Women Writers Project

By Alicia Svenson, Ph.D. Student, History I was asked to finish encoding a text that had been languishing in the WWP’s “under construction” holding area since 2014. Opening the file up, it was clear that Clara Reeve’s Plans of Education; With Remarks on the System of Other Writers. In a Series of Letters between Mrs. Darnford and her Friends (1792) was not going to be like previous texts I had encoded, such as Lucretia Mott’s famous polemic about women’s rights,…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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By Syd Bauman This blog post describes the history behind and recent release of the “tei_customization” schema available in the oXygen TEI framework.  As many readers of this blog already know, the Text Encoding Initiative schema is designed to be customized by its users. The customization process enables individual projects or user communities to alter the TEI’s constraints and make them more restrictive, more permissive, or just plain different. While the strategic value of such customization is a subject of…

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In this blog post, we describe the WWP’s solution to a problem that other projects may well face: inserting encoding for line breaks after a text has been transcribed. Here is a lightly edited transcript of an interview Kyle Wholey (Outreach Coordinator at the WWP) conducted with Syd Bauman (Senior XML Programmer-Analyst) and Sarah Connell (Assistant Director).   So what exactly was the problem you worked on here? Sarah: We recently discovered an issue with a text that had been…

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