Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is aptly named. Virginia Woolf's parodie biography, Orlando, about an Eng lish writer who lives from the Renaissance to the 1920s and changes sex from a man to a woman—and more broadly, Woolf's search for the literary history of women in A Room of One's Own—are fitting endorsements of this" elec tronic textbase." The Orlando Project similarly reaches beyond the limits of time and gender: from the fifth century BC (or BCE) to the present day, it in cludes male writers and" other women" from other countries. It is an extraor dinary compendium of historical and biographical scholarship and a success ful" experiment in humanities computing." An oak tree, alluding to the hero/ine Orlando's magnum opus," The Oak Tree," serves as the" Home" icon of the site, as a" visual pun" on" the growth of history from biography, and... the tree-like structure of our text encoding," as the Scholarly Introduc tion explains. Orlando too is a grand ecosystem of many roots and branches that should continue to grow. Though digital projects have been notoriously ephemeral, this seems adaptable, and updates have been added at six-month intervals. The project avoids the usual monumental parade ground of famous authors or national histories, instead dispersing biographical recognition and delegating countless users to find patterns of meaning in this historical web. Although Woolf's protagonist liked to daydream under the oak tree, this textbase—as they insist it be called, being a searchable palimpsest of historical argument and biographies rather than an information database or an archive of literary editions—is hardly for the pastoral idler. Casual searchers could just as well search Google or Wikipedia for some of the data on events or peo ple. Far more than an information tool, this is a structured world that some" players" will navigate better than others. Not that it's only for nerds, either. It will reward anyone interested in women's history, biography, or literature, although unlike Woolf's, this Orlando has no portraits and not a whiff of satiric humor. Inevitably I will touch on a perennial theme in any collective biographical history or prosopography, the theme of what's missing. But my aim is to introduce some of the notable features and functions of this magis terial project, and to offer some observations on the design and markup (as it