Brown University Women Writers Project, Rockefeller Library, Providence, RI, March 2, 2001.

Some twenty hearty souls from Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island braved cold weather, light snow, and a slippery walk up Brown University's College Street hill to attend the Women's Studies Interest Group winter program, "Bringing early women's writing to the modern field of vision: the Brown University Women Writers Project" at the Rockefeller Library on March 2, 2001.

 

The Women Writers Project is a research organization devoted to making early women¼s writing available for teaching and research. It has produced Women Writers Online, a collection of 200 English texts by women writers before 1830, with an interdisciplinary range of subjects and genres.

 

Julia Flanders (WWP Director) began the program with a discussion of the background of the WWP. The WWP was founded in the mid-1980s as a reclamation project to bring early women's writings out of obscurity and into classroom use. At the same time they wanted to use the newly emerging digital technology to help achieve this goal and to increase access and usability to rare materials and materials difficult to access.

 

The project went through three phases of development.

1) Proof of Concept. Text encoding technology was primitive when they began in the mid-1980s but they began doing text encoding of early women's texts.

 

2) Research Phase. By 1993-1994 SGML was stable and TEI (the Text Encoding

Initiative) allowed for detailed description of text. Julia's handout showed a poem from the WWP encoded in TEI (HTML on steroids) and in HTML. The TEI coding indicates that this is a poem, that there is an epigraph, or a stanza. HTML merely indicates that the text is a paragraph with line breaks. TEI allows you to count or find the number of poems in a given text, for example. In an example of TEI encoding of a play, TEI can tell you who is speaking, and the age and gender of the speaker. One could ten search to find out how often that character speaks, and to whom.

 

TEI was developed without looking at women¼s writings, so when the WWP began using TEI, some women's texts were difficult to code with TEI. For example, footnotes in women's writings could include whole essays; TEI needed to be modified to better suit women's writings.

 

3) Publication Phase. In 1999 Women Writers Online was launched on the World Wide Web (which of course did not exist when the WWP began).

 

The WWP collection process has two components, collection maintenance and grant-funded projects. Based upon feedback from users, new texts are selected by a board of scholars. The WWP maintains a chronological and generic balance in its selection. The second component is grant-funded projects. Recent grant-funded projects include the encoding of texts of women of color and renaissance women.

 

Julia then showed us the Main page of Women Writers Online. A table of contents lists texts by author. One can search by words, phrases , or use SGML coding. For example, one can look for the word "love" in the genre "poems." In the results screen one can then sort by date, giving an indication of how a word is used over time.

 

Most of the texts used in the WWP have come from the Folger, Huntington, and Newberry libraries. There are approximately 200 subscribers to WWO at this time.

 

Dominique Coulombe and Ann Caldwell, catalogers, offered the perspectives and contributions of librarians to the WWP. Dominique began by describing what catalogers do. Given the purpose of cataloging, the goals of the WWP, and the fact that the WWP was located at Brown, there was an impetus to catalog and provide access to the WWP.

 

They began to look at the correspondences between the TEI headers (which describe and document electronic texts) and MARC format. A handout in table format compares MARC fields and corresponding TEI headers, noting areas in which there is no correspondence. These areas presented challenges for cataloging. Catalogers provided added value to the records, by supplying LC subject headings and classification numbers, as well as genre and form terms.

 

Ann Caldwell described the production phase of cataloging WWP texts. A template was created for Josiah, the Innovative Interfaces catalog, to eliminate retyping and cut down on repetitive stress injuries. A call for volunteers yielded paraprofessionals and catalogers interested in the project. Training was provided. The benefits of the project included introducing a larger pool of people to cataloging electronic records, introducing staff to TEI headers, and making more staff aware of the WWP.

 

WWO subscribers were interested in obtaining catalog records in batch mode. These are now available through OCLC.

 

Julia Flanders then described a survey sent to scholars who had used WWP texts in the past. (The WWP began encoding texts, then making them available as printouts to scholars for research and teaching purposes). Would scholars be interested in online texts? There was some concern for the loss of books as individual objects and for errors in electronic texts. There was concern for the changing role of scholars. If texts were no longer edited, and there was no longer any commentary accompanying the texts, it was perceived that the role of the scholar would disappear. Nevertheless, half of the scholars polled said that electronic texts would work for them,

 

Elizabeth Hageman, Chair of the Advisory Board of the WWP, and Professor at the University of New Hampshire, gave a presentation on how the WWP got started. Anthologies of women¼s texts rarely included the works of early women's writings. The WWP began as an effort to create an archive of pre-Victorian women¼s texts on computer that could be printed out and distributed in hard copy and sold at cost. The WWP produced electronic texts that were distributed as photocopies at first. Next, printed volumes of texts with added introductions, and footnotes were prepared using Brown's electronic texts. These were published by Oxford University Press and used in classes.

 

Next, the Renaissance Women Online text database got headnotes written for each author by scholars who were experts on those authors.

 

Professor Hageman described some of the ways in which she and her colleagues use the WWO, and specifically the 100 texts in the Renaissance Women Online (RWO) subset. She asks the students to look at the database for 20 minutes. Then she asks the students to explain what they learned. Another assignment is to have each student look at a different author, then explain in a 15-minute report to the class on the author. The student chooses a text by that author to show the class on screen. Students in her advanced Shakespeare and Women's Culture class have used the RWO to examine family structure in Elizabethan England.

 

Another assignment is to look up a word, such as blood or race (both terms used by Shakespeare) in the OED, then use the RWO to examine the use of the word in women's writings. She explained that race once meant lineage, and was used to distinguish, for example, people of York from people of Lancashire. The word honest, when applied to men and to women, meant different things. Other words to look up include marriage (to women the word marriage often referred to a relationship providing companionship; to men, a relationship for producing heirs) and guardian . She provided an example from a student paper in which the student examined the use of the name Sarah (the biblical character), the wife of Abraham. Sarah was often given as an example of the role of women in marriage. The Quaker writer Margaret Fell, in Women's Speaking Justified, uses biblical passages to reverse the roles of Sarah and Abraham . A search of Sarah in the RWO gives other examples of women using Sarah as an example on how women should behave in a manner radically different from conventional texts on women and

marriage.

 

Professor Hageman noted that while counting the number of hits for the occurrence of a word is not literary analysis, it does provide students and scholars with the texts that they can then analyze themselves. She also said that the OED is being revised and that the RWO is contributing to the revision. The RWO is providing examples different readings of words as they are used by women.

There was some discussion of regularization of spelling and modernization of spelling. It is one thing to render the letter W as W, not as the double V that was common during that time period. But when one starts to modernize the spelling it is very easy to change the meaning of the word and of the passage.

 

The WWP was funded for its first ten years by the NEH, and a Mellon Foundation grant funded the RWO for three years. Both organizations are interested in text reclamation projects. Now, with cost-sharing, the WWP is about to break even. They will be writing new grants to fund the coding of new texts. There are some 10,000 prospective texts. The project will continue as long as it is useful. There are other groups doing similar women's e-text projects, and there is dialogue with these organizations. Right now, the WWP is the only one on a paid subscription basis. They are exploring ways in which they might link to these secondary materials. In the future there may be some sort of mediated interface. It may be a question of time and money.

 

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