Sarah Connell, Project Manager on the Women Writers Project, has an exciting announcement! Since 1986, The Women Writers Project has been committed to ensuring that texts written by women in the early modern period are digitized and accessible to contemporary audiences. Northeastern is privileged to host one of the oldest projects in the field of digital humanities and aid its ongoing work. Visit our Projects page to learn more about the WWP and other initiatives supported by the Digital Scholarship Group.
The WWP is delighted to report that we have received funding for a three-year, $290,000, project from the National Endowment for the Humanities, focusing on intertextuality in early women’s writing. Starting in October 2016, the WWP will begin work on Intertextual Networks, a collaborative research initiative that will examine the citation and quotation practices of the authors represented in Women Writers Online (WWO) to explore and theorize the representation of intertextuality.
For this project, the WWP will assemble a collaborative research team that includes faculty, graduate students, and members of the WWP staff, representing a diverse set of perspectives and expertise. Each member of the collaborative group will pursue a research project engaging with materials from WWO, to be published in Women Writers in Context, the WWP’s open-access publication series. We will also be developing interface tools for exploring intertextual connections and patterns. As part of this work, we will be undertaking a broad encoding of quotations and citations across the entire WWO collection, linking textual references to a comprehensive bibliography of sources, which we will make openly available at the WWO Lab. We will also make a deeper exploration of subtler kinds of intertextual reference (such as allusion and parody) in a subset of the collection, to reveal the many ways in which the textual space reverberates with echoes and referential gestures. This deeper exploration will be strongly informed by the research of our scholarly collaborators and the particular projects they undertake.
Our initial research has already found several promising ways that text encoding can support research into citation and quotation practices. For example, we can trace the increased secularization of writing over time by tracking biblical references in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Biblical quotations make up a dramatically higher percentage of citations in seventeenth-century texts (about 1,600 out of 2,100) when compared with eighteenth-century ones (about 200 out of 1,700). We have found this same pattern in the titles that are named by WWO authors—in the seventeenth century, books of the Bible are most frequently named, while in the eighteenth there is a broader spread of writers and genres. The expanded markup we will be performing as part of this project will enable us to make much more precise and detailed analyses of reference patterns and practices in early women’s texts.
We have recruited an initial set of collaborators and we are currently soliciting proposals for additional scholars interested in joining the project. For more details and to submit a proposal, see here. We will be posting updates on our progress and discoveries, as well as guest posts from our collaborators, here at the WWP’s blog so follow this space for more news.
Intertextual Networks has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This content was first posted on the WWP’s blog; learn more about recent developments in the project there!