We are excited to announce that the WWP has begun work on a new project, “ New Digital Methods for Understanding The Impacts of Early Women Writers on the Development of Science and Philosophy,” funded by a Northeastern University TIER 1 mentored grant awarded to professors Peter West (NU London), Sarah Connell (English), Julia Flanders (English), and Brian Ball (NU London).

This project will examine and highlight the impacts of early women scientists and natural philosophers on the development of these disciplines during a formative period of the Enlightenment. We will use Margaret Cavendish’s engagements with the Royal Society (RS) as a case study in the relation between early women’s writing and early institutional science. The formation of the RS in 1660 represents the very beginning of ‘modern science’ as we know it.
Cavendish (1623–73) was one of the first early modern women to publish under her own name and produced a remarkably large and diverse corpus of writing for a woman at this time. She was an early critic of the RS and, In 1667, was the first woman to be invited to a meeting of the RS (no women were admitted until 1945).

The project will also address a wider, societal need for public awareness of women in the history of philosophy and science. By using digital methods, we will both enable novel research into this seminal period and provide new tools for raising the public visibility of women and the sciences, helping to show that women have contributed to scientific and
philosophical disciplines since before the beginnings of modernity. Ultimately, the project will demonstrate the many ways that women have always belonged in science.

.The project will draw on the resources and expertise of The Women Writers Project (WWP), the NULab for Texts,Maps, and Networks, and the PolyGraphs project at NU London and, in doing so, provide a feminist and recovery-orientated large-scale text analysis project in the digital humanities (DH). A collaborative team of graduate students will work on encoding more of Cavendish’s texts, to bolster the corpus of her texts. All three groups will bring specific expertise to this project. The data will support a wide range of analytical methodologies, including word embedding models and network analysis

We are very excited to begin this project—if you have comments or suggestions, please contact us at wwp[at]northeastern[dot]edu.