By Kyle Wholey, Anjelica Oswald, and Julia Flanders
This is the second post in our new series celebrating the Women Writers Project’s 30th anniversary by featuring images from the project’s history.
Since 1988, the WWP has focused on collaborative projects that involve faculty, students, and the community of those interested in early women’s writing and text encoding. Through these various collaborations, the WWP has expanded both our community and our collection of texts. Here, we cover the outreach materials that we have used over the past few decades.
Postcards
Our anniversary events are one of the many ways that we’ve celebrated the WWP’s history over the years. Below is a postcard marking the 20th anniversary of the WWP, while we were still located at Brown University. The postcard also announces that Women Writers Online will be free during the month of March, in recognition of Women’s History Month, a tradition that the WWP continues to this day.

Mailings and Brochures
We’ve also provided mailings and brochures to share the WWP’s texts and resources. Shown here are two brochures that were handed out during conferences, as well as a brochure for the WWP book series.


Bookmarks
We’ve created several different WWP bookmarks, each with a different quote from WWO. A Northeastern-produced bookmark was part of the 30th anniversary celebration, handed out at events like our workshop at Attending to Early Modern Women in the summer of 2018 to share our new Thirty Years, Thirty Ideas series; see the published exhibits in the series here.

Seminars and Symposia
We’ve also held seminars to help hone the skills of digital humanities scholars. For instance, our current NEH-funded seminar “Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist” provides both introductory and intensive sessions on research and teaching with word embedding models. Further details on this seminar and other WWP seminars can be found here.
We’ve hosted symposia as early as 1990, with our Sidney’s Sisters symposium at Brown University. We also collaborated with a vast number of digital humanities scholars on our 2012 symposium Knowledge Organization and Data Modeling. Another one of our conferences, Women in the Archives, focused on the role of archival materials in shaping the study of early modern women’s writing.

Events
Not all events are restricted to workshops and conferences. In 1997, the WWP helped support the play “In Her Own Words: Elizabeth I Onstage and Online.” This was a one-woman show compiled by actress and storyteller Marilyn Murphy Meardon from the speeches of Elizabeth I, Queen of England. The speeches were transcribed and encoded as part of the WWP textbase under a grant from the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities (RICH). The grant also supported the production of a series of performances by Meardon and the creation of her spectacular costume.

Recently, we’ve begun a new tradition of helping organize local transcribe-a-thons for Douglass Day, part of a national event convened by the Colored Conventions Project in celebration of the life and work of Frederick Douglass. In these events, transcribers gather together to decipher difficult-to-read handwritten notes, decode unknown abbreviations, and discuss new information.


As our collection of texts grows, the WWP continues to celebrate our 30+ years of research. Every year, we find new opportunities and new ways of expanding our collection and our collaborations.