Women Writers Project receives NEH grants to publish book for researchers developing digital projects

by Mary Jo Curtis

The Women Writers Project will take an important step forward in the next two years, supported by $206,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Project director Julia Flanders, programmer/analyst Sydney Bauman and electronic publications editor Paul Caton are writing a book that will help those mounting similar projects to create high quality digital representations of documents and publications.

Founded in 1988 "to eliminate the myth that women didn't write anything before 1830," the Women Writers Project (WWP) is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. In the past 12 years, the staff and student workers have transcribed and encoded some 230 publications written before 1850 and dating to as early as the 1540s, bringing these texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive to make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars and readers online.

"This is a big industry now, and we're a particular niche" offering "primary source content about women," said Flanders. "Only a handful [of others] have this kind of rarified domain."

Larger services such as Literature Online (LION) may offer as many as 250,000 publications, but subscriptions are pricey - as much as $50,000 to $100,000 to purchase - and their approach is "coarse-grained," Flanders notes. Users are limited to broad searches by categories such as authors or keywords. The WWP site allows users to search and cross-search by many more categories, including document contexts such as quotes, epigraphs and handwritten annotations.

"This is a representation of texts that is very analytical and allows scholars to ask research questions," says Flanders. "It can look at 100 or 1,000 [items] at a time to see patterns no human would find looking at them one by one."

As a result, the Women Writers Project site is highly regarded by subscribers from as far away as Japan, Australia, Israel, Eastern Europe, Mexico and, recently, the University of Zululand. "That was probably the farthest from the beaten path," Flanders says of the inquiry from a professor writing about British romanticism.

Flanders, Caton and Bauman will draw from their decade of experience to guide others to develop their digital projects using analytical, methodical procedures that will anticipate - and ultimately meet - the needs of users and subscribers.