Sorting things in: Feminist knowledmodes of scholarl

Susan Brown a,, Patricia Clea School of English and Theatre Studies, Univers

b Department of English and Film Studies, University o

electronic publication. The rise of electronic media is industrial revolution; some have compared it to theinvention of the printed book in terms of the magnitude

publishing on it, gave rise to a rhetoric of informationfreedom that cast electronic media as the fulfillment ofearlier utopian dreams of seizing themeans of publication. I

Women's Studies International Forum 29 (20

(Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford). The first person voice hereis that of Susan Brown, since this paper emerged from her presentation

at the Multi-Mediating Women's Voices workshop that led off theof the change in signifying practices and socialfunctions of textualities. Whatever the eventual as-essment of the magnitude and implications of thischange, we certainly face a major transformation in ourmodes of scholarly production. I want to consider whatis at stake for academics in electronic publishing withreference to some features of current electronicscholarship in the humanities.

The internet, and the apparent ease and cheapness of

The authors listed here are the founding researchers on the OrlandoProject. The Project has been, as the body of the discussion notes,highly collaborative, with input from numerous other researchers,postdoctoral fellows, and research assistants at various stages. For afull list of participants and roles, see the Credits screen of Orlando.Other centrally involved members of the project at this stage are:Jeffery Antoniuk, systems analyst; Sharon Farnel, textbase manager;Jane Haslett, bibliography manager; Stan Ruecker, graphic designerand co-investigator; Kevin Spencer, document flow manager (all at theUniversity of Alberta); and Kathryn Carter, encoding specialistA feminist web-based research initiative must make electronic publication an integral part of the research design. We are at acritical juncture in the production of scholarly tools in electronic form, as we move from the production of archives that seek toreproduce existing collections of primarymaterial towards more mediated contextual materials, such as the newly publishedOrlando:Writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present or the proposal for fusing primary and secondary materials in theprojected Feminisms and Print Culture, 18301930 project. This discussion takes the Orlando Project as an example of what can begained by the customized application of semantic markup language to originally digital materials in order to address some crucialissues raised by large-scale humanities computing work. Feminist scholars must participate in the highly politicized processes ofknowledge organization to have a shaping impact on humanities research and dissemination, and this shift in our mode of productionhas major impacts on what scholarly work involves, how it is resourced, how it is conducted and by whom, and how it is credited. 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The twenty-first century is witnessing a major shiftin the production and dissemination of scholarly textsaway from exclusively paper-based printing towards

radically changing how scholars produce and publishwork and those new media demand new methodolo-gies. This transition may prove as profound as theSynopsisFeminisms and Print Culture project. Corresponding author.E-mail address: sbrown@uoguelph.ca (S. Brown).

0277-5395/$ - see front matter 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2006.04.010ge representation and changingy production

ments b, Isobel Grundy b

ity of Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1f Alberta,

1

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E5

06) 317325www.elsevier.com/locate/wsifwant to invoke here a piece of feminist ephemera of thekind that feminist archival projects would seek to preserve:

ntern318 S. Brown et al. / Women's Studies Ia poster called Women in Print, produced by the See RedWomen's Workshop and published in the 1970s or early1980s as a postcard by Britain's Campaign for Press andBroadcasting Freedom an organization that continues towork to protect public and labour interests in the face of thecorporate concentration of contemporary media. Thisposter/postcard represents a photograph of a womanoperating a printing press with a caption that reads, Thefreedom of the press belongs to those who control thepress. (see Fig. 1) Historically, a line of feminists fromEmily Faithfull through Virginia Woolf to Barbara Wilsonhas concurred. Of the possibilities offered by the HogarthPress, Woolf observed on 22 September 1925, I'm theonly woman in England free to write what I like (Woolf,1980, p.43). The possibilities offered by electronicpublication look alluring from a feminist perspectiveinformed by knowledge of the difficulties women andother disadvantaged groups have historically had gainingaccess to print. Yet gender and other factors can alsoimpede access to the technology on which these new formsof publication rely, complicating the issue considerably.

