Women Writers Project - History

History

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.

Since the release of Women Writers Online, initiatives include publishing a Guide to Scholarly Text Encoding, offering workshops and seminars in text encoding, and hosting an annual conference, "Women in the Archives."