By Colleen Nugent, Ph.D. student, History For my NULab research project, I worked with the Women Writers Project at Northeastern. My overall goal was to add more context to a WWO text by providing map visualization to accompany a travel narrative. Before I could start on this project, I first had to learn text encoding using XML and TEI in Oxygen. I was embedded into the WWP as a text encoder, and fully encoded a text of my own before I began learning…
We are very excited to announce a new open-access research tool! Women Writers: Intertextual Networks is the result of a three-year project focusing on intertextuality in early women’s writing. This collaborative research initiative examined the citation and quotation practices of the authors represented in Women Writers Online (WWO) to explore and theorize the representation of intertextuality, and to study the ways in which early women writers named, cited, quoted, and remixed texts by other authors. We identified and encoded each of…
By Avraham Roos This post is part of a series we will be publishing with projects from the WWP’s Institutes Series: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist. This post is excerpted from Avraham Roos’s dissertation, “Why is This Translation Different from All Other Translations? A Linguistic and Cultural-Historical Analysis of English Translations of the Passover Haggadah from 1770 to Now.” Former Google-employee Thomas Mikolov and colleagues introduced “Word2Vec” (Mikolov et al. 2013), a tool for learning continuous word embeddings…
We are delighted to announce that Women Writers Online (WWO) will once again be free during the month of March in celebration of Women’s History Month. The collection contains more than 430 texts written and translated by women, published between 1526 and 1850. We also invite you to explore our other publications, which are always open access. These include Women Writers in Review (WWiR), a collection of close to 700 reviews of and responses to works in WWO, and Women…
By Emily Miller Leading up to the July 2021 Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist workshop, I’d been doing some work with the WWP website and incubating a fledgling word2vec project as part of my work on the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities here at Northeastern. The workshop approached, and the R files were prepared and polished. All that was left was to give them a road test. As someone new-ish to DH and learning these tools for my own project,…
By Cailin Roles Here at the Women Writers Project, our central work is text encoding: we encode works in English or English translation by women before 1850 in XML, following the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). In 2020, the WWP expanded to include a new, internally-funded collaborative project, which asks whether and how digital collections of historical texts can represent racial identity. Building on the work of scholars like Kim Hall (1995), Brigitte Fielder (2020), and Jessica Marie Johnson (2020), we…
By Juniper Johnson During my time as the 2019–2020 NULab Coordinator, I extended my previous research experience with the Women Writers Project to build an XSLT script for tokenizing element content for the Women Writers Vector Toolkit (WWVT). The WWVT is an online laboratory for learning about and experimenting with word embedding models and features over 20 models created using the Women Writers Online (WWO) corpus and parallel corpora created from the Text Creation Partnership collections. The WWVT models are…
By Grace O’Mara, WWP Research and Encoding Specialist and PEAK Award Recipient The Goal Over the past four months, I have spent my time researching Sarah Jinner’s 1659 almanac “An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year of our Lord 1659 being the Third After Bissextile Or Leap Year: Calculated for the Meridian of London, and may Differently Serve for England, Scotland, and Ireland / by Sarah Jinner Student in Astrology” and Mary Holden’s 1688 title “The Women’s Almanack for the…
We are delighted to announce that Women Writers Online (WWO) will once again be free during the month of March in celebration of Women’s History Month. The collection contains more than 420 texts written and translated by women, and published between 1526 and 1850. We also invite you to explore our other publications, which are always open access. These include Women Writers in Review (WWiR), a collection of close to 700 reviews of and responses to works in WWO, and Women Writers in Context (WWiC), a…
By Jacob Murel In his book The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (2012), Urs App tells the story of the sixteenth-century murderer Anjirō (also, Yajirō) who fled Japan and joined the Jesuit order in Malacca. After being baptized and instructed in the Christian faith under Francis Xavier, Anjirō returned to Japan as a translator between the Jesuit missionaries and Japan’s Buddhist community. Anjirō’s respective descriptions of Buddhism to the Malaccan…