Furthermore, although the publishing technology of thewoman in the poster is largely a given a set of constraints

Fig. 1. Women with Print. (See Red Women's Workshop published byBritain's Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom).and enablements within which she must work thetechnology of electronic publication ismoremalleable. Theparameters of digital publishing are constantly changing,and we have the potential to determine these modes ofpublication inways not possiblewith ink and paper. Indeed,the possibilities of electronic publishing would seem to begor even demand our taking control, or at the very least anactive part in developing the means of scholarly publica-tion.While the internet as a communicationsmediumoffersa broad spectrum of possibilities for publication, the extentto which electronic media are dominated by corporateinterests has overdetermined the development of thosepossibilities: the massive promotion and expansion of theWorld Wide Web when graphical interfaces made it logo-friendly is but one example. Within this commercially-dominated environment, feminist scholars need to be notjust consumers of technology, but producers of technolog-ical tools that suit our aims and methodologies. And inter-vening in the means of electronic textual production is acomplicated matter, involving such things as network ser-vers, software programs, and modes of textual andgraphical delivery. It challenges some of the fundamentalprinciples according to which scholarly work and dis-semination have operated.

Increasingly, feminist scholars in the humanities areusing electronic methods that are not just hyped-up ver-sions of older technologies and tools the word processorfor the typewriter, the on-line catalogue for the card cata-logue but are new ways of conducting and presentingresearch activities that are themselves being reshaped bythese tools. Web-based resources such as Brown Uni-versity's Women Writers Online and Chawton HouseLibrary's Novels On-line, dedicated to providing primarytexts bywomenwriters from the earlymodern period to theearly nineteenth century, offer the kind of succinct scholarlycontextualizing which a modern non-specialist readerneeds in order to engage with these early texts from thestandpoint of women's literary history, unlike the unme-diated facsimile texts by both sexes available commerciallyfrom EEBO (Early English Books Online) or ECCO(Eighteenth Century Collections Online). The PerditaProject applies its expertise to elucidating the practices ofearly modern women who amassed personal archives ofrecipes, family history, poetry, etc. and the CorveyWomenWriters on the Web provides bibliographical, biographical,and other contextual information regarding women'swriting from 1790 to 1835. Women Writers Online inparticular contributed to the development of rigorouselectronic editing methodologies as a pioneering projectemploying the Text Encoding Initiative. On each of thesesites the works or words of women in history are made

ational Forum 29 (2006) 317325available to today's readers in ways that simply were not

nternpossible without the electronic medium. This embrace ofelectronic methods by feminist scholars is just one of therespects in which, as Donna Haraway provocatively noted,we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids ofmachine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Thecyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborgis a condensed image of both imagination and materialreality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility ofhistorical transformation (Haraway, 1991, p.150). And,not least because the cyborg a category which forHaraway spans not just the privileged users or consumersof technologies but also the ethnically and racially diverseunderprivileged Silicon Valley workers who produce itgives us our politics as well as our scholarly modusoperandi, we need to try to shape these new scholarlytechnologies to our purposes.

Many of us who are working in new media perceive anopportunity to try to enact new methodologies for theproduction and publication of scholarly text. This articlereflects on the integration of electronic methods of scho-larly production in large-scale, team-based feminist re-search. It emerges from my experience as a foundingmember of the research team that has produced TheOrlando Project (Orlando Project Public Website). Thisproject, conceived circa 1991 and first funded in 1995, willbe released in its first version in 2006. Its original title anintegrated history of women's writing in the British Isles conveys its ambition and scope. It is a history primarilyof writing in English, in which the term British Isles putsthe regional in tension with the national: we mean a historyof writing at this scene, which means, for instance, thatHarriet Beecher Stowe'sworkwill bemore prominent thanthat of some women born and bred in the British Isles. It isnot an archive, but a critical resource in which all text isauthored for the textbase. It is entirely textual: we decideddoing images right would be another project altogether.

The project, which is based at the University of Albertaand the University of Guelph, Canada has employedelectronic media to represent new ways of doing literaryhistory. Our contention is that some of the challenges le-veled at traditional literary historyits exclusivity, its li-nearity, an over-reliance on narrative, a certain totalizing ormonologizing tendencymay be met by producing anddisseminating literary history electronically. The historyweare producing is formed of thousands of multiply linkedand dynamic chunks of text which may be navigated alongan almost infinite variety of pathways, so its organization isnot linear. The text of the Orlando Project is multiply andcollaboratively produced, in significant part by graduatestudents. It therefore represents a range of authorial voices,discursive strategies, critical approaches, and theoretical

S. Brown et al. / Women's Studies Iemphases. The elements of narrative which we considernecessary to an inclusive feminist literary history are mul-tiple, parallel, and fractured rather than continuous andsingular: the electronic form of the text allows these ele-ments to be ordered and traversed according to variousprinciples and interests. Perhaps most excitingly of all, tothe Orlando researchers, is that the Orlando Project is usingelectronic text to produce explicit representations of theconceptual structures and priorities governing our history,representations in the form of tags that are both imbricatedand in constant dialogue with the readable text. This pro-cess opens up newways of bothwriting and reading literaryhistory.

The politics of web-based or electronic representation ofresearch are correspondingly complex. This is because anyelectronic form of text is itself a mode of representationwith its own implications. Electronic text markup orlabeling of text of the kind that is used by the World WideWeb (HTML or Hypertext Markup Language) is rudimen-tary, and works simply to label text in order to allow webbrowsers to display it in particular ways (italicized,indented, laid out in a table) or to create links to othermaterials on the web. However, a considerably more com-plex set of standards has emerged for the markup of texts inthe humanities that is not merely oriented towards displaybut works to try to describe, through the markup, theontology of the text itself and lay out a grammar specifyingthe relations between the various elements in the text. So,for instance, rather than mark up a periodical title merelywith a label or tag that tells the system to italicize what isinside it, markup based on the Text Encoding Initiative(itself an application of Standard Generalized MarkupLanguage or SGML) would label that title as a journal title,making an assertion about what that piece of text is ratherthan how it should be processed or rendered, and leaving itto a particular processing of that piece of text to italicize it,underline it, hyperlink it, or whatever. There is thus therepresentational act of the text itself or the text that will beread by a human being, and the representational act of theencoding that represents it electronically: bTITLE TITLE-TYPE=JOURNALNTime and Tideb/TITLEN. This mayseem a fairly innocuous act when one is dealing with titles,but this kind of text labeling has far-reaching potential andimplications, as I hope to show.

The process of applying ontology (a system for definingthings within a knowledge domain) and logic (relatingthem in a systematic way according to rules) to the task ofrepresenting that knowledge domain via computers, knownas knowledge representation in the field of artificialintelligence, makes us self-aware, as John F. Sowa wouldhave it, by making us do hard ontological work in order tobe able to sort things into groups so that a computer can

319ational Forum 29 (2006) 317325treat them (format them or process them) in particular ways

ntern(Sowa 2000). Constructing a knowledge representationsystem, he argues, forces methodological self-conscious-ness. Employing a knowledge representation system in theform of textualmarkupmakes itsmethodological decisionsexplicit and available for analysis, but doesn't necessarily,in my view, produce such self-consciousness. It is bothfitting and heartening that the team of scholars involved inFeminisms andPrint Culture, 18301930,with its attentionto media as well as content, should want to grappleseriously with the methodological issues arising fromelectronic methodologies head-on, despite the fact thatmost are subject specialists rather than specialists in digitalhumanities work. Such grappling is crucial, for much is atstake in employing these new methods. As Geoffrey C.Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have argued in their bookSorting things out: Classification and its consequences,Information scientists work every day on the design,delegation, and choice of classification systems andstandards, yet few see them as artifacts embodying moraland aesthetic choices that in turn craft people's identities,aspirations, and dignity (Bowker & Star, 1999, p. 4).

The Orlando Project decided to go electronic it wasinitially conceived as a book project for a number ofreasons. First and foremost was capaciousness, the lure oflots of room to discuss both major and minor figures. Thiswas joined over time by the advantages of moveable textthat permitted dynamic ordering of materials according toreader's priorities; the dialogism or multi-voicedness thatseemed particularly suited to collaboration; the ability tocombine the processing power of electronic markup withnuanced prose; the ability to produced a dispersed, non-linear text rather than a narrative or linear one; the oppor-tunity to map the intellectual principles explicitly in theconceptual markup which organizes the text. This lastpoint that SGML markup would provide a way ofmaking our intellectual principles and priorities clear was from the outset themost intellectually stimulating, andalso both practically and intellectually the most daunting.

