The speeches of Elizabeth I and a book on the "art of midwifery" are among the works of early women's literature that the Brown University Women Writers Project has worked for nearly two decades to make more accessible through transcription into digital text.
This January, the WWP was awarded a $250,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which it will use to finance a series of 12 workshops and seminars at selected universities across the country. These workshops, which will attempt to explain the major concepts behind transcribing scholarly documents as electronic text, begin this March at Stanford University.
"Text encoding doesn't usually loom large in the humanistic imagination," said Julia Flanders, the project's director. "The goal of these seminars is to give people a sense of text encoding as representation."
Just as in print editions, the transcription process affects the format and content of the primary documents. With this in mind, Flanders added that she hopes to teach scholars to analyze digital texts more critically.
Though the WWP has plenty of experience giving workshops - staff members have traveled as far as Taiwan to teach - these seminars will focus less on the step-by-step process of text encoding than have previous workshops.
"It's definitely going to be less hands-on and more about theory," said Syd Bauman, a senior analyst and programmer who will conduct the seminars with Flanders and Paul Caton, the project's editor of electronic publications.
Since its inception, the WWP has encoded a total of 234 works, all of which are currently available on its Web site, Women Writers Online, which can be found at www.wwp.brown.edu. According to Flanders, up to 25 or 30 texts may be added to the database each year, depending on the number of student programmers the project is able to hire.
In addition to its collection of plays, poems and novels, the WWP also houses several unusual documents in its database. A cookbook written by Hannah Wolley in 1664 describes the best procedures for pickling artichokes and stewing cows' udders, while Elizabeth Grey's "Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery" offers home remedies for maladies such as toothaches and the plague.
The database also contains texts by early female philosophers, such as Margaret Cavendish. "She wrote plays and natural philosophy in verse," Flanders said of the 17th-century author. "She asked things like 'Why is water wet?' and 'Why does heat rise?' She was very interested in science, but her medium was poetry."
While at first the project had difficulty locating documents, a renewed interest in the field of women's writing has unearthed a plethora of rare works. A board of librarians and literature professors from across the nation, including Melinda Rabb and Elizabeth Bryan, both associate professors of English at Brown, now consults the WWP about which documents to encode.
In addition to their workshop series, the WWP has several other projects slated for 2007. In the coming months, the WWP hopes to post an online collection of syllabi from faculty that show the various ways in which female-authored texts are being taught. The project will also publish an online guide to scholarly text encoding.
