Women Writers Project

Women Writers Project
Name	Women Writers Project
Formation	1988
Type	Research center / Digital humanities project
Location	University of Pennsylvania
Leader title	Director
Leader name	Susan Brownell Anthony

Women Writers Project

The Women Writers Project is a long-running digital humanities initiative based at University of Pennsylvania that produces a searchable electronic corpus of texts by women writers from the early modern period to the nineteenth century. It supports scholarly work on authors such as Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Anne Bradstreet, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning while partnering with institutions like the Modern Language Association, the Text Encoding Initiative, the Library of Congress, and the Folger Shakespeare Library to advance standards for digital scholarly editions.

History

Founded in 1988 at Harvard University before relocating to University of Pennsylvania, the project grew out of scholarly initiatives in digital textual scholarship exemplified by efforts at Brown University, Columbia University, Oxford University, and King's College London. Early milestones include adoption of SGML conventions and later migration to XML schemas influenced by the Text Encoding Initiative and work by researchers associated with Rosalind Franklin University and the Council on Library and Information Resources. The project expanded its corpus through partnerships with repositories such as the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the British Library, and the National Library of Scotland.

Mission and Scope

The project’s mission emphasizes creating accurate, accessible digital surrogates of primary texts by women writers, supporting research on figures from Margaret Cavendish and Mary Sidney to Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Brontë. It foregrounds editors’ labor comparable to editorial traditions at the Modern Humanities Research Association, the Oxford University Press, and the Renaissance Society of America. Scope includes textual markup compliant with standards promoted by the Text Encoding Initiative, pedagogical resources used in courses at institutions like Yale University, Princeton University, and University of California, Berkeley, and curated collections serving readers from the Schlesinger Library to public users of the Library of Congress.

Collections and Projects

Collections encompass early modern drama and poetry, American colonial writings, and nineteenth‑century novels and correspondence, featuring writings by Margaret Fuller, Zilpah Grant, Lydia Maria Child, Sarah Josepha Hale, George Sand, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Frances Harper, and Louisa May Alcott. Projects include periodical indexing that complements holdings at the British Library Newspapers collection, thematic collections coordinated with the American Antiquarian Society, and editorial projects drawing on archival material from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Technology and Editorial Practices

Editorial practice centers on TEI‑compliant markup, interoperability with initiatives like Project Gutenberg, faceted metadata compatible with the Dublin Core standards used by the Digital Public Library of America, and versioning practices inspired by protocols at the Open Book Publishers and the HathiTrust Digital Library. The project employs XML schemas for transcription, normalizes orthography for searchability while preserving diplomatic transcriptions for textual criticism, and uses controlled vocabularies found in the Library of Congress Subject Headings and authority files from the Virtual International Authority File.

Collaborations and Impact

Collaborations span scholarly societies and cultural heritage institutions: editions and datasets have been used in courses and research supported by the Modern Language Association, cited in work published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, and incorporated into digital projects at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Project MUSE, and the Perseus Digital Library. The project has influenced editorial standards adopted by journals such as Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, and informed public programming at venues like the Smithsonian Institution and the New-York Historical Society.

Funding and Governance

Funding historically combines support from higher education institutions, foundations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in‑kind contributions from partner libraries including the Huntington Library and the Bodleian Libraries. Governance involves faculty and staff at the hosting university, advisory boards with scholars affiliated with Princeton University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, and representatives from partner institutions like the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society.

Category:Digital humanities Category:Text encoding Category:Women's studies