For Orlando, we tackled this problem by using SGMLto tag the conceptual content of our materials. SGML is akind ofmeta-language for representing electronic texts: youspecify the textual items that you want the computer to beable to identify and process in various ways, as well aslaying out a nesting relationship among them. In primarytext markup, under the TEI guidelines, the encoding ormarkup is used largely to record the formal properties of apre-existing text, with a number of tags for relatively (butonly relatively) straight-forward conceptual phenomenasuch as names, titles, and so on. The tags we devised for theOrlando project go into very interpretive territory. We usedthe markup to label aspects of the text's content that we

320 S. Brown et al. / Women's Studies Itook to be crucial to an investigation of women's literaryhistory. The set of conceptual tags we devised includes:collaborative authorship; intertextuality; theme or topic;type of press; earnings; attitudes to writing; periodicalpublication; birth; mode of education; marriage; pseudo-nym; organization name; occupation; political affiliation;violence.

We ended up with five distinct tagsets: three relativelystraight-forward ones for timeline entries, bibliographicalentries, and short encyclopedia-like entries, and two quitecomplex ones for encoding entries on women's lives andentries their writing and writing careers.

Above is a diagram of the biography or life tagset showing just the first level of conceptual tags (i.e. subtagsand attributes are not visible). Although the diagramorganizes the tags thematically into relatively privateaspects of lives on the left and more public ones on theright, this arrangement does not reflect any structural aspectof the tagset. All of these tags are available at the same levelof the tag hierarchy, all are mutually exclusive, and al-though they may occur in a particular order in one docu-ment, they may occur in a completely different order inanother: most documents begin with person name, fol-lowed by birth and family or cultural formation, and mostend with death, but the order of tags between that variesgreatly.

The tagset for entries on women's writing is consider-ably more complex both in terms of numbers of tags and inthe way the structure works. It is divided into the majorareas of production, reception, and textual features, each ofwhich have subtags, but those subtags can occur withineach of the three major areas, and many of them can nestwithin another tag and vice versa. In others words, it istechnically amuch less hierarchical tagging structurewhichallows for multiple, flexible hierarchies of tags in order tofacilitate the interrelation of different aspects of texts. Thisis in part a response to the fact that, for all its relativesophistication, this kind of encoding is a quite bluntmedium, awkward in many ways for the pressure it createstowards disambiguation when one is dealing with nuancedcritical prose that wants to weave together diverseconceptual threads. After all, in the final result, either atag is present or it is not, and the challenge of taggingwithin

ational Forum 29 (2006) 317325a relatively traditional hierarchical and exclusive tagging

nternstructure such that we use for biography discussions is thatwhen you have intersecting concerns, say the death of afamily member which results in an inheritance that frees awoman to write (which could be tagged as matter of afamily, wealth, or occupation) the tagger is faced with thedilemma of settling on the one which seemsmost germane,and in the result suppress the other possible choices.Alternatively, she can spread the discussion of it acrossseveral tags, but, since they can't be nested, this hasimplications for prose style, extends the already consider-able time taken for writing and tagging, and impacts on theeventual rendering or delivery of the prose. So, sincecomplex discussions of authors' writing and literary careersare most important to Orlando's literary historicalframework, wemade the tag structure for those discussionsmuch more inclusive than for biography, so that tags couldbe inter-nested with one another, making it easier to flagmultiple concerns simultaneously. The two types ofdocuments are thus experiments in the utility of differentkinds of tagging structures.

Below is an image of the production tags.

Devising these tagsets was a challenging processwhich forced a group whose members had quite diversekinds of training, period specialization, and theoreticalorientations to define priorities, specifically to settle on afinite set of categories and characteristics we wanted toinvoke and also to agree on terminologies and relation-ships between them. Our group was relatively small the group doing the actual decision-making on tagdevelopment was usually not more than half a dozenpeople and it took literally years to devise, test,and finalise our tagsets.

The process meant essentially coming up with theclassifications that would structure our work. We didn't atthe time foresee the extent to which they have come toinform and shape our writing, or the impact they wouldhave on the way the materials we would write would bedelivered via theweb. In fact, inways that there is not spaceto expand on here, the technological ground was shiftingunder our feet. Because we began this work before thedevelopment and acceptance of Extensible Markup

S. Brown et al. / Women's Studies ILanguage (XML), which can translate SGML for use onthe web, we could think about delivery only in fairlyabstract terms. Now that browsers are XML-capable and arange of XML tools is available, it is now possible to thinkbackwards, to consider what one wants the tagging todeliver based on existing applications. That was notpossible for Orlando. And even given the availability ofXML, there is the fact that the kind of customized markuparound which the project is designed currently demands acustomized delivery system: these are expensive to build,are not platform-independent, but yet are essential to a user-friendly interface. And even with XML's great potential,what we deliver in the first version of Orlando onlyscratches the surface of the functionality that the tagset wedeveloped could enable.

