Only Connect!:

Intertextuality, Circulation, and Networks in Digital Resources for
Women's Writing

Alison Booth

ab6j@eservices.virginia.edu

University of Virginia, United States of America

Sarah Connell

sa.connell@neu.edu

Northeastern University, United States of America

Marie-Louise Coolahan

marielouise.coolahan@nuigalway.ie

National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Jeremy Boggs

jeremey@virginia.edu

University of Virginia, United States of America

Julia Flanders

j.flanders@neu.edu

Northeastern University, United States of America

David Kelly

david.d.kelly@nuigalway.ie

National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Rennie Mapp

rcm7e@virginia.edu

University of Virginia, United States of America

Worthy Martin

martin@virginia.edu

University of Virginia, United States of America

Introduction

This panel brings together papers by three projects that are working on digital
methods for researching and representing the textual networks of women writers.
“Documentary Social Networks: Women Travel Writers in Prosopographies,” by
Alison Booth with Worthy Martin, Rennie Mapp, and Jeremy Boggs, focuses on a
cohort of travel writers from the

Collective Biographies of Women project to consider documentary social networks
and the “sibling” relationship of subjects who occupy a single biographical
volume. “Intertextual Networks: Theorizing and Encoding Textual Connections in
Early Women’s Writing,” by Sarah Connell and Julia Flanders, presents the Women
Writers Project’s (WWP) work on using markup to model and research the citation
and quotation practices of early women writers in the context of the larger
ecology of digital projects focused on gender. “Digital
Representation, Intertextual Relationships, and the Impact of Early Modern
Women’s Writing,” by Marie-Louise Coolahan and David Kelly, describes the
research of the RECIRC project (The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern
Women’s Writing: 1550-1700), focusing on RECIRC’s development of taxonomies of
reception and circulation and on the methodologies for understanding textual
transmission that the project has been testing.

These projects explore the problem of intertextuality at several different
levels: primary source documents (including print and manuscript), metadata,
and synthetic or critical narratives such as biography and annotation. Each
project faces the challenges particular to its own place in the digital ecology
and also the challenge of making its data usable in other parts of that
ecology: connections that will depend on the collaborative generation of
digital standards. The projects also share an interest in understanding the
roles that gender played in the circulation of texts, investigating what women
read and cited, which women were read and cited, and how women were represented
in writing. Together they offer an opportunity to explore how intertextuality,
as understood in the context of the modern web of linked open data, operates
not only as a deliberate rhetoric of quotation but also through more
complex interconnections between texts, authors, and other cultural
agencies—and how those links can effectively be brokered through connections
between digital research projects and resources.

These three papers will not only discuss the various textual networks of women
writers that are the subject of their individual projects but will
also consider connections between the projects themselves, highlighting both
points of contact and distinctions. We see this panel as an opportunity
to examine the wider possibilities for making intertextual connections legible
among digital systems of textual circulation.

Documentary Social Networks: Women Travel Writers in Prosopographies

Alison Booth with Worthy Martