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Orlando: Women's Writings in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present

The Orlando Project explores and harnesses the power of digital tools and methods to advance feminist literary scholarship. The project is collaborative and multidisciplinary: the venture at its core brings together literary scholars, digital humanists based in varied disciplines, and computing scientists. Orlando research is cross-cultural, and student team members—of whom the project has trained upwards of 120, and rising—learn about editorial and archival research, document analysis, and markup by working with mentors and peers.

Orlando and LINCS​

Orlando has transformed its textbase for ingestion into the LINCS triplestore. The textbase, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, is an unprecedented work of literary scholarship. Published by Cambridge University Press and updated twice a year with new and revised material, its design encourages researchers and readers to explore and remix it in creative ways.

This is literary history with a difference. Not a book, though in length the equivalent of more than 80 scholarly books, and not a digital edition of an existing text, it is a richly searchable textbase of born-digital, original writing. It is full of interpretive information on women, literature, and culture, with more than 8 million words of text in documents on the lives and writing of over 1400 authors, together with a great deal of contextual historical material on relevant subjects, such as education, politics, science, the law, and economics.

Orlando’s unique contribution to feminist digital humanities has been to encode relationality and intersectionality in women’s writing and its conditions of possibility. The project’s widening focus to include Linked Open Data (LOD) and collaborative systems has great potential for more aggregation, for different kinds of exploration, and for bringing data from different projects into conversation with each other.

Project Leads​

  • Susan Brown, Technical Director
  • Patricia Clements, Founding Director
  • Isobel Grundy, Research Director
  • Katherine Binhammer, Literary Director
  • Kathryn Holland, Associate Director

For more information, see Orlando’s Team.

Funders​

Orlando is currently funded by a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant. For more information, see Orlando’s Funding.

Dataset Details​