The ORLANDO Project 1University of Guelph School of English and Theatres Studies University of Guelph Guelph, ON N1G 2W1 sbrown@uoguelph.ca 2University of Alberta Department of English 3-5 Humanities Centre Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E5 patricia.clements@ualberta.ca isobel.grundy@ualberta.ca http://www.ualberta.ca/ORLANDO/ Abstract: This presentation will demonstrate Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present as a new mode of literary history enabled by the computer. The founding researchers and presenters of this paper turned electronic to solve some crucial problems in literary history: wanting to meet attacks on the partiality and monological qualities of linear narrative text; wanting to allow for great inclusiveness; wanting updatability given that basic factual recovery work on women writers is still in midstream; and wanting the text produced to be highly searchable. The Orlando Project turned to SGML markup and developed to support these aims a unique, domain-specific semantic markup system and latterly an XML delivery system designed to exploit the tagset and provide context-sensitive searchability. What ensued was a transformation in the research processes of the project itself, a new mode of disseminating the results of literary historical research, and a new kind of tool that enables literary research to be done in new ways. Orlando is thus, in its processes and its product, part of the practical transformation of research in the humanities by computer. Bio: Susan Brown, Project Co-Investigator, is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph and a founding member of the Orlando Project. She is responsible for Victorian materials in the textbase, and author of volume two of the Orlando History, 1820 - 1890. Her areas of research interest include Victorian women writers, Victorian poetry and poetics, the relationship of Victorian writing to diverse social fields including feminism, imperialism, and economics, and various issues in humanities computing. She was a contributor to the Feminist Companion to Literature in English and to the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States , and has published essays in the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (ed. J. Bristow), Victorian Women Poets (ed. A. Chapman), Literature and Money (ed. A. Purdy), Gender and Colonialism (ed. S. Ryder et al), and in journals including Feminist Studies , Victorian Poetry , Victorian Review , and English Studies in Canada . She received a University of Guelph Faculty Association Special Merit Teaching Award in 1999. Patricia Clements, Orlando Project Director, is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. With Susan Brown and Isobel Grundy, she is an editor of Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present , which is scheduled for publication online by Cambridge University Press at the end of May. She is responsible for twentieth-century literary and historical materials in the Orlando textbase, and co-author, with Jo-Ann Wallace and Rebecca Cameron, of volume three of the Orlando narrative history. She was principal investigator on the SSHRC Major Collaboratives Research Initiatives Grant which launched the Orlando work, and later the team leader on the CFI grant which helped fund development of the delivery system. She is co-author/editor, with Virginia Blain and Isobel Grundy, of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English , 1990, the first reference work to women's writing in the various literary traditions in English, and co-editor with Isobel Grundy of Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, 1983 . She has published on nineteenth-century French and English poetry and prose: Baudelaire and the English Tradition , 1985; The Poems of Thomas Hardy , ed. with Juliet Grindle, 1980. She served two terms as Dean of Arts at the University of Alberta, 1989-99, and a term as President of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, 2000-2002. She has a BA in English from the University of Alberta, a DPhil from Oxford University, and an honorary DLitt from Brock University. She was a recipient of the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal. Isobel Grundy, Project Co-investigator, is the author of volume one of the Orlando history, the early period to about 1830. She received her degrees from Oxford University, where she was a member of St Anne's College. Between her BA and her DPhil she worked for six years in Finland, London, and New York. She taught at Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary and Westfield College), London University, from 1971, then moved to the University of Alberta in 1990 as Henry Marshall Tory Professor. Her areas of research interest are women writers in English from the Medieval period through the long eighteenth century: favourite authors Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Samuel Johnson. She was one of the authors of The Feminist Companion . Her Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment appeared from Oxford University Press in 1999 (paperback 2001). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada . In September 2000 she was awarded the University of Alberta's highest honour, the University Cup, for excellence in research and teaching. |