Women Writers Project

By Mel Williams, English Ph.D. Student Overview Currently, the Women Writers Online collection contains 32 texts by Margaret Cavendish, spanning philosophy, poetry, plays, and scientific reflection, making her the most extensively represented early modern woman writer in the collection. Cavendish distinguishes herself as an author through her diverse genres and her insightful and often critical engagement with contemporary scientific and philosophical discourses. In 1667, she became the first woman invited to a meeting of the Royal Society, one of the…

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By Molly Nebiolo, Research and Encoding Specialist I was able to fly to Victoria, British Columbia to to attend DHSI 2018 thanks to a course waiver awarded by DHSI and a NuLab Seedling Grant that funded my transportation and housing for the class. Details on my experience with DHSI can be read here. Stylometry is a way to compare the similarity of texts in vector space and visualize those connections or changes between authors, over time, or across genres. The…

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by Lara Rose, PhD Student: Literature, Northeastern University This post is part of the Women Writers Project sub-project that explores the intersection of text encoding and text analysis using word embedding models. For brief explanations and early explorations, please see this post by Elizabeth Polcha, and this post by Jonathan Fitzgerald. “When a woman killed her husband, it was petty treason—a crime against the nation—When a man killed his wife, it was only murder.” -Professor Marina Leslie, on gender and…

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By Jonathan Fitzgerald, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Northeastern University I remember the first time I trained a topic model. It was in a course called Humanities Data Analysis, taught by Ben Schmidt. He provided us a corpus of the Federalist Papers and some code that he adapted from David Mimno, contributor to the original MALLET package and author of the R implementation of MALLET. After the initial confusion–“topics” aren’t topics in the traditional sense, after all–it felt like magic. The computer…

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