Renaissance Women Online

Renaissance Women Online was a three-year initiative of the Women Writers Project from 1997 to 1999, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its goal was to study the impact of electronic resources on teaching and scholarship in the humanities. The chief work of this initiative is now complete, although some ongoing changes and additions will be made.

In particular, we explored the changes that occur with the introduction of electronic texts: changes to research habits, changes to teaching practices, and changes in the economics of text creation and use. Our work for this initiative included two linked projects: a model resource for working with primary texts in the humanities, and a user study of electronic text use in the humanities. An initial report on the latter and a final report on the entire project are now available online.

The RWO Site

The RWO collection builds on the existing work of the WWP, using the same encoding and editorial methods and expanding the project's coverage of the Renaissance considerably. The RWO collection, when complete, will include 100 texts: about 60 encoded specially for this project, and about 40 from the WWP textbase. At the same time, the site experiments with expanding access to these texts in a variety of ways. To provide some historical and conceptual context for texts which have been all but unknown, scholars have written introductory materials for each work. These not only help readers understand more about the text in question, but also point them towards usefully related texts. We also provide a set of topical essays which discuss recurring cultural and textual themes. These essays help to introduce a reader unfamiliar with the Renaissance period to issues which emerge in these texts, and they also provide a thematic method of navigation by linking texts with similar concerns.

We expect that these contextual materials will broaden access to these texts for readers unfamiliar with the Renaissance period, by providing background information and guidance in finding texts on related topics. This is a strategy found at many web sites, although perhaps more rarely for collections of this size. At the same time, the site also opens up these texts in a profoundly different way, by providing analytical tools for studying their language and structure individually and over the collection as a whole.

In choosing the texts to be included in RWO, the selection committee attempted to achieve a balanced collection on a number of counts. They chose a mix of now well-known writers such as Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish, together with lesser-known women such as Elizabeth Poole. They also included both "original" work and translations, and included as well writing under probable female pseudonyms like "Jane Anger" and written representations of an otherwise lost female voice (as in the accounts of the Flower witchcraft). They selected a range of genres, including drama, poetry, religious tracts, philosophical writings, cookbooks, trial narratives, works in translation, and introductions to translated works. They also tried to include as many women from "lower" socio-economic classes as possible, and provided a range of religious stances (Anglican, Fifth Monarchist, Quaker, Roman Catholic, etc.) from this religiously fraught period. Although the materials are chronologically balanced across the period covered, since there is a smaller amount of extant writing by 16th-century women, the committee selected a larger percentage of it than of the 17th century, where more choices were necessary.

The site was published in August 1999 in tandem with the larger WWP collection, Women Writers Online. Both resources are now accessible by license only.

We value your feedback on this site; if you have comments or suggestions, please send email to wwpcomments@brown.edu.

Research on Scholarly Use of Electronic Resources

The RWO initiative also includes a user study, aimed at gathering detailed information on text use among humanities scholars: how they used primary sources in their work, how they gained access to these resources, and what factors mattered most to them in choosing a method of access.

Acknowledgements

In addition to the three-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation which has made this work possible, we have received generous help and considerable hard work from a number of people who have contributed to the RWO project.

Professor Elizabeth Hageman has provided general scholarly oversight for the RWO initiative, and has led the team that identified the texts to be included. The other members of this team are Dr. Georgianna Ziegler, Professor Boyd Berry, and Dr. John Lavagnino.

Dr. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman and Professor Susanne Woods contributed the introductory essays which welcome the reader into the RWO resource.

A large number of scholars have generously volunteered their time and effort to create the contextual materials for this project.

Professor Walter Freiberger and his research assistant Vanja Dukic performed the statistical analysis of the survey results.

Catharine Hall and Karen Murphy designed the original survey, and Catharine Hall performed extensive coding and qualitative analysis of the results.

The Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University has provided extensive assistance with the considerable technological challenges involved in the creation of the RWO resource.