Reading Between the Lines: A Mini Blog Series Investigating A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

Reading Between the Lines: A Mini Blog Series Investigating A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

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By Claire Lavarreda, NULab/DITI Research Fellow and World History Ph.D. student   I. Introduction “Mother, from the time we were taken, had manifested a great degree of fortitude, and encouraged us to support our troubles without complaining; and by her conversation seemed to make the distance and time shorter, and the way more smooth. But father lost all his ambition in the beginning of our trouble, and continued apparently lost to every care—absorbed in melancholy. Here, as before, she insisted on the…

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On Encoding Difficult Texts

On Encoding Difficult Texts

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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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Student project showcase: visualization citations over time

Student project showcase: visualization citations over time

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We are very excited to share a class project, developed by Emily Gringorten, Sofie Cook, and Grace Brown for the class DS4200, Information Presentation and Visualization. In this project, the students worked with data from the Intertextual Networks project to explore chronological patterns in citations of well-represented authors and genres in the WWO collection. The team also explored references to women writers over time. For example, the plot below shows reference to Shakespeare between the seventeenth and nineteenth centures: See the project writeup…

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Antiracist Markup Practices Symposium

Antiracist Markup Practices Symposium

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By Grace O’Mara, Research and Encoding Specialist On May 15th, 2023, the Women Writers Project hosted a virtual symposium on Antiracist Markup Practices. The event gave participants the opportunity to hear from a variety of digital projects that are working to develop antiracist editing and encoding practices, and to think through the potential and challenges of representing marginalized and racialized identities through markup. Additionally, the symposium investigated the implications of social justice frameworks for text encoding theory and practice. We…

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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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