Announcements
Four New Texts Added to Women Writers Online
Happy Halloween! We are pleased to announce that we have added four new texts to Women Writers Online: Aphra Behn’s 1677 Abdelazer, or, The Moor’s Revenge, Amelia Bristow’s 1830 The Orphans of Lissau (vol. 2), Zilpha Elaw’s 1846 Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, and Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, and Clara Reeve’s 1792 Plans of Education.
This publication set, which continues the WWP’s focus on texts by women of color and that represent racialized identities, highlights the breadth of the WWO collection, with a seventeenth-century play, an eighteenth-century work of educational theory, a nineteenth-century novel, and a nineteenth-century memoir.
July 22, 2025
Updated Python Notebooks for Word Embedding Models Now Available
We are happy to report that we have now released updated versions of the WWP’s notebooks for working with word embedding models in Python. Available at this release, the notebooks have been revised and tested, and now include a new notebook with code and instructions for evaluating trained models. The full set of notebooks can be viewed on our GitHub repository, and the new model evaluation notebook is also complemented by an essay on “Word Vector Model Evaluation” by Avery Blankenship.
You can see the full set of the WWP’s resources for working with word embedding models on the Women Writers Vector Toolkit and explore datasets, visualizations, and other tools for experimenting with early women’s texts at the WWP Lab.
June 24, 2025
Announcing the Launch of an Updated Women Writers Online Interface
The Women Writers Project is delighted to announce that we have released a new version of the Women Writers Online (WWO) interface. This new interface includes significant improvements to WWO’s search functionality (especially for older works), as well as a refreshed theme with higher-contrast icons, mobile-friendly layout, and many small updates to improve the site’s usability. Also new to WWO is the context pane, which opens alongside the document reader. The context pane provides access to information about the work as a whole, such as details about the WWO publication and original publication, and navigable keywords-in-context.
To celebrate this launch, we invite you to explore the WWO collection using the following temporary credentials:
User name: wwo2025
Password: NewWWO
Both are case sensitive. These credentials will remain active until July 14, 2025.
As always, the WWP team is happy to offer free trial access upon request.
Women Writers Online includes more than 470 texts written and translated by women, first published between 1526 and 1850. See our welcome page for more ideas on working with WWO and the WWP’s other collections, and see our help page for more on using the new interface. We welcome your feedback, suggestions, and questions on the new interface and the WWO collection: please email wwp@neu.edu to get in touch.
April 7, 2025
Celebrating More Than Thirty Years of the Women Writers Project
The WWP is delighted to announce the release of Always in Progress: Three Decades of the Women Writers Project, a documentary by John Melson. Work on this documentary begin in 2018 as part of the WWP’s celebrations of the project’s thirtieth anniversary. This milestone marked an opportunity to reflect on the WWP’s decades of work bringing texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive to make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, and scholars. The documentary shares highlights from the WWP’s years at Brown University, where the project was founded in 1988, and Northeastern, where the project moved in 2013. The WWP hosted a screening party on March 27 and we were delighted to have in the audience present and past members of the WWP community including students, staff, and advisors—it was exciting to see familiar faces and remember the many important contributions people have made over the years.
The documentary outlines the WWP’s long history as a project focused on early women’s writing and text encoding, and includes insights from current and past staff and students about representing texts using the Text Encoding Initiative markup language and publishing them on the Women Writers Online digital interface. The film also follows WWP staff and students as they work on several initiatives, including the Women Writers Vector Toolkit exploratory interface, the Women Writers in Review collection of periodical reviews, and the Women Writers in Context scholarly exhibit series. Several scholars and experts in the digital humanities, including Dean of the Library Dan Cohen, also speak about the impact of long-term projects like the WWP on digital scholarship and discuss what the project can teach us about the history of the digital humanities.
The documentary was made possible with support from the Northeastern University Humanities Center, the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, and the Northeastern University Library. It was directed by John Melson, with camera and sound by John Melson and Colleen Nugent. The WWP team is deeply grateful to all who contributed to the documentary and to the many others who have shaped the project over the years!
March 3, 2025
WWO Beta Site and Free March 2025
In celebration of Women’s History Month, Women Writers Online will once again be freely available during the month of March. This collection includes more than 470 texts written and translated by women, first published between 1526 and 1850. See our Welcome Page for more ideas on working with WWO and the WWP’s other collections.
The Women Writers Project is also delighted to announce that we have released a beta version of the Women Writers Online (WWO) interface. The beta interface includes significant improvements to WWO’s search functionality (especially for older works), as well as a refreshed theme with higher-contrast icons, mobile-friendly layout, and many small updates to improve the site’s usability. Also new to WWO is the Context pane, which opens alongside the document reader. The Context pane provides access to information about the work as a whole, such as details about the WWO publication and original publication, and navigable keywords-in-context.
We invite all members of the community to test the new Women Writers Online interface. We really appreciate your input. The site will be freely available through March 31, 2025, in celebration of Women’s History Month. Please take some time to experiment with the beta site and then we invite you to share your impressions in the form.
October 18, 2024
Call for Teaching Partners and Free March 2025
The WWP team is happy to confirm that Women Writers Online will be again free for the month of March, in celebration of Women’s History Month. This collection includes more than 470 texts written and translated by women, first published between 1526 and 1850. See the current list of texts in WWO for more on the collection. We also wanted to share some resources developed by our teaching partners, and circulate a call for those who are interested in joining the teaching partners program with the WWP.
If you’d like more ideas about using WWO in the classroom, we have a growing set of resources on teaching with Women Writers Online, including both assignments and syllabi. We also have a program in which teaching partners collaborate with us to create activities, assignments, and syllabi. Read more about the program and see some of the materials developed by our partners on the teaching partners page.
If you’re interested in becoming a teaching partner yourself or have teaching ideas to share, please email us for more information (wwp@neu.edu). If you’d like to work with Women Writers Online prior to March, and you don’t have institutional access, we would be happy to set up a trial (more details on WWO licensing and trials are here). If you are curious about the resources that the WWP shares, we have a Welcome page that has information on all the WWP’s publications, many of which are always open access.
June 17, 2024
Seven New Texts Added to Women Writers Online
We are pleased to announce that we have added seven new texts to Women Writers Online: Amelia Bristow’s 1828 Emma de Lissau (vol. 2), Charlotte Brooke’s 1791 The School for Christians, Elizabeth Colson’s 1727 A Short Account of the Life of Elizabeth Colson, Elleanor Eldridge’s 1838 Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge (with Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall), Hannah Webster Foster’s 1797 The Coquette, Hannah More’s 1788 Slavery, a Poem, and Joanna Southcott’s 1801 The Strange Effects of Faith.
This publication set includes two accounts sharing the perspectives of Black women in New England: Elleanor Eldridge’s memoirs describe her personal and family history in Rhode Island, as well as her experiences in a property debate, which the memoirs were published to help fund. A Short Account of the Life of Elizabeth Colson is a first-person description of her life that was published in The New-England Weekly Journal. This publication set also adds to the abolitionist writing available in Women Writers Online, with Hannah More’s poem, which demands: “Shall Britain, where the soul of Freedom reigns, / Forge chains for others she herself disdains? / Forbid it, Heaven! O let the nations know / The liberty she loves she will bestow.” Another highlight is Southcott’s Strange Effects of Faith, a collection of religious prophecies which helped launch a “Southcottian” movement that has continued adherents in the twenty-first century.
Women Writers Online is Free for the Month of March
In celebration of Women’s History Month, Women Writers Online will once again be freely available during the month of March. We invite you to explore and enjoy the more than 460 texts in the collection!
If you haven’t visited WWO before, there are multiple ways to discover new texts. For example, you can filter through texts based on genre and publication year or use the search bar to look for specific keywords. You can also go to our open-access collections Women Writers in Review and Women Writers in Context and browse the themes and topics there for subjects you’re interested in, since both collections link back to the texts in WWO. You might also want to check out our full list of texts in WWO, recently published texts, and help pages. See our Welcome Page for more ideas on working with WWO and the WWP’s other collections.
This is an especially exciting time to explore the WWP’s publications, since we have added 25 exhibits to Women Writers in Context this year, many of which were originally published through the earlier Renaissance Women Online collection. We are grateful to the scholars who have contributed their expertise in making works by early women writers more accessible and discoverable. If you are interested in submitting an exhibit for WWiC, see the series description and author guidelines.
