WWO Overview
Important: This is an old general overview of the WWO
Introduction
Women Writers Online is a website where licensed users can browse and search the WWP texts that are ready for the world. The majority of license holders are academic institutions or large public libraries, but there are individual scholars with personal licenses, too. The resource includes Renaissance Women Online, which is a subset of about 100 WWP texts from the early modern period. Under a Mellon Foundation grant a set of supplementary materials was created around this subset of texts and that is why they are presented separately as RWO in addition to being part of the complete WWO set.
Main WWO components
Browseable texts
The texts for browsing are static XHTML files stored in sub-directories under /WWO/html/. These XHTML files are created by running finished WWP XML files (ie. those in /tb/distribution/ through a processing sequence (more below). There are two types of XHTML file:
- the actual content of the text
- some metadata from the <teiHeader>
The actual display that users see onscreen is controlled by a PHP page. That is, when the user clicks on a title in the list of available texts, what they get from the server is actually a PHP page that constructs the link areas at the top and left of the screen and also grabs the appropriate contents XHTML file and includes it in the display.
Search functionality
WWO uses the open-source Philologic search engine. WWP finished files are processed (more below) and copies of the resulting XML files are then _ingested_ by Philologic engine which creates detailed and complex indices of words, elements, etc. A PHP-based interface allows users to query strings of texts and also element structures.
Processing of WWP texts to get them into WWO
Texts are copied over from /tb/distribution/ and processed by a series of Perl scripts and XSLT stylesheets to optimize them for transformation to HTML. They then have three separate stylesheets applied to them to produce three separate HTML files. These:
- extract some metadata
- transform the XML into XHTML