Getting Started

Welcome! If you’re just beginning to explore the Women Writers Project’s publications, or if you’re curious about what the WWP has been up to, this is a great place to get started. Here, you will find links and resources for Women Writers Online and other WWP publications.

Women Writers Online

Women Writers Online is a collection of early women’s writing in English. It includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible. To get started with WWO, see the help page, list of recently published texts, the full list of texts in the collection, or our set of textual records and metadata.

Resources for Teachers

The WWP publishes many tools and materials to help teachers use the uniquely digital dimensions of WWO more effectively in their teaching. Our teaching resources include a database of syllabi on early women’s writing, suggested assignments to help students use some of the advanced features of WWO, and a set of quick how-tos to help get you started.

We also host a teaching partners program. Teaching partners work with the WWP to pilot assignments that use our collections—or that involve teaching with TEI and XML. The goal of the program is to develop sample sets of assignments to be published with our teaching materials and shared on the sites for each collection. Please see the teaching partners page for more information, and contact us at wwp@neu.edu if you are interested in participating.

Resources for Librarians

The WWP has a help page for librarians that contains information on licensing, MARC records, configuring proxy access, accessing usage statistics, and other useful resources.

Resources for Research and Learning

The WWP’s Resources page includes tutorials for learning TEI encoding, customization, transformation, and publication—accompanied by crib sheets and templates. This page also includes tutorials and guides for computational text analysis. Our Public Code Share on GitHub has a wide range of datasets, crib sheets, and code templates. If you would like to access the Women Writers Online XML files for research purposes, please send an email with a brief description of your research plans to wwp@neu.edu.

WWP Publications

In addition to WWO, the WWP also publishes a wide variety of collections and resources on early women’s writing, text encoding, and digital scholarship. For a full listing of WWP publications, including grant reports and documentation, visit our publications page.

Women Writers in Review is a collection of close to 700 contemporary reviews of and responses to works by the authors in WWO. WWiR is open access and linked with WWO, so that readers can easily navigate between both collections.
Women Writers in Context is an open-access collection that now includes more than 110 essays exploring topics related to early women’s writing. WWiC provides core background information for the texts in WWO and WWiR, while helping readers to discover new works by women writers. WWiC is a particularly helpful resource for students and can be a great way to facilitate access to the WWO collection.
Women Writers: Intertextual Networks is an interface for exploring the many ways that women quoted, cited, named, or referenced other texts and authors. WW:IN includes a bibliography of all the texts referenced in Women Writers Online, as well as options for exploring by genre, by different forms of intertextuality, and by the authors in WWO.
WWP Lab is where we publish new tools, visualizations, and technologies for experimenting with women’s writing.
Women Writers Vector Toolkit is an interface for exploring the WWO collection using word embedding models, which enable the discovery of relationships between words in large collections of texts. The WWP also publishes a tutorial curriculum (https://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/resources/wordvectors.html) for self-paced exploration of word vector models and machine learning.

Updates and Announcements

Keep up to date with the WWP! Our blog shares announcements and news on work in progress (including content and features to be added to WWO), along with posts describing research with the WWP’s collections. We also share updates on our announcements page.