But we did have a sense that what we were doing wascrucial insofar as we were trying to devise a tagset thatwould make visible what previous literary historicalmethods had made invisible or excluded. To pick up onBowker and Star's insight that Each standard and eachcategory valorizes some point of view and silences another(Bowker & Star, 1999, p.5), we were trying to develop afeminist literary historical knowledge representation thatwould valorize and give voice to women and the texts theywrote, and make them susceptible to kinds of historiciza-tion, interrelation, juxtaposition, and analysis not previous-ly possible. In contrast to the sorting out of women in olderliterary histories which excluded them, we were trying tosort women into the version of literary history we wereconstructing.

But the beauty (and also the terror) of SGML, as Sowa(2000) argues, is that the classifications are not buried inworking infrastructures. They are not invisible: they arebaldly and boldly evident (Sowa, 2000). They force adegree of methodological explicitness that can be uncom-fortable particularly to the extent that one is attuned to thepowers and dangers of category work. Perhaps paradoxi-cally, because we consider with Joan Wallach Scott thatanalysis of the changing construction of gender is intrinsicto feminist historical inquiry (Scott, 1988, p.49), our SGMLencoding scheme doesn't include a tag for gender or genderissues, although we do tag the sex (including transgender-ing) of persons who are the subjects of entries, and there aremore specific tags for things such as attitudes to gender andwriting, or gendered responses to texts. This way of struc-turing the materials may prove right or wrong, or rather,more or less helpful in terms of answering the questions ofstudents and researchers who seek to use our encoding toguide their reading or answer particular questions; but theparticular methodological decision, the judgment that feedsinto the sorting process, is explicit in the tagging andtherefore available for examination, discussion, analysis,

321ational Forum 29 (2006) 317325and critique in a way it would not be if one simply wrote an

nternarticle or monograph informed by the same set of priorities.The same is true of the tagging of subjects' race andethnicity, forwhichwe struggled long and hard to develop arange of tags that deal with identity issues including sex-uality, political affiliations, religion, race, and ethnicity. Tosort in these kinds of differences between and withinwomen, explicitness or demarcating them through encod-ing is necessary, although we came to the conclusion thatthe historically changing nature of such cultural categoriesmeant that devising a fixed vocabulary for these would beimpossible, and that we had to allow for as much interlea-ving of discussions of these mutually constitutive catego-ries, so intimately associated with identity, as possible. Inother words, although text encoding often sounds quitepositivist, we believe that it need not be. Indeed, in fosteringcritical and methodological self-consciousness, knowledgerepresentation can operate as a culmination of, rather than adeparture from much recent theoretically and politicallyinformedwork in the humanities. Andwe hope that processcan carry over into way the history is received, that theexplicitness provided by the tagging will invite the readersand users to do parallel work, that is, to reflect self-con-sciously on the way categorization, sorting, and orderingare informing both the text they are reading and theirreception of it.

A further dimension of explicitness is required if one isto make a knowledge representation system legible to thereaders or users of the text it is used to structure. TheOrlando Project has thus had, first for internal trainingpurposes and then again for users, to produce monograph-length guides to the tags and their use. Documenting tagdefinitions and usage guidelines seems in some sense a farcry from the literary-historical work that we set out to do,but it is part and parcel of the decision to take that workinto a new mode of scholarly production, and involve aproject's users in the debate over the development of newkinds of research tools.

So then, what's the payoff? I can only give a briefoverview of some aspects of the Orlando Project witha view to suggesting the kind of power the conceptualtagging gives. One can perform a text-only search on theword suffrage across allmaterials in the system: this is theequivalent of a straightforward Google-type lexicalsearch, except that the results are returning in sorted andmeaningful units which contain the search term: portions ofentries in order of the author's birth; a chronology of events;an alphabetical list of bibliographical entries. But Orlandotagging structures make it possible to refine that search in arange of ways. For instance, starting with a chronologybased on such a search on suffrage, if one doesn't want atimeline containing all 451 events, this can be cut to a third