December 11, 2023
Six New Texts Added to Women Writers Online
We are pleased to announce that we have added six new texts to Women Writers Online: Amelia Bristow’s 1828 Emma de Lissau (vol. 1), Angelina Grimké’s 1836 Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, Sarah Grimké’s 1836 An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States, Eliza Haywood’s 1725 Fantomina, Mary Holden’s The Womens Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1688, and Sarah Jinner’s An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of our Lord 1659.
We are delighted to include two almanacs in the publication set, and we look forward to publishing additional almanacs in the year to come. The newly-published texts also include two abolitionist essays by the Grimké sisters, who were prominent advocates for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.
Another highlight in the publication set is Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, a text that was also encoded by students of Professor Jessica Kane as part of the WWP’s Teaching Partners program. See the student edition or read more about the project on the WWP’s blog.
October 25, 2023
Call for Teaching Partners and Free March 2024
The WWP team is happy to confirm that Women Writers Online will be again free for the month of March, in celebration of Women’s History Month. This collection includes more than 450 texts written and translated by women, first published between 1526 and 1850. See the current list of texts in WWO for more on the texts in the collection. We also want to share some resources developed by our teaching partners, and circulate a call for those who are interested in joining the teaching partners program with the WWP.
If you’d like more ideas about using WWO in the classroom, we have a growing set of resources on teaching with Women Writers Online, including both assignments and syllabi. We also have a program in which teaching partners collaborate with us to create activities, assignments, and syllabi. Read more about the program and see some of the materials developed by our partners on the teaching partners page.
If you’re interested in becoming a teaching partner yourself or have teaching ideas to share, please email us for more information (wwp@neu.edu). If you’d like to work with Women Writers Online prior to March, and you don’t have institutional access, we would be happy to set up a trial (more details on WWO licensing and trials are here). If you are curious about the resources that the WWP shares, we have a “Getting started” page that has information on all the WWP’s publications, many of which are always open access.
September 6, 2023
The WWP Adds New Tutorials for Word Vector Models in Python
The Women Writers Project is delighted to announce that we have released a new set of code tutorials for training word vector models in Python. Word vectors are machine-learning technique for studying relationships between words in large corpora of texts. Please see this introduction for more on word vector models and their applications in humanistic research.
The new tutorials grew out of the NEH-funded Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist institute series, in which the WWP offered several seminars on using word vector models in teaching and research. As part of that series, the WWP published a set of R tutorials on running code, training and querying word vector models, validating trained models, and exploring models through plots and visualizations. To support those who work in Python, we have now released a complementary set of Jupyter Notebooks that cover the same key topics using the Gensim implementation of word2vec.
These notebooks were developed by Avery Blankenship, WWP Research Assistant and English Ph.D. Candidate, in collaboration with WWP staff Ash Clark and Sarah Connell, and with support from Julia Flanders, Quinn Dombrowski, Felix Muzny, Santiago Rivas, and Yong-Yu Huang. Both the R tutorials and the Python notebooks can be downloaded along with sample data and a framework for organizing texts and generated files from the WWP’s Public Code Share GitHub repository.
The series of Python tutorials includes four notebooks:
- Introduction to Python provides an overview of fundamental concepts in the programming language Python that are necessary for the subsequent notebooks. The notebook assumes that users have an understanding of basic programming concepts but perhaps not Python specific knowledge.
- Introduction to Word Vectors in Python provides an introductory framework for importing data, cleaning data, training a word2Vec model, querying that model, and finally evaluating that model. The notebooks use a sample dataset of nineteenth-century American recipes which has been included with the directory. This sample dataset can be modified.
- Exploratory Visualization With Word2Vec provides a framework for exploratory visualization techniques using word2Vec. The notebook uses a sample model provided with the directory, but this sample model can be changed.
- Further Explorations of Word Vectors in Python elaborates on the word2Vec notebooks above to provide possibilities for further analysis as well as to discuss the broader world of machine learning that word2Vec is a part of.
You can read more about getting started with these notebooks, and see the source code, at the GitHub repository.
We are excited to add the new Python notebooks to the growing set of resources the WWP has developed for exploring this powerful method of textual analysis:
- The Women Writers Vector Toolkit (WWVT), an online laboratory for learning about and experimenting with word embedding models. This includes an interface for exploring pre-trained word vector models without using any code, as well as a range of guides, samples, and other resources.
- R versions of the tutorials for working with word vector models, available for download on GitHub as well as in formatted versions for reading online.
