Women Writers Project

Celebrating more than 30 years of the Women Writers Project

On March 27, as part of a month-long celebration of Women’s History Month, the Women Writers Project hosted a screen of Always in Progress: Three Decades of the Women Writers Project, a documentary by John Melson.

Screenshot of a person with glasses speaking in front of a bookshelf. The person is identified as Julia Flanders, Director of the Women Writers Project & Professor of the Practice, Northeastern University
Julia Flanders, Director of the Women Writers Project, speaks in the Always in Progress documentary.

Work on this documentary began in 2018 as part of the WWP’s celebrations of the project’s 30th anniversary. This milestone marked an opportunity to reflect on the WWP’s decades of work bringing texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive to make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, and scholars. The documentary shares highlights from the WWP’s years at Brown University, where the project was founded in 1988, and Northeastern, where the project moved in 2013. We were delighted to have in the audience present and past members of the WWP community, including students, staff, and advisors—it was exciting to see familiar faces and remember the many important contributions people have made over the years.

The documentary outlines the WWP’s long history as a project focused on early women’s writing and text encoding, and includes insights from current and past staff and students about representing texts using the Text Encoding Initiative markup language and publishing them on the Women Writers Online digital interface. The film also follows WWP staff and students as they work on several initiatives, including the Women Writers Vector Toolkit exploratory interface; the Women Writers in Review collection of periodical reviews; the Women Writers: Intertextual Networks interactive bibliography; and the Women Writers in Context scholarly exhibit series. Several scholars and experts in the digital humanities, including Dean of the Library Dan Cohen, also speak about the impact of long-term projects like the WWP on digital scholarship and discuss what the project can teach us about the history of the digital humanities.

Three people sit in an office setting chatting
Elizabeth Adams, Julia Flanders, and Carole Mah working in the early days of the Women Writers Project.

The documentary was made possible with support from the Northeastern University Humanities Center, the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, and the Northeastern University Library. It was directed by John Melson, with camera and sound by Melson and Colleen Nugent. To learn more about the WWP, see the project’s Welcome page.

Library Digital Scholarship Group and NULab receive $500,000 NEH grant

The Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks received a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the NEH’s American Rescue Plan program.

The American Rescue Plan aims to provide funding to organizations conducting humanities projects that were adversely affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The grant awarded to the DSG and NULab is specifically focused on supporting humanities organizations.

This grant will help fund a series of digital projects currently underway through the DSG and NULab, but that were delayed or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It will support efforts to conduct collaborative research, digitize and process archival materials, create metadata, increase web accessibility, and more, while creating many graduate and undergraduate student research positions to conduct this work.

The projects that will benefit from this grant all involve collaborative engagement with communities outside of Northeastern, with many of them focused on resources related to underrepresented groups and social justice efforts. These include:

The grant also includes funding for additional projects organized through the NULab.

Julia Flanders, the director of the Digital Scholarship Group, is excited to get started: “We are honored and energized by this award. It creates wonderful research opportunities for students and will help the entire digital humanities ecology at Northeastern.”