The Women Writers Project recently received a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to further study the primary sources already available in the project's database.
Though the project — an ongoing Brown-based research project that aims to recover and digitize the works of early women writers — has been funded repeatedly by NEH grants in the past, the most recent grant will allow the University to collaborate with outside researchers.
"This latest grant funds specific, focused parts of the project's major mission," said Julia Flanders, director of the Women Writers Project and member of the library's Scholarly Technology Group. The project will concentrate on the reception of the early texts written by women in the English language. Flanders said the new grant project will help answer questions such as "How did people read the texts at the time? How did people see women's writing at the time? How was it viewed in public media?"
Part of the money from the grant will be used to attract scholars from outside the Brown community to research how women writers were received at the turn of the 18th century.
"We're not so presumptuous to think we have a monopoly on the expertise of early women's writing," said John Melson, manager for the Women Writers Project.
In addition to research, Flanders said the grant will fund graduate student research assistants, who will identify and collect reception materials, along with the development of the infrastructure for storing and presenting the research material.
Flanders said the idea for the grant was "a lucky result of ongoing conversations," especially those she had with Sarah Bordac, head of outreach and instructional design at the John Hay Library.
The grant-funded project begins in January. "Results will start to be visible within the first year or so, but the final project will be completed at the end of the grant," which is three years from now, Flanders said.
The results of the new project will be digitized and available to everyone, Flanders said. Both she and Melson said they hoped the texts would also be visible in company with Women Writers Online primary texts, which are only available by license. Flanders said she wanted the context to be studied "side by side" with the text.
"Looking at the way this material was talked about and written about by readers could provide a context for those reading it," Melson said.
Brown has been a leader in the "general domain of digital humanities and specifically of creating these high-quality digital humanities research materials," Flanders said. "The mission of the project is to recover and republish works by early women writers in English, materials that under normal circumstances would be difficult to find for teaching and research."
The Women Writers Project has already digitized 322 texts written by women in English before 1850, Melson said.