- A “Primer” that offers self-guided lessons in both foundational concepts and hands-on applications for working with word vector models.
- A series of blog posts about research and teaching with word vector models, authored by WWP staff and participants in the Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist institutes.
We hope you will find these resources useful! Please email us at wwp@neu.edu with feedback or suggestions. To get started with the new Python tutorials, download them from our GitHub repository.
Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist 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.
June 15, 2023
Six New Texts Added to Women Writers Online
We are pleased to announce that we have added six new texts to Women Writers Online: Lucretia Mott’s 1850 Discourse on Woman, Christian Gray’s 1821 A New Selection of Miscellaneous Pieces in Verse, Eliza Lee Cabot Follen’s 1846 The Liberty Cap, Amelia Bristow’s 1830 The Orphans of Lissau (vol. 1), and Lydia Maria Child’s The Oasis (1834) and the Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836).
Several of these texts highlight how women contributed to nineteenth-century abolitionist campaigns; for example, The Liberty Cap contains vignettes and poems that advance anti-slavery arguments, The Oasis is a collection of anti-slavery works edited by Child that includes the narrative of “Joanna”, and the Anti-Slavery Catechism outlines its argument through a set of questions and answers, such as:
“Q. It does not seem as if such things could take place in a civilized country. Can you believe it?
A. If you reflect a little upon human nature, I believe you will think it perfectly natural that such abuses should exist, wherever one human being has arbitrary power over another. You would not like to place yourself completely in the power even of the best man you know; you would be afraid to have it depend entirely on his will how much work you should do in a day, what food you should eat, what clothes you should wear, and how and when you should be punished. It is not considered entirely safe for an aged parent to relinquish all his property, and trust entirely the generosity of his own children; what then do you suppose the poor slave has to expect, when he becomes too old and infirm to be profitable to his master?”
Women’s close engagement with the social issues of their times is evident in the other new texts as well. Bristow’s Orphans of Lissau asserts that its aim is to provide authentic representations of the “customs, opinions, and habits” of Jewish individuals during a time “when their spiritual and temporal circumstances are, in an especial manner, brought before the Public, both by the religious and political world.” Gray’s collection of poems offers the perspective of an author described as “Blind From Her Infancy” on topics that include access to medicine, living in a time of war, and property ownership. Mott’s Discourse on Woman is a published lecture on equality for women that closes with this wish: “Let woman then go on—not asking as a favor, but claiming as right, the removal of all the hindrances to her elevation in the scale of being—let her receive encouragement for the proper cultivation of all her powers, so that she may enter profitably into the active business of life.”
May 1, 2023
Intertextual Networks White Paper Published
The WWP is delighted to announce that we have released a white paper on the Intertextual Networks project. Intertextual Networks was a research project funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, focusing on intertextuality in early women’s writing. As part of this project, the WWP has published a series of exhibits on early women’s engagements with intertextuality as well as the Women Writers: Intertextual Networks interface for exploring the many ways that WWO authors named, quoted, cited, and otherwise engaged with texts and authors.
The focus of this work on this project was twofold: both to develop a version of the WWP’s full-text collection of early women’s writing in which intertextual “gestures” are formally represented as data, and also to produce a body of scholarship that explores the complex and multifarious phenomenon of intertextuality with a specific focus on women’s writing. The white paper describes the work and outcomes of this project, sharing insights on both intertextuality and large-scale markup expansion efforts.
March 2, 2023
Call for Submissions: Race and Racialized Identites in Early Women’s Writing
As part of a grant-funded project on “Representing Racial Identity in Early Women’s Writing,” the Women Writers Project is seeking submissions for short exhibits on topics related to race and racialized identities for the open-access Women Writers in Context publication series.
We are hoping to publish a collection of short topical introductions aimed at a broad readership. For example, possible topics might include the intersections of racialized identities with colonialism and empire, social justice, place and geography, public and private spaces, health and medicine, or literacies and ways of knowing.
The format is flexible: each exhibit should introduce its topic and discuss how that topic relates to or manifests in a relevant set of texts from Women Writers Online. Within this basic structure, we welcome experimentation from authors. Length is also flexible: we imagine that some exhibits might be just five or six paragraphs, but longer and more in-depth pieces are also welcome. The goals of the series are to introduce people (particularly students) to new texts by early women writers, to provide a set of entry points for understanding early women’s writing in the context of critical race theory, and to draw new connections between the texts and authors in Women Writers Online.