322 S. Brown et al. / Women's Studies Iby narrowing the search to early suffrage activities duringQueenVictoria's reign, or cut in almost in half again to 78 ifone chooses the most selective rather than the mostcomprehensive selectivity option (to narrow the results toevents considered by the taggers generally significant asopposed to those concerning individuals only), and thennarrowed further to 48 if one selects only those with anational or international event type designation, or insteadto 15 if one selects those associated only with Britishwomen writers. These options all draw on the tagset torefine the results. One can also use the tagset to focussearches in other ways too: to produce a timeline of orga-nisations with the word suffrage in their names; or,moving away from chronology, to pull together discussionsof texts about suffrage, or discussions of explicitly politicalwritings that appeared in periodicals; or to group togetherwriters who identified themselves (or have been identifiedby others but not themselves the tagging allows one tomake this distinction) with suffrage as a political affiliation(Brown, Clements, & Grundy, 2006).

Many of the search results, including many of thediscrete events, are excerpts from longer entries on par-ticular writers. One of the benefits of SGML is that weare able to treat documents both as wholes and as col-lections of parts that can be treated dynamically, whichmeans that the Orlando history combines longer, read-able discussions with the searching power of a databasecontaining more granular information. So, for instance,anyone wishing to read an excerpt in context can go witha click to the full entry from which it came. And anyonewho wishes to read the marked up text whose catego-rization informs the searches can do so, to see whatunderlying judgments are informing the processing ofsearches.

The issue of hyperlinking also demonstrates thepower and impact of the category work or knowledgerepresentation that is embodied in the tagging. A majordilemma of hyperlinking in electronic text is what tolink and why, and what to make the target of a link ifthere are numerous possibilities. Rather than making asingle point in the textbase the target or destination of alink, Orlando leverages the markup of our text to allowusers to make informed choices about what links theywant to follow. For instance, clicking on a mention ofthe National Society for Women's Suffrage (later theFawcett Society) produces the following screen.

The underlying tagging architecture allows a readerto choose from the left column the context(s) that inte-rest her most: she can then expand on the right the listassociated with that context (as in the case of TextualProduction and Politics above) and go to an entry (suchas Helen Blackburn) within that list, or switch to the

ational Forum 29 (2006) 317325Excerpts tab to read brief portions all the entries in

which mention of the Fawcett Society occurs, or clickon the Timeline tab to access a chronology for the orga-nisation. The kind of conceptual categorization or sor-ting of the materials evident in the Orlando Links screenis of proportionately greater use the greater the numberof links there are to a particular phenomenon, for ins-tance the thousands of mentions of London as a place.Thanks to the tagging, these can be accessed in smallersubsets according to interest: for instance one canchoose to focus on the writers involved in politicalactivities there, in which case the system lists the writersfor whom London occurs within a politics tag, and thisstill quite large group can be further narrowed by usingdate parameters on the search.

I have outlined what Orlando has sought to do insome detail first of all because it seems to me that theproposed Feminisms and Print Culture project marksa shift from the production of archives that seek toreproduce existing collections of primary material, withcontext understood more or less as value added', to-wards integrating primary materials with originally di-

awareness in the face of competing priorities that think-ing through technological method is not a distractionfrom but rather an integral part of the real work of theproject.

Feminists must participate in the highly politicizedprocesses of knowledge organization to have a shapingimpact on humanities research and dissemination, andthis shift in our mode of production has major impactson what scholarly work involves. I want before closingto comment briefly on these impacts as inseparable formthe politics of knowledge representation.

How such work is resourced is a major issue: this kindof research is extremely costly at both the developmentand the delivery or dissemination phases. We're not usedin the humanities to thinking of our research asexpensive, but this kind of research devours resourcesand time. It is research in itself, an additional area ofscholarly engagement, critical thinking, debate, andsheer hard work, but that fact can disappear foradministrators, funding agencies, and even ourselveswhen the work we undertake emerges from traditional

323S. Brown et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 29 (2006) 317325gital contextual materials that can thus be writtenaccording to specially devised ways of sorting womenin: the proposed project's fusion of the primary and se-condary is truly exciting, and the self-consciousnesswith which it is being undertaken methodologically isvery promising. The potential for what might be done onsuch a project is vast: the challenge will be to determinethe priorities and how to achieve them, and to maintaindisciplines. Such research is about thinking big, and ithas to be financed big. Orlando continually surprised uswith expenses we did not anticipate, and that's whatexperimental research is about: you have to build con-tingencies into the budget. Above all, don't underesti-mate technical expenses: you don't do this kind of workon the back of university-provided tech support. So youneed to be able to hire dedicated people to do technical

nternwork and, if possible, collaborate with computing facultyor humanities computing scholars who want to engagewith the project as part of their own research. Bigfunding requires a lot of grant work: grant applications,administration, and reporting require people, time, andresources, and become ongoing aspect of a big project.For multi-institutional projects, there is the challenge offiguring out how to give different sites a degree of localautonomy, but give enough resources to a centre orcentres in which unifying processes take place.

