The Story of The Orlando Project: Personal Reflections

The foremother of Orlando was The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, published in 1990 by Batsford Academic in the U.K. and by Yale University Press in the U.S., edited by Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy. This early reference book on women's worldwide writing in English contained 2700 author entries and a few topic entries. Three years after that was published, Patricia raised the idea of following it with a discursive history. She enlisted Isobel, her colleague at the University of Alberta, and Susan Brown of the University of Guelph as partners in the project. Susan suggested using computers, and a team was mustered for an application to the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, which was just launching a scheme for Major Collaborative Research Initiatives.

The three original collaborators felt strongly that the time had come to recuperate the discipline of literary history, and, reluctantly, that to keep the project manageable it would be necessary to concentrate on a single national tradition. They chose writing from the British Isles, as having the earliest origin and the longest span for women's writing in English. Literary history had come under attack from theorists of various stripes: as monologic and as reifying a centrist, progressivist, exclusionary account of national literatures. The collaborators felt that by treating women's writing as the center, not the margins, by weaving together a host of distinct narratives linked by synchronicity, and by exploiting the power of the new electronic medium, they could counteract these tendencies. This approach would provide both a new lease on life for the practice of literary history and the kind of coverage for the history of writing by women that had long been taken for granted as available in a whole range of sources about writing, which was chiefly or entirely by men. We became very excited about the potential of the new electronic medium and about the idea of using something revolutionary in a technical sense for the purpose of recuperating the history and asserting the importance of undervalued writing by women.

The team reached the final round of MCRI applications at its first attempt but was not then awarded a grant. We were, however, strongly advised to strengthen the electronic aspect of the application and to resubmit. At this point Pat recruited Elaine Brennan (recently of the Women Writers Project at Brown University) and Susan Hockey (then at Princeton-Rutgers Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities). Elaine, who was with us very briefly as a freelance consultant, pointed the project towards the use of SGML (Standardized General Markup Language) for tagging or encoding its newly written text. Susan Hockey, a leading humanities computing scholar, who subsequently moved to Alberta to head the newly founded Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts, remained a key team member for years.

In 1995 the Orlando Project received a grant of 1.6 million Canadian dollars for an Integrated History of Women's Writing in the British Isles, then intended to take the form of five printed volumes (one of chronology, four of critical narrative history) and an electronic textbase. We hired eight graduate student research assistants (six at the University of Alberta, two at the University of Guelph), two postdoctoral fellows (Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood), a part-time administrator, and a "project librarian," Susan Fisher, who was despatched posthaste to Susan Hockey's CETH to learn to write and parse SGML. We did not at this time hire a computer programmer or include the salary for one in the grant application. Little did we know.

These were heady, and scary, days. We had all these team members reporting for work, and we had as yet nothing for them to work with. We needed to produce SGML tagsets (known to those in the field as DTDs or document-type definitions), custom-designed to structure our writing about women's experience and women's literary production. (No account of Orlando's work can manage without some specialized vocabulary. Hopefully readers will not find it...