For more information, see our author guidelines for Women Writers in Context and our statement on peer review. We are envisioning these exhibits as similar to those in our current series “Thirty Years, Thirty Ideas,” which also offer short topical introductions using texts from WWO. See our publications in this series for examples of how authors have approached such exhibits.
This list of texts in WWO indicates the range of the collection and we also have a list of forthcoming texts; suggestions for works we should add to WWO are always welcome. Interested authors who do not have institutional access to WWO are encouraged to email us to arrange free access.
If you have questions or are interested in submitting an exhibit, please email us at wwp@neu.edu. And finally, please share this invitation with anyone you know who might be interested.
February 27, 2023
Women Writers Online is Free for the Month of March
In celebration of Women’s History Month, Women Writers Online will once again be freely available during the month of March. We invite you to explore and enjoy the more than 450 texts in the collection!
If you haven’t visited WWO before, there are multiple ways to discover new texts. For example, you can filter through texts based on genre and publication year or use the search bar to look for specific keywords. You can also go to our open-access collections Women Writers in Review and Women Writers in Context and browse the themes and topics there for subjects you’re interested in, since both collections link back to the texts in WWO. You might also want to check out our full list of texts in WWO, recently published texts, and help pages.
February 13, 2023
Updates on WWP Outreach
The WWP team is happy to share some updates about how we’ll be circulating announcements and other news in the future. The biggest change for 2023 is that we are moving from Twitter to Mastodon. Please follow us there.
We are also working to reinvigorate the WWP-L list. This list brings together a community of people interested in women’s writing, text encoding, and feminist DH work. We’ll continue using the list as a place to share announcements and new publications, and we’re also welcoming members to share their own work, ask questions, and get input from the community. The WWP site has more information on the list, including how to join.
We have also decided to fold the discussions from the WWP-Encoding list into WWP-L, to streamline communications. WWP-Encoding is a list for questions from and discussion among participants in our TEI workshops, but is now very low-volume, so should not generate much extra traffic on WWP-L, where encoding questions are very much welcome! We’ll soon be inviting members of the WWP-Encoding list to switch to WWP-L, to bring all the WWP’s discussions into the same space.
If you’re looking for even more exciting WWP content, you can follow our blog for posts written by our staff and collaborators on current research and teaching with text encoding and early women writers.
Finally, just a reminder that WWO will again be free for the month of March, in celebration of Women’s History Month, and we are always able to set up free trials upon request.
December 13, 2022
Seven New Texts Added to Women Writers Online
We are pleased to announce that we have added seven new texts to Women Writers Online: Anne Hart Gilbert’s 1835 Memoir of John Gilbert, Elizabeth Sarah Gooch’s 1795 The Contrast (vol. 1), Eliza Haywood’s 1729 The City Widow, Jemima Kindersley’s 1777 Letters from the East Indies, Lady Damaris Masham’s 1696 A Discourse Concerning the Love of God, and two anonymous texts: the 1767 Female American (vol. 2) and the 1808 Woman of Colour.
These texts connect closely with the WWP’s grant project, “Representing Racial Identity in Early Women’s Writing,” funded by Northeastern’s TIER 1 program, with co-PIs Professors Nicole Aljoe and Julia Flanders. For more on this project, see “Representing Race in the Early Modern Archive” by Cailin Roles.
October 18, 2022
Announcing the release of Checking Pointers Using your TEI ODD Customization
We are pleased to announce the publication of Checking
Pointers Using your TEI ODD Customization. This
document is intended as a sort of “TEI by Example”
for those writing TEI customizations (ODDs) who wish to
enforce rules about their encoded pointers
(URIs). Inspired by a TEI
issue, it demonstrates how to add rules to your
customization to allow checking of pointers during
validation of your documents, rather than waiting for
errors in processing. It demonstrates rules like “the
@target attribute of a
<note> should point to only 1 thing”
(by default it can point to many) or “the
@ref attribute of a
<persName> must point to a
<person>” (by default it can point
to anything).
We hope this proves useful and welcome your feedback—Please contact us at wwp@neu.edu with any questions, feedback, or bug reports.
For older announcements please see our archive.
