The Women Writers Project

http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu

One of the advantages that digital humanities offers scholars is the possibility of developing new computational and publication methods in order to reshape the ways in which we analyze and disseminate the works of authors that have been excluded from more traditional modes of scholarship. Certainly, those of us on the textual side of DH have long argued that digital forms of publication provide important opportunities to expand the literary canon and reconsider cultural, historical, and genre studies in ways that market-driven print publication has disallowed. Digitization permits us to question and rethink what constitutes an edition, a collection, or an anthology, and thus to participate in the shaping of new ways in which we engage with texts and reconsider their reception.

Different from large-scale digitization projects such as Early English Books Online (EEBO), the text-centric DH projects to which I refer, such as the Perseus Digital Library,¹ the Orlando Project,² and the Text Creation Partnership,³ are distinguished by their emphasis on otherwise unfeasible editorial approaches that consider translation, reclamation of literary voices, more comprehensive oeuvres, and/or intertextuality. Thanks to the scholars who sought to actualize these projects, the ways in which we study and teach literary texts have changed profoundly in the last twenty years. Their commitment to the harnessing of computational methods to achieve these goals, and their tenacity in building the mechanisms and collaborations needed to develop, implement, and sustain the resources envisaged have ensured that digital humanities projects in research and publication are now considered to be the models for the projects currently being developed by new scholars.

History of WWP

One of the most ambitious, comprehensive, and well-respected of these large-scale, long-range DH projects is the Women Writers Project (WWP), founded in 1986 at Brown University by a group of scholars with the goal of "providing access to rare materials by women that otherwise would go unread and untaught" ("About"). In 2013, the Women Writers Project and staff moved to the Center for Digital Scholarship at Northeastern University. It is important to acknowledge the project's history, as it has informed our own work in Digital Humanities, and to document what the WWP directors and collaborators have taught us since its beginning. The project developed in line with the field of early modern women's studies, which focused on women's literary work from the "long Renaissance," later defined as the period from 1526 to 1850. When articulating the scope of their field, the WWP project leaders saw the opportunity provided by the new area of electronic text encoding to compile and disseminate these works: "[a]s 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" ("History"). When one considers the limitations of institutional computer access to humanities scholars at that time (not to mention the meagerness of computing power), the goal set by the project's leaders seems remarkable.

Although its early output was by necessity restricted to traditional publication (notably the fifteen-volume series, Women Writers in English, 1350–1850, published in collaboration with Oxford University Press), the project's electronic aspect advanced rapidly even as the Internet was expanding, with electronically-produced transcribed draft materials printed out and shared for purposes of study and teaching. Recognizing the need for the adoption of encoding standards in order to ensure sustainability and promote collaboration, WWP was an early adopter of guidelines developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). By the mid-1990s, the project had set for itself a new method of encoding and documentation that transferred the work already published to the more stable, standardized text environment afforded by the TEI. This process, which took six years of planning, training, and conversion, required significant training for all involved in the project, thus confirming one of the WWP's tenets from its inception: that participation in knowledge production requires pedagogical engagement.

WWP...