Women Writers Project

The Northeastern University Women Writers Project (formerly the Brown University Women Writers Project) or WWP, founded in 1986 at Brown University, is a long-term research and publication project which focuses on making texts from early modern women writers in the English language available online. The Women Writers Project maintains "Women Writers Online" an electronic collection of rare or difficult to obtain works written or co-authored by women from the sixteenth century to the mid nineteenth century. In addition, the WWP is actively engaged in researching the complex issues involved in representing manuscripts and early printed texts in digital form and holds an occasional conference, Women in the Archives, as well as teaching workshops in text encoding and other practices central to digital humanities.

The Brown University Women Writers Project developed at the end of the 1980s from the marriage of two communities, early modern women’s studies and electronic text encoding.

As a method of preservation and to make the texts more widely accessible, the WWP transcribed an initial digital collection of about 200 texts in the first five years and experimented with publishing editions of selected works in traditional print format. The 15-volume series “Women Writers in English, 1350–1850” is still available.

In 1993, with the publication of the expanded Text Encoding Initiative or TEI guidelines, the WWP began a three-year period of research on how to use the new guidelines to represent early women’s texts. During this time, few new texts were added to the collection, but a new set of encoding methods and improved systems of documentation and training took place.

From 1996 onwards, new texts were once again encoded with the new TEI standards. Between 1997 and 2000, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the WWP developed “Renaissance Women Online,” a project studying the impact of electronic texts on teaching and research. The project included the creation of introductory materials for 100 texts, currently constituting a sub-collection of Women Writers Online. In 1999 Women Writers Online was published, making the corpus available online.

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