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Category: Encoding Explorations

“My Master” : Interracial colonial encounters in Women Writers Online

“My Master” : Interracial colonial encounters in Women Writers Online

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By Elizabeth Polcha, English Department PhD Candidate and WWP Research & Encoding Specialist This publication set calls attention to the complexity of settler colonialism and imperialism in women’s writing between the early eighteenth and the mid nineteenth-centuries, particularly in regards to representations of interracial relations. One of the earliest texts in this set, Elizabeth Hanson’s God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty (1728), is a captivity narrative in which Hanson shows both gratitude and affection for the indigenous people who have taken…

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WWO Free for the Month of March

WWO Free for the Month of March

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We are delighted to announce that Women Writers Online will once again be free during the month of March, in celebration of Women’s History Month. This collection includes almost 400 texts written and translated by women, first 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 by the works in WWO,…

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To the Right Honourable, Virtuous, Heroical Reader

To the Right Honourable, Virtuous, Heroical Reader

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This post was authored by Anna Kroon, University of New Haven class of 2019, who held an internship at the WWP during the summer of 2017.  I came to the Women Writers Project really excited to work on such a large project with a wide variety of texts in their files. My experience was limited to Victorian shipboard newspapers, so anything not related to the ocean or intellectual boat humor was thrilling to me. Since I had experience with XML…

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“‘The Text is Variety’: Contextualizing and Analyzing the Works of Margaret Cavendish with Text Encoding

“‘The Text is Variety’: Contextualizing and Analyzing the Works of Margaret Cavendish with Text Encoding

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Below are lecture notes from Sarah Connell’s presentation at the 2017 International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference. The slides are available as a separate file here. Okay, so, since one of the themes of this conference is how Cavendish was received, I want to begin with a quote about her from a text in Women Writers Online. So, here we have Elizabeth Benger on Cavendish, speaking of her fertile fancy, her uncommon genius, her wildness and inaccuracy, and her voluminous works. And,…

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“Day of DH” Snapshots of Our Daily Lives

“Day of DH” Snapshots of Our Daily Lives

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The Women Writers Project is proud to host our local Digital Scholarship Group “Day of DH” post this year. “Day of DH” provides an opportunity for members of the DH community to share “day in the life” vignettes with each other. For more information about “Day of DH,” please view the official site and you can follow the twitter hashtag #DayofDH.  I hope these snapshots offer a fun array of some of the people, activities, and work that comprises the DH community at Northeastern. Julia Flanders, Director…

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Manicules, double daggers, and silcrows! Oh my!

Manicules, double daggers, and silcrows! Oh my!

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The power of the corpus-wide query can often unearth a few surprise gems. While the team was researching the way notes are formatted in WWO, we became curious about which characters appear before notes in our texts. A quick XQuery script later, we had uncovered a few fun and interesting findings in the list of characters that are prefixed to the <note> elements in WWO. You can see the whole list at the bottom of this post. It’s not really surprising that the…

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A (semi-)Serious Proposal to the Linguists

A (semi-)Serious Proposal to the Linguists

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God, Vertue, Ladies, and Souls A few days ago, I came across this really interesting Language Log post, which talks about capitalization in one of our Women Writers Online texts—Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694). In the post, Mark Liberman asks the question: “Why did authors from Astell’s time distribute initial capital letters in the apparently erratic way that they did?” Liberman looks at sentences like this one, which describes the purpose of Astell’s proposal: It’s aim is…

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Loanwords, Macrons, and Orientalism: Encoding an Eighteenth-Century Fictional Translation

Loanwords, Macrons, and Orientalism: Encoding an Eighteenth-Century Fictional Translation

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By Elizabeth Polcha, WWP Encoder and Ph.D. Candidate in English Since late last fall, I’ve been encoding a text that poses some interesting markup challenges because of its use of Orientalist language: Scottish author Eliza Hamilton’s 1796 epistolary novel, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. While I was excited to encode Translation because my own research considers eighteenth-century colonial literature, I focus on Caribbean and American literature. So, as an encoder, I approached Translation with an interest in…

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Prototype Visualizations for Cultures of Reception

Prototype Visualizations for Cultures of Reception

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We will soon be publishing an exploratory interface for the more than 600 reviews, advertisements, and other periodical items that we’ve encoded for our Cultures of Reception project—which explores how the authors in Women Writers Online were discussed in periodicals from 1770 to 1830. In preparation for that interface, we’re also working with Steven Braun, the Data Analytics and Visualization Specialist in the Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group, to set up some visualizations that will help to highlight patterns across the texts…

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