Sample: The Women Writers Project by Julia Flanders and Team (Northeastern University) 1988-present

What is it: “Mark-up languages are among the common forms of structured data. The term “mark-up” refers to the use of tags that bracket words or phrases in a document. They are always applied within a hierarchical structure and always embedded within the text stream itself. Experimental approaches to address some of the conceptual and logistical problems that arise from the hierarchical structure of mark-up have not succeeded in making an effective alternative. Mark-up remains a standard practice in editing, processing, and publishing texts in electronic forms. The use of HTML tags, introduced in an earlier section, is a very basic form of mark-up. But where HTML is used to create instructions for browsers to display texts (specifying format, font, size etc.), mark-up languages are designed to call attention to the content of texts. This can involve anything from noting the distinctions among parts of a text such as title, author, stanza, or interpreting mood, atmosphere, place, or any other element of a text.”

Knowledge Design: what is the research question? what new knowledge is being created?

As a method of bringing inaccessible texts back into use, the electronic archive seemed like the ideal successor to the physical archive, since it promised to overcome the problems of inaccessibility and scarcity which had rendered women’s writing invisible for so long. This partnership of archival scholarship and electronic technology has become a model for text encoding projects all over the world.

Who is it for: a research community (literary studies, women’s studies, history), students, the public

Who makes it: a team of varying size

Medium/Media: forthcoming

System requirements: varies

Common Tools

How to measure impact: forthcoming

Resources