Subject: On etexts and databases about women writers in cyberspace
From: Ellen Moody <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 08:06:57 -0400

Dear all,

While I was at the recent ASECS Montreal meeting (American Society 
for 18th century studies) I gave a paper on a panel about 18th 
century women's texts and information about them on the web (and 
issues that pertain).  It included a description of a large database 
called the Orlando Project which is to include vast amounts of 
information and links to works about (and it is hoped eventually by) 
19th century women writers:

http://www.ualberta.ca/ORLANDO/

Women writers from across a vast swatch of time are included, and 
there is hope the company might allow the people doing Orlando to 
link into their database to others which include etexts.  Of real 
interest (I think) is the tags chosen are taken from typical events 
and needs and outlooks from women's lives not means.  So we have 
"violence [experienced]" for a tag.  Alas it's not open access so you 
must be affiliated with an institution which can afford and is 
willing to buy the access.  This will cut down participants among women.

The second presentation was about the NWO research project Women 
Writers and their audiences (1997 - 2004):

http://www.databasewomenwriters.nl/

The second is aimed at Dutch readers (partly because of the 
university supporting it), but it includes non-English speaking women 
and much information about the reception of their work.  The way 
reception history is framed takes into account how women are often 
translators and how their work is often marginalized and 
misframed.  It does seem as if this project is open access.  (The 
presentation was given in French so I may have missed or 
misunderstood some of what she said.)  It too includes 19th century 
women.  The two women the speaker used as test cases were George Sand 
and Germaine de Stael.

My paper is about women's behavior in cyberspace culture, how women's 
websites differ from men's.  I try to describe the obstacles to and 
what needs to be done to make cyberspace more appealing, hospitable 
and usable for women.  The problem of a need to feel safe is 
especially important, and also a need (how to get over this I don't 
know) to get more women computer scientists, engineers, for without 
these the Net remains a male construction:

http://www.jimandellen.org/ConferencePapers.WomenCyberspace.html

There was not much direct discussion of how this kind of thing will 
affect book history, but it was implicit throughout.

I'll mention too that yesterday I was reading a fascinating essay by 
Arthur Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (the introduction to their 
anthology, _Print, Manuscript and Performance_) where they argue that 
some of the conditions of communications and the social realities and 
results surrounding manuscript publication (pre-mid-18th century 
where print and manucript culture intermingle) resemble those in 
cyberspace.  It's very much worth reading.  Paradoxically as you go 
along you get to feel writes had expectations and freedoms when 
things were produced in manuscript they lost when print came to 
become the only way to present your material that was paid attention 
to by other writing in print that counted (produced by the elite or 
the powerful or connected and disseminated).

Ellen Moody
[email-masked]