Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings

Product description

It has been more than 25 years since the Orlando Project's experiment in feminist literary history was first launched in 1995 and much has changed.

In 2006, its flagship publication, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles, heralded a new genre of scholarly writing: collaborative, digital, and feminist.

In 2022 we are proud to launch a new edition of the site with a completely rebuilt interface.

Developed by our interdisciplinary team, the Orlando text base comprises more than 8 million words of original scholarship about women writers’ lives, bodies of work, and cultures in a collection of author profiles, event entries, and bibliographic entries brought together for searching and remixing by the project’s bespoke tagging system.

Orlando is neither a traditional monograph of literary history nor an online reference source. As an expansive collection of digitally-encoded, collaboratively-authored original scholarship about the history of women's writing, it aims to 'scale up' humanist methods of interpretation, thereby increasing research possibilities for discovering new connections and new narratives in the history of women's writing. Our experiment is never done as we continue to learn and to make new discoveries, using our methods and tools to refine and extend Orlando. Inspired by the enduring oak tree in Woolf's 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography, this text base has grown taller and stronger with each passing year.

• Since the initial publication of Orlando in 2006, we have integrated new writers, new collaborators, and new technologies. The text base is updated bi-annually with new scholarship, including 436 new author profiles added since the launch.
  
  
• Our team continues to grow, with more than 130 graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral fellows contributing to the project over the past 25 years, and with a growing network of external contributors as we move into the Orlando Project's next phase of activity. 
  
  
• With new modes of both production and publication, we are launching Orlando 2.0, opening up to new forms of collaboration with the research community and to sharing our data with the world in new ways.

In the fifteen years since the text base's original publication, critics have increasingly questioned whether we still need a separate field for women's writing now that so many women's texts have been mainstreamed.

The Orlando Project answers a resounding 'yes' if only because of the intransigence of patriarchal culture: as long as sexism affects writing and reading by women, there is a need for an overt commitment to centring women's voices.

We are excited that the revised Orlando interface will allow us to close the gap between the Orlando text base and this experimental work such as this: we look forward to gradually augmenting the interface with new points of access to our take on literary history, including graph visualizations and maps and a visualization for the Connections screen.

This new functionality will be the fruit of creating linked open data to complement the text base, and so we were delighted that someone on Wikidata, the most active community in this space, saw fit to make Orlando’s author identifiers into Wikidata author IDs: this means that Orlando will interlink more readily with other open data on women’s writing within and beyond Britain.

Unlimited user access throughout your school is £250.00 per year.