The Women Writers Project, or WWP, is a long-term research and digital publication project within the field of feminist digital humanities that makes texts from early modern women writers in the English language available online through electronic text encoding. Since 1999, WWP has maintained Women Writers Online, an electronic collection of rare or difficult to obtain works written or co-authored by women from the early modern period. It is currently housed within the Northeastern University Library's Digital Scholarship Group.

History

WWP was founded in 1986 by English faculty members at Brown University and literary scholars from other institutions, but those involved were discussing the project as early as 1984. The project was initially created to address the lack of access to early English women writers before the Victorian era and promote new research on the recovered writings.

One of WWP's earliest transcriptions was a 15-volume series "Women Writers in English, 1350–1850," completed in collaboration with Oxford University Press, which were released in print and for electronic use. The project included the creation of introductory materials for 100 texts, currently constituting a sub-collection of WWO. In 1999, WWO was released online.

In 2013 the WWP moved from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Women Writers Online

Women Writers Online, or WWO, is the digital collection of early English women's writing ranging from 1526 to 1850 maintained by WWP. As of 23 October 2023, the textbase contains more than 450 individual works. Viewing and usage of the texts are available only to individuals or institutions with paid subscriptions. Information about the textbase, such as document metadata, encoding practices, funding records, are freely accessible.

The focus of the corpus is currently on hard to find or generally inaccessible texts from both well known and more obscure writers. Within this focus is a sizeable collection of religious writing from the Renaissance as well as works of early fiction, drama, and political commentary. In March 2011, WWP held their first seminar on XSL Transformations (XSLT) at Brown University.

From 2008 to 2011, the WWP also hosted an annual conference titled Women in the Archives in collaboration with the Sarah Doyle Women's Center and several other groups at Brown University. The opening seminar held on 22 March, 2008, titled Revealing Women, introduced the seminar series as an exploration of how archived writings of early English women shaped the approach to research and pedagogy on the subject.

September 2012, then-director Julia Flanders delivered a presentation at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities discussing the support available for educators and researchers new to XML technologies and TEI encoding through the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS).

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.

Notable people

  • Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, Women Writers Project (2017–)

See also

  • List of women writers

References

  • List of texts in Women Writers Online