Women Writers Project

The Brown University Women Writers Project or WWP, founded in 1986 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is a long-term research and publication project which focuses on making available the texts of early modern women writers in the English language. The Women Writer's Project maintains "Women Writers Online" an electronic collection of rare or difficult to obtain works written or co-authored by women up to 1850. In addition, the WWP is actively engaged in researching the complex issues involved in representing early printed texts in digital form and holds an annual conference, "Women in the Archives," as well as teaching workshops in text encoding and other practices central to digital humanities.

History

The Brown University Women Writers Project developed at the end of the 1980s from the marriage of two communities, early modern women’s studies and electronic text encoding.

As a method of preservation and to make the texts more widely accessible, the WWP transcribed an initial digital collection of about 200 texts in the first five years and experimented with publishing editions of selected works in traditional print format. The 15-volume series "Women Writers in English, 1350–1850" is still available.

In 1993, with the publication of the expanded Text Encoding Initiative or TEI guidelines, the WWP began a three-year period of research on how to use the new guidelines to represent early women’s texts. During this time, few new texts were added to the collection, but a new set of encoding methods and improved systems of documentation and training took place.

From 1996 onwards, new texts were once again encoded with the new TEI standards. Between 1997 and 2000, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the WWP developed "Renaissance Women Online," a project studying the impact of electronic texts on teaching and research. The project included the creation of introductory materials for 100 texts, currently constituting a sub-collection of "Women Writers Online." In 1999 "Women Writers Online" was published, making the corpus available online.

Since the release of Women Writers Online, initiatives include publishing a Guide to Scholarly Text Encoding, offering workshops and seminars in text encoding, and hosting an annual conference, "Women in the Archives."

Women Writers Online

"Women Writers Online" is a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English ranging from 1526 to 1850. Currently, the database contains over 320 individual works, with around fifteen new texts being added to the collection every year.

The focus of the corpus is currently on hard to find or generally inaccessible texts from both well known and more obscure writers. Authors included in the corpus include, among many others:

• Anna Laetitia Barbauld
• Aphra Behn
• Margaret Cavendish
• Queen Elizabeth I
• Margaret Fell
• Felicia Hemans
• Catherine Parr
• Mary Sidney
• Mary Wollstonecraft

Access to "Women Writers Online" is available through a through a web-based interface with a paid subscription, available to both institutions and individuals. There is also a free one-month trial period for potential subscribers.

Resources & Outreach

The WWP hosts a number of text encoding workshops and seminars throughout the year for various skill levels. There is also an annual conference "Women in the Archives" which the the WWP hosts in collaboration with the Sarah Doyle Women's Center and several other groups at Brown University.

In addition to the "Women Writers Online" collection, the WWP also offers some public resources helpful for researchers and teachers interested in early modern women writers. These include orientations for getting the most out of researching within the online collection, possible assignments that take advantage of the online interface, and syllabi submitted by professors that incorporate the online texts and focus on courses in Renaissance and early modern literature, women’s studies, and related subjects.

See also

• List of women writers

External links

• Women Writers Project (homepage)
  • List of texts in Women Writers Online
  • List of texts available in printed form (some of which are not available online)