Once again The Orlando Project was delighted to celebrate Women’s History Month by making the textbase freely available for the month of March 2014, courtesy of Cambridge University Press.
What is Orlando?
The Orlando Project is an experiment in the integration of text and technology. It has designed and continues to enhance digital tools to harness the power of computers for critical literary and historical research. Its widening of the knowledge base in cultural history goes together with the training and professional development of generations of students.
The project began when Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, and Susan Brown proposed to research and write a much-needed literary history and to deliver it electronically. It was a bold move: such an undertaking had not previously been attempted in kind, scale, or complexity, and at this stage in the development of humanities computing – the mid 1990s – it was by no means clear either that text encoding (markup) could produce meaningful results in so complex a field as literary history or even that an extensively encoded text could be effectively deployed and accessed on the internet. Nevertheless, Brown, Clements, and Grundy, traditionally trained and hitherto non-computational professors of English, set out to create a multidisciplinary team which could both produce a major history of women’s writing in the British Isles and conceive and build this as a digital history.
The Orlando Project is collaborative and multidisciplinary. The venture at its core brings together literary scholars, digital humanists, and computing scientists, and from the beginning the team has benefited from the generous collaboration of distinguished digital humanists from across Canada and internationally. Orlando research is cross-cultural, and student colleagues – of whom the Project has trained upwards of 85, and rising – learn about both editorial and archival research, and document analysis and markup. Professors and student researchers alike are excited by the experimental environment. Read more >
Searching in Orlando
The first three entry points to Orlando are People (for author entries singly or in groups, and other names), Chronologies (timelines by word, date, or tag), and Tag Search. Tag Search offers picklists of tags, with explanatory diagrams showing relationships between tags. This starburst represents the chief tags in the Production section of the Writing schema developed by Orlando. Some of these have subtags not represented here. For example, the Mode of Publication tag can be narrowed to subtags about subscription, or limited edition, etc.
NEWS: Open Access for Women’s History Month 2014Once again The Orlando Project was delighted to celebrate Women’s History Month by making the textbase freely available for the month of March 2014, courtesy of Cambridge University Press.
Orlando in the Media
Orlando’s Design Research
Explore in Orlando
20 August 1640
The Scots (provoked by Charles I's imposition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on the Scottish Presbyterian Church in 1637) invaded England, and for the second time in eighteen months their monarch marched against them.They entered English territory by fording the River Tweed. The resulting campaign became known as the Second Bishops' War. Charles (whose troops were raw and inexperienced) was beaten in battle by Scottish forces at Newburn (now in Tyne and Wear) on 28 August.
20 August 1642
Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham with the intention of reducing his rebellious people to subjection: thus began the English Civil War.Some skirmishes preceded this; the first battle followed at Edgehill in Warwickshire on 23 October. The central position of Nottingham increased the importance of Lucy Hutchinson's account of the war, told from that vantage point.
20 August 1661
Dorothy White dated her tract An Epistle of Love, and of Consolation unto Israel, from the pouring forth of Spirit, and holy anointing of the Father: the work numbered 14 pages, including verse passages.
- 20 August 1640
March 1, 2014 ·
September 24, 2013 ·
Susan Brown and John Simpson presented a paper titled “From XML to RDF in the Orlando Project” at the 2013 International Conference on Culture and Computing in Kyoto, Japan, on September 16. The beginning of the conference was postponed due to a typhoon warning for Kyoto and the surrounding area that had shut down the train systems, preventing many attendees from arriving on time. The conference began in . . . Read more
September 1, 2013 ·
“The most unaccountable of machinery”: The Orlando Project produces a textbase of one’s own,” an essay by Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy initially presented at last year in Saskatoon is now available in Interdisciplinary / Multidisciplinary Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Second Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, edited by Ann Martin and Kathryn Holland (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2013). Print copies of the collection can . . . Read more
August 31, 2013 ·
Orlando can now be searched through NINES, the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship. See the link under “Explore” on the Orlando home page or simply click here to search the full text of all entries. Inclusion in NINES means that Orlando materials are now searchable alongside NINES’ other rich collections of primary and secondary digital resources.
Because of the ways in which the extensive data can be mined or formulated, Orlando offers the best access to information on British women writers and serves as a model for similar databases that will supplant printed literary dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks (187).
The experiment is unquestionably a successful one. Orlando‘s most obvious utility, as with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, involves the ability to turn to its entries on more than 800 individual British women writers for specific biographical or bibliographical information. For example, Orlando‘s entry on Jane Austen or Frances Burney is in many ways more useful than the ODNB’s: it supplies more specific dates and employs a hierarchical structure that enables the reader to jump easily to specific portions of each entry. . . . Orlando, in that sense, offers one-stop biographical and book-historical shopping. Orlando’s unique value is in providing ‘materials [that] are capable of a high degree of interaction.’ To be sure, one can do a full-text search in the ODNB for the word ‘antiquarian’ or ‘bluestocking’ and come up with some surprising and valuable results, but in Orlando, the ability to quickly investigate not only such keywords but also circles of writers—particularly by tracing connections among individual writers (male and female)—is unprecedented. One can learn not only about interpersonal connections and literary influences but also about locations, events, occupations, genres, birth position, and other categories that link British women writers (and a smaller selection of male or non-British women writers) to each other.
Two books under review in this essay: William McCarthy’s Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment and Nicholas D. Smith’s The Literary Manuscripts and Letters of Hannah More.
Devoney Looser, “Enlightenment Women’s Voices”, Huntington Library Quarterly 73:2 (June 2010), 295-302. (Available from JSTOR).
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the number of digital Restoration and eighteenth-century archives and databases has proliferated. . . . . With diminishing resources for many universities, however, distinctions need to be made. Worth the investment, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present . . . should be considered indispensable for all scholars of literary history. . . . Much to their credit, the project’s editors, Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, have given great consideration to Orlando‘s macro- and micro-organizational principles. Ranging across factual, conceptual, critical and interpretive tags, their customized markup system provides in-depth information on the lives and works of women writers as well as their political, literary, economic, and cultural contexts. With the goal of creating a “comprehensive scholarly history of writing by British women,” it provides individual investigators with a productive tool for generating chronologies and “herstories” that we could only have dreamed of writing in an earlier era . . . . Fortunately, the editors here do more than most to explain their choices and to discuss the potential implications of their markup system. Thanks to their collective intellectual labors, users will have access to as many rooms of their own as they can imagine.
Lisa A. Freeman. “Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (review)”. The Scriblerian, 44: 2, 45: 1 (Spring and Autumn 2012), 87-9.
Wernimont takes Orlando, together with Women Writers Online, as “exemplary instances of digital literary scholarship.” Orlando’s DTDs or interpretive markup, she writes, are tools which are generative and transformative, not merely declarative. They "can be read as paratextual with respect to the absent primary texts — the literary texts written by women that Orlando articles discuss. Consequently, we can see this markup as generating a feminist and materialist hermeneutic space through which a reading of primary texts is enabled.”
Jacqueline Wernimont, “Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives” (Digital Humanities Quarterly, 7: 1 (2013), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000156/000156.html#fraiman2008.
… each Orlando Project entry serves the beginning student and advanced researcher alike; it provides an introductory survey of a particular author, but can also function as a source of the latest critical understandings of the author and an encouragement for further advanced research on the themes, influences, and cultural contexts radiating out from that author (377).
[...] Orlando‘s most innovative contribution to humanities scholarship is the modelling of more interpretive, open-ended, thematic database research. The database encourages what it terms “Tag Searches,” in which entries have been tagged to highlight key terms relating to topics unique to literary history; searches can return information relating to biographical details, literary production, literary reception, textual features, and essential or “core tag” details such as dates and names. Orlando allows searches for topics that are not part of a “typical” database search—such as editions, circulation, anthologization, and type of press—but are of keen interest to researchers of reading and writing culture. Orlando thus captures some of the most recent trends in history of the book and material culture studies and translates those interests into research queries that can be performed quickly and efficiently (377).
[...] Orlando enacts exciting new approaches to women’s history, literary history, and the history of the book by translating those approaches into an equally exciting database organization. The textbase features authoritative summaries of women’s lives and writing, new cultural and thematic topics for “tagged” investigations, and innovative processes for performing searches across disciplines and time periods. Perhaps most importantly, Orlando encourages the researcher to see new patterns, new connections, and new traditions—and thus to think in new ways. The transformative effect of women’s writing is keenly felt by the Orlando researcher. With its ability to encourage new thinking in both the entry-level student and the advanced researcher, Orlando deserves a prominent place in the electronic database collection of every research library (378).