And big also usually means collaborative. There is away in which role convergence is increasingly forced onus by technology. The chimerical multi-tasking, multi-mediating electronic academic is supposed at once to be anauthor, editor, copyeditor, typesetter, book or webspacedesigner, proofreader, and printer/publisher. But in truthwe can't do it all alone, although the roles associated withelectronic publishing easily blur. Because this research isso heavily collaborative, it's crucial to think about intel-lectual property issues up front as much as possible. Itseems to me that there is a fairly basic choice betweengreater complexity and a fairly tight-knit group of colla-borators, and lesser complexity and a more open colla-borative model. Training time is a significant issue if onetakes the route of greater complexity. The Orlando tagsetcontains 245 different tags and 116 different attributes.Some of these are standard tags derived from the TextEncoding Initiative, but many in the Life and Writing tagsets are unique to Orlando. Learning to tag means not justlearning the tag names, but howwhen and how to use them(for instance, the kind of discussion or information towhich they apply, where they occur within the tagginghierarchy, what sort of text a word, a sentence, one ormore paragraphs? they contain, how to tag unambig-uously names, dates, titles and other core tags so that thesystem can use themas the basis for hyperlinking and otheressential processes). It's about 100 hours to the beginningsof tagging competence in the Orlando system.

And depending on what model of collaboration isadopted, there is the need to think carefully about projectmanagement, another area in which I think we tend tounderestimate expenses. Collaboration is immenselyenriching, but it is also both time-consuming and inevi-tably involves lots of administration, communication,compromise, and some relinquishment of scholarly auto-nomy. But however the collaboration is structured, workon electronic resources gets dispersed in a range of ways:rarely if ever is a sophisticated electronic text the productof one person's efforts. At the Orlando Project we trackactivity on every document in the system: every time adocument is altered, that activity is tracked in terms of

324 S. Brown et al. / Women's Studies Iwhoworked on it, when, and what they did. No documentis the product of a single person;many have hadmore thana hundred separate actions performed on them by ten ormore people. Clearly, one needs to have one's house inorder as far as credit is concerned, including credit forthose who are doing crucial work that is not the kind ofauthoring or editingwork that is usually credited.Whatdoes it mean if some pieces are individually credited butsome kinds of activity crucial to the electronic publicationof those pieces are not? And how should credit be givenfor spin-off work that draws on group experience but iswritten by an individual? There are numerous issues thatrequire careful thinking, as of course does the questionof how to publish, given that studies of credibility inelectronic publishing strongly suggest the need for peerreview, for junior scholars in particular (Siemens, 2002).

Orlando went down a particular road in terms of testingthe utility of quite intensive and domain-specific markupfor a secondary source in the humanities. Because wewereliterary scholars approaching text markup afresh, we ap-proached that question in the abstract, largely divorcingmarkup decisions from particular desired functionalities oreffects.What the Feminisms and Print Culture project doesis likely to be quite different given the different aims thatwill flow from its emphasis on bringing together primaryand secondary material, and it will have the advantage ofbeing able to consider a number of models and strategiesfor how it wants to represent the knowledge it produces inelectronic form. But what it does will contribute from afeminist methodological perspective to the ongoingtransformation of the production and dissemination ofscholarly texts.

Because, as Jerome McGann (2002) says, computersare dull and unimaginative, knowledge representationis a double-edged activity: the need to disambiguate isextremely productive if also merciless, but it is alsolimiting if it makes us decomplexify our work or accepttoo easily current strategies for electronic processing anddelivery of research (McGann, 2002, pp. 25/26). Thosewho work with electronic systems need to be constantlyalert to counter the deficit of creativity which will occurif they become passive in relation to their tools. Some ofthe more promising new electronic undertakings marrynew media with relatively new approaches to disciplin-ary or cross-disciplinary knowledge, such as poststruc-turalism and feminism, taking risks with or departingfrom established methodologies in an attempt to re-present scholarship in new ways. New media offer im-mense possibilities. Western culture is just beginning toexplore what this massive shift in signifying practicesinvolves. Thankfully, however, the process of knowl-edge representation involved in responsible electronic

ational Forum 29 (2006) 317325publication compels us to reflect critically on what these

new publishing practices mean. I believe that this pro-cess of thinking throughwhat we are doing electronicallycan't help but make the underlying research activitybetter, and it may have far-reaching impact on the largereffort to sort women into accounts of writing, society,and history.

References

Bowker, Geoffrey C., & Star, Susan Leigh (1999). Sorting things out:Classification and its consequences. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Brown, Susan, Clements, Patricia, & Grundy, Isobel (Eds.). (2006).Orlando: Women's writing in the British Isles from the beginningsto the present. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (http://

Gudon, Geoffrey Rockwell, and Lynne Siemens. Text Technology,11, 1128 [Also online: http://www.mala.bc.ca/%7Esiemensr/hssfc/index.htm].

Sowa, John F. (2000). Knowledge representation: Logical, philosoph-ical, and computational foundations. Pacific Grove: Brooks, Cole.

Text Encoding Initiative. http://www.tei-c.org/Women Writers Online. Brown University. http://www.wwp.brown.

edu/texts/wwoentry.htmlWoolf, Virginia (1980). In Anne Olivier Bell & Andrew McNeillie

(Eds.), The diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3 (pp. 19771984).London: Hogarth Press.

Further reading

Brown, Susan, Grundy, Isobel, Clements, Patricia, Elio, Rene, Balazs,Sharon, & Cameron, Rebecca (2004). Intertextual encoding in thewriting of women's literary history. Computers and the Humanities,38, 191206.

Brown, Susan, Clements, Patricia, Grundy, Isobel, Butler, Terry,

325S. Brown et al. / Women's Studies International Forum 29 (2006) 317325Campaign for press and broadcasting freedom, United Kingdom.http://www.cpbf.org.uk/

Corvey women writers on the Web: An electronic guide to literature17961834 (CW3). Sheffield Hallam University. http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/corvey/CW3/indexohp.htm

Novels on-line. Chawton House Library and Study Centre. http://www.chawton.org/novels.php

Haraway, Donna (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology,and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Haraway(Ed.), Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature(pp. 149181). New York: Routledge.

McGann, Jerome (2002). Compu[e]ting editorial fu[ea]tures. InElizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux & Neil Fraistat (Eds.), Reimaginingtextuality: Textual studies in the late age of print (pp. 1727).Madison: University of Wisconsin Press [Also online: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jjm2f/old/comput-ed.html].

Orlando Project Public Web Site. www.ualberta.ca/ORLANDO/Perdita Project. Nottinghman Trent University. http://human.ntu.ac.uk/

research/perdita/index.htmScott, Joan (1988). Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. In

Scott (Ed.), Gender and the politics of history (pp. 2850). NewYork: Columbia University Press.

Siemens, Raymond G. (2002). Project co-ordinator. The credibility ofelectronic publishing: A report to the humanities and socialsciences federation of Canada. With Michael Best, ElizabethGrove-White, Alan Burk, James Kerr and Andy Pope, Jean-ClaudeHockey, Susan, Fisher, Susan, et al. (1998). Tag team: Computing,collaborators, and the history of women's writing in the British Isles.In R. G. Siemens & William Winder (Eds.), Technologising thehumanities/humanitising the technologies. Special issue of comput-ing in the humanities working papersText/technology, Vol. 8 (pp.3752) [Available at: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/orlando/].

Flanders, Julia (1997). Gender and the politics of the electronic text. InKathryn Sutherland (Ed.), Electronic text: Investigations in methodand theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Grundy, Isobel, Clements, Patricia, Brown, Susan, Butler, Terry, Cameron,Rebecca, Coulombe, Greg, et al. (2000). Dates and chronstructs:Dynamic chronology in the Orlando Project. Literary and LinguisticComputing, 15, 265289.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999).How we became posthuman: Virtual bodiesin cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Hockey, Susan (2000). Electronic texts in the humanities: Principlesand practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Screibman, Susan, Siemens, Raymond,& Unsworth, John (Eds.). (2004).A companion to digital humanities.Malden,Massachusetts: Blackwell.orlando.cambridge.org).

Sorting things in: Feminist knowledge representation and changing modes of scholarly productionReferencesFurther reading