Exploring women’s texts with the Women Writers Online: Scrabble Discovery Interface

Exploring women’s texts with the Women Writers Online: Scrabble Discovery Interface

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Here’s another way to explore the WWO collection during Women’s History Month: on April Fools Day, 2017 we released the Women Writers Online Scrabble Discovery Interface, an exciting new tool that enhances the texts in Women Writers Online by allowing users to discover the Scrabble® scores for the words in each text. Using cutting-edge XML technologies, this interface excludes non-playable words such as proper nouns, words in dialect, and non-English words. For example, the highest scoring single word in WWO…

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Using Encoding to Teach Textual Analysis II – Bigger and Badder

Using Encoding to Teach Textual Analysis II – Bigger and Badder

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By Jessica Kane, University of Michigan This collaboration was part of the WWP’s Teaching Partners program; for more information, see the digital edition created by the students. Introductory literature courses typically seek to help students understand why stories matter, as well as introduce them to some of the tools we use for textual analysis. Close reading, one of the foundational tools for analysis, requires careful attention to a text’s language, patterns, and gaps – something students often find challenging. A previous course’s success encoding…

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Setting the Foundation: Understanding WWP Authors’ Citations as Early Feminist Praxis

Setting the Foundation: Understanding WWP Authors’ Citations as Early Feminist Praxis

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By Alanna Prince, Ph.D. Candidate in English My latest efforts on The WWP’s Intertextual Networks project have made evident just how meticulous women writers were in their citation. Authors like Lady Damaris Masham and Joanna Southcott quoted and engaged with Scripture and other texts frequently in their works, showing not just that they were readers and consumers of texts, but also that they were able to produce critiques that were eloquent, sharp, and pointed. Further, through citation, these women were…

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Struggling to Teach with Word Vectors

Struggling to Teach with Word Vectors

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By Hayley C. Stefan (she/her) This post is part of a series we are publishing with projects from the WWP’s Institutes Series: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist. In May 2021, seemingly a lifetime ago, I had the opportunity to attend Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist, a week-long pedagogy-focused workshop put on by the Women’s Writers Project at Northeastern University, funded by an NEH Institutes for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities grant. One of our goals for the workshop was to think…

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Research with WWP Data at the AI/Machine Learning Research Bootcamp

Research with WWP Data at the AI/Machine Learning Research Bootcamp

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By Haripriya Mehta, Co-founder, MehtA+  In Summer 2022, 15 high school students from all over the world participated in MehtA+’s AI/Machine Learning Research Bootcamp and learned the theory and application of machine learning. Students learned various AI/Machine Learning models including KNN, support vector machines, artificial neural networks, and topics in computer vision and natural language processing.  The students put their newfound knowledge into practice through an exploratory week-long midterm project. The objective of the midterm was to predict the gender of the…

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Using encoding to teach textual analysis

Using encoding to teach textual analysis

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By Jessica Kane, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Albion College This collaboration was part of the WWP’s Teaching Partners program; for more information, see the digital edition created by the students or watch this short video on the project.  Eliza Haywood’s novella “Fantomina” (1725) begins by introducing the reader to “A YOUNG Lady of distinguished Birth, Beauty, Wit, and Spirit” (258) who creates four different personas, seduces the same man four different times, and ends up banished to a convent…

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Craven’s Journey: NULab Research Project

Craven’s Journey: NULab Research Project

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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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Announcing the launch of Women Writers: Intertextual Networks

Announcing the launch of Women Writers: Intertextual Networks

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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…

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Exploring English Translations of the Passover Haggadah in Word2Vec

Exploring English Translations of the Passover Haggadah in Word2Vec

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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…

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Women Writers Online is Free for the Month of March

Women Writers Online is Free for the Month of March

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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…

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