project invites proposals for one- or two-semester internships focusing on methods of representing, visualizing, and analysing digital texts in the humanities. Interns work closely with WWP staff and develop tools or research studies arising from the Women Writers Online collection.
WWO Sandbox Now that the WWP has made the full transition to our new interface and publication environment, we are looking for ways to exploit the potential of the new technologies that are now available to us. Many of these—such as visualization tools or methods of extracting new kinds of information from texts—are very experimental, and need to be tested and adapted before we can incorporate them into the main body of Women Writers Online. In order to allow for this experimentation, and to give our readers a chance to play with these tools as they emerge, we will develop an experimental annex or "sandbox" connected to the main WWO interface and linked from it. This space will be used to test out experimental interface ideas, to give users a chance to work with beta versions and provide feedback, and to present tools and interface features that are too specialized or unusual to be incorporated directly into WWO. The sandbox is now under development and we hope to launch an initial version of it in 2009.
Online Syllabi The WWP has been collecting and digitizing syllabi which use texts from the WWP collection, contributed by faculty members who have used our texts in their teaching. These syllabi demonstrate a fascinating range of teaching approaches and juxtapositions between texts: those that are well known and those that are more obscure; texts by female and male authors; texts from unexpected genres that allow a particular theme to be pursued in innovative ways. We are now creating a database of these materials and plan to make them available to our readers in a searchable form, with links to online WWO texts.
User-centric visualization tools This is a collaborative project which we are planning tentatively with the University of Alberta, McMaster University, and the University of Montreal, and for which we expect to seek funding. This collaboration brings together expertise in innovative interface design, in text mining, and in rich text encoding, with the goal of producing and testing new interface tools that would provide an expanded range of visualization possibilities for collections like WWO. The resulting tools will be incorporated into the WWO sandbox and perhaps eventually into the main WWO interface.
Staff and Funding
The WWP has a permanent staff of three:
- Julia Flanders, Director
- Syd Bauman, Senior Programmer/Analyst
- John Melson, Project Manager and Textbase Editor
The project employs a team of graduate and undergraduate student encoders; job openings are posted at the Brown University Student Employment web site, but for information please contact us at WWP@brown.edu.
We also host an internship program for graduate students seeking project experience or research opportunities, particularly in the areas of library science, digital humanities, and women's studies.
Funding comes from several sources. The most significant is the licensing income from Women Writers Online, which makes it possible for the WWP to continue maintaining and expanding the WWO collection, but does not yet fully cover our operating expenses. We also receive support from grant funding, and from consultancy services to other projects.
History
The Brown University Women Writers Project has its intellectual roots in two communities whose synergy began to be evident at the end of the 1980s. The first of these was the growing field of early modern women's studies, whose project was to reclaim the cultural importance of early women's writing and bring it back into our modern field of vision. The other was the newly developing area of electronic text encoding, with its emphasis on improved access and longterm preservation of textual data. As a method of bringing inaccessible texts back into use, the electronic archive seemed like the ideal successor to the physical archive, since it promised to overcome the problems of inaccessibility and scarcity which had rendered women's writing invisible for so long. This partnership of archival scholarship and electronic technology has become a model for text encoding projects all over the world.
In the first five years of the project, we transcribed an initial collection of about 200 texts, and began making draft printouts available for teaching and research. These printouts are still available through our online ordering system, and we will be issuing new, updated versions soon. We also worked on a project with Oxford University Press to publish editions of selected texts in traditional print form.
In 1993, with the publication of the expanded TEI Guidelines, the WWP began a three-year period of research on how to use the new guidelines for early women's texts, and how to convert our existing encoding to the new model. During this interval, we encoded very few new texts, but we established a new set of encoding methods, set up improved systems of documentation and training, and began the long process of converting our legacy data.
With the new encoding system in place, we resumed encoding texts in earnest in 1996. From 1997 to 2000, with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we developed Renaissance Women Online, a project studying the impact of electronic texts on teaching and research. With support from the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities we also sponsored "In Her Own Words", a one-woman show based on the life and writing of Elizabeth I. And the National Endowment for the Humanities renewed our funding once more in 1999 to encode a group of new texts focusing on satire, gender politics, and the cultural context of 18th-century England.
We reached a very important watershed in 1999 with the publication of Women Writers Online, which made the WWP collection available electronically after over a decade of work. WWO is now offered by subscription to universities, libraries, and individuals. Subscription fees support the WWP's ongoing work: expanding the collection, researching women's writing and text encoding, and collaborating with other projects to advance the use of digital technology in humanities scholarship.
In addition to our new encoding initiatives, we have worked collaboratively with the Orlando Project at the University of Alberta, and with the Oxford English Dictionary.
The WWP is the result of generosity from a number of sources, including Brown University, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Apple Computer, Inc., and numerous private donors. This information is detailed in an annotated history of grants with links to grant reports. For information on making a donation to the WWP, please visit our funding page.
