In celebration of Women’s History Month, the Women Writers Online collection is open to public use for the month of March! It’s available through the Library and you can also explore it at http://textbase.wwp.brown.edu/WWO/.
Women Writers Online (WWO) is an electronic resource that contains full texts by women writers from approximately the mid-1500s to the mid-1800s. Literary figures featured in the database range from the canonical figures, such as Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and Mary Wollstonecraft, to lesser known and anonymous writers.
Women Writers Online also offers valuable support for teachers with syllabi collected from instructors who have used WWO texts in courses, suggested assignments that use WWO texts, and guides to using WWO texts in research.
The Brown University Women Writers Project created Women Writers Online, and it describes itself as “a long-term research project devoted to early modern women’s writing and electronic text encoding.” This project is a prime example of digital humanities scholarship, as its transcriptions and encoding of texts in TEI have produced rich collections of electronic texts that offer intriguing new avenues for literary studies and textual research. More of their work can be explored at http://www.wwp.brown.edu/wwo/lab/.