CIRCA:BrownWomenWriters

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The entry for the Brown Women Writers Project is still under construction.

Contents

Overview

Women Writers Project Homepage

One of the oldest and most established text encoding projects, the Brown Women Writers Project (WWP) has been active since 1988. The project’s goal is to increase the visibility and accessibility of pre-Victorian women writers by making TEI encoded versions of their texts available online. The text corpus includes fiction, poetry, and drama plus women's contributions to religious and political debates and to science, history, philosophy and medicine. Over three hundred texts that were originally published between 1526 and 1850 have now been encoded.

The Brown Women Writers project is part of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. It has three permanent staff members, including a director, a dedicated programmer, and a project manager. WWP also has a large advisory board comprised of scholars from a variety of academic institutions. The majority of these are English professors, with a mix of digital humanists and librarians. Much of the text encoding work is done by undergraduate and graduate students. Project funding has come from a variety of sources, including major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.


Audience & Publications

Women Writers Online

The intended audience for the project is primarily scholarly. One of the WWP’s first major publications was a 15 volume print series entitled Women Writers in English, 1350-1850 that was published by Oxford University Press. The full text corpus is available electronically via a subscription database called Women Writers Online, which also provides search functionality and text analysis tools. It is available through the University of Alberta Libraries. The project web site maintains a current list of the texts and authors that are available. Approximately 15 texts per year are added to Women Writers Online.

In addition to publishing scholarly resources, the project runs a number of workshops and seminars on scholarly text encoding which are aimed at humanities researchers, librarians, archivists, students, and digital practitioners. Consulting services are also available for smaller digital humanities projects, and for individual faculty members.


Technical Details

The Brown Women Writers Project encodes text into TEI-compliant XML files. They use a customized version of the TEI schema - customized in the sense that they remove unused elements, control specific attributes, add elements for features that the TEI does not include, and alter internal element structures and names to make it better represent the text. The markup of the text tries to be as precise to the source material as possible in an effort to preserve the document as close to the original object as possible.




Implications for the Digital Humanities




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