(SDH/SEMI Award Plenary) 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: On the day on which Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present goes live online with Cambridge University Press, we will reflect on its development and on the impact on our practice of a fundamentally canonical discipline of being thrown into an experimental environment. We will begin with a discussion of the ways in which The Orlando Project has brought about changes in various of the contexts in which we worked. The making of this literary history required us not only to find new ways of conceiving of literary theory, but also to make adjustments in our institutional arrangements and our research and writing practices. These include the emergence of a new model for graduate education, of new developments in institutional programs and staffing, of a new interdisciplinary practice. We will stress the opportunities that are opened when experiment is possible, and we will touch on the late awakening of our funding councils to the transformation of the humanities. Orlando’s computing methodologies were developed in the context of and together with a major literary research project. They emerge from experiment and transformation in this context, straddling the cultural divide between the traditional humanities research and the emergent culture of the digital age. It needed to be readable and flexibly searchable in ways that made sense to humanists, and also to be scalable and modular in ways that supported indexing, hyperlinking, and dynamic delivery. The successful implementation of all of these things depended, finally, on the invention and implementation of a tagging system that would support these needs. The discussion will reflect on the kind of category work involved in Orlando’s semantic tagging, with particular attention to the divergent structure of the project’s two major DTDs. As the project publishes, it becomes possible to reflect on the difference that methodology makes to what Orlando is. Though the prose that inhabits the tagging in the Orlando textbase is almost exactly similar to the prose that might appear on a printed page in a conventional literary history, it has very slight differences in form and highly significant differences in effect. It has to be intelligible in different contexts, and must register its search-specific relevance to the user. The encoding also impacts on content as well as style: the tagset pushes the coverage in particular directions, moving the materials towards consistency of coverage and working against partiality. The paper will consider to what extent this works against the grand over-arching narrative, or the single interpretation. In the end, Orlando makes possible a new kind of literary history that emerges from the interplay between the acts of judgment—technical, critical, historical—that inform the textbase, and the acts of inquiry and judgment of the user. 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. |