Navigating Landing Pages

The landing pages for authors, received works, and periodical sources include basic bibliographic and biographic details, such as: birth and death or publication dates; publishers, editors, and publication locations; and locations of birth and death. Landing pages for received authors also provide a list of the works which are discussed in Women Writers in Review, and links to name authorities, such as WorldCat and the Library of Congress Name Authority. Landing pages for received works provide links to any editions of those works published in Women Writers Online, (subscription required; see this page for information on subscribing and setting up a free trial). It is worth noting that we have linked to Women Writers Online whenever an edition of a reviewed work is published there; the edition in WWO is not necessarily the particular edition under review.

On the landing pages, you will find a list of the individual reviews that were written about each author or work, published in each source, or marked with each tag. Longer sets of results will have multiple pages, which you can navigate using the numbered boxes at the top of the listed reviews. To open any review for reading, simply click on its title. You can also use the right-hand caret () to display or hide additional details about each review, or select a facet from the left-hand list to filter the results you see on each landing page.

Filtering with Facets

The list that appears on the left under the “Filter Results” heading will allow you to narrow the results you get in a set of reviews. For example, you can click on the “Authors” facets from a source’s landing page to view a list of all the authors that are discussed by that source—clicking again will minimize the list. Clicking on a facet will narrow your set of reviews to include only those for that facet—and clicking a second time will pull up the full set of results again.

Reading Reviews

The reading pages for individual reviews display relevant tags in the buttons at the top, which will enable you to navigate to other reviews with matching tags. Publication details and notes for each item appear in the box on the left, with links to the landing pages for authors, received works, and sources. If the work discussed in a particular review is available in Women Writers Online, you will be able to navigate to the WWO edition using a button that appears after the work’s citation, like this: .

Authors

Most reviews have no known author, so Women Writers in Review instead uses the term “authors” as shorthand for “referenced authors”—people who are mentioned or discussed in the reviews and who also hold some responsibility for creating texts. As a Women Writers Project initiative, Women Writers in Review seeks to highlight women’s contributions to creative works and so we apply the word “author” flexibly and include, for example, people identified as translators.

Reviews, Sources, and Works

Women Writers in Review seeks to place women’s writing in its context as a product of—and influence on—a growing literary culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To that end, we have collected several types of bibliographic information:

• reviews, or the TEI-encoded transcriptions of individual texts, including data about their sources, and pointers to any referenced works or authors;
• sources, or the historical periodicals/books/etc. in which the reviews were originally published; and
• works (shorthand for “referenced works”), or the distinct textual creations which are referenced in the reviews.

Levels of Bibliographic Data

Women Writers in Review subdivides each “work” into the following bibliographic entities:

• the work, or the text as a distinct artistic creation;
  • expressions, or the text as created or interpreted in different ways; and
    • manifestations, or the text as embodied in a published edition.

These roughly correspond to Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entities. A work can have multiple expressions, and an expression can have multiple manifestations.

For example, Hannah Adams wrote A Summary History of New England, which she later reinterpreted for a younger audience (An Abridgement of the History of New England for the Use of Young Persons). We have grouped these two texts as expressions of the same work (see here). In this case, there is no need to distinguish manifestations. An expression might have more than one manifestation if it was printed in multiple countries, or republished with minor corrections—neither of which applies to A Summary History of New England or An Abridgement of the History of New England for the Use of Young Persons.

It is worth noting that Women Writers in Review should not be considered a comprehensive resource for works’ publication histories. Editions are listed only if referenced by particular reviews.

Scavenger Hunt

Ask students to complete a scavenger hunt in WWiR. Below are a few suggestions for items that students could search for in the collection:

• References to either “female writers” or “female readers”
• Discussions of the costs of books, solicitations of subscriptions, or other aspects of print publication and circulation
• References to or reprints of other reviews
• Quotations of two or more paragraphs from reviewed texts
• Discussions of gender equality or the rights of women
• Usage of the word “fair” (bonus points if combined with “authoress”)

Once students have completed their search, discuss their results in the class as a whole. Some questions for consideration might be: How did students locate their results? Were any items particularly easy or difficult to find? How representative do the examples that each student or group found found seem to be? Were there interesting differences in the results that students found for any items on the list?

This activity provides an introduction to some prominent topics in the collection, while asking students to gain proficiency in navigating the site and encouraging consideration of early transatlantic review culture more broadly.

Survey of Adjectives

Ask students to read through several reviews and track all of the adjectives applied to authors and their works. You may wish to assign a group of reviews or ask students to look at different subsets of the collection—for example, students could compare “Very positive” and “Very negative” reviews, or filter by different formats and genres, or look at North American and British reviews.

Ask students to compile two lists: one with the adjectives applied to women writers and another with the adjectives applied to their writing (you may also want to ask students to observe descriptions of male writers and male-authored texts that appear in the reviews). Ask students to report their findings in a collaborative online document, through a class site, on whiteboards in the classroom, or however you prefer to share content in your class. Once the results are collected, ask students to identify the kinds of descriptors they have found (e.g., describing age, physical appearance, genre, gender, class, literary quality). You might ask: How do the descriptors break down into positive and negative categorizations? Are any adjectives being used to describe both the authors and their works? Are there any differences between the subsets of reviews? What do you think these results might indicate about the ways that women writers were represented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals?

This activity can begin a discussion about the reception—and representation—of women writers in transatlantic periodical culture while asking students to navigate and filter results in WWiR and encouraging them to pay careful attention to the language of individual reviews.

Survey of Evaluative Criteria

This activity also asks students to collect and categorize examples from WWiR, focusing on evaluative criteria more broadly. As with the survey of adjectives, this activity can be usefully applied to subsets of the collection to enable comparison and introduce filtering by evaluation, location, theme, and so on. Ask students to look through different sets of reviews and collect examples of the language these use to evaluate the reviewed texts. A few examples will likely be helpful here:

Ask the students to collect as many examples as they can find and then begin identifying the categories of evaluative criteria being applied; for example, the three quotes above all evaluate the works they discuss according to their fidelity to, or mastery of, some expected principles for writing verse. Other evaluative criteria might be: appropriateness of subject matter for a female author, readerly pleasure, grammatical correctness, or originality.

Once students have located quotes and categorized their evaluative criteria, ask them to share both quotes and categorizations with the class as a whole (because these will be longer than individual adjectives, electronic sharing is recommended). Then ask the students if they want to revise their taxonomies, having seen their classmates’ results. You may want to have the group consider the existing evaluative categories in WWiR, structured broadly around positive and negative evaluations, to lead into a discussion of how digital collections like this one can frame readers’ engagements with their materials.

This activity can help to introduce larger questions of collection design, while asking students to think about more challenging aspects of categorization and practice recognizing patterns in the rhetoric used in reviews of women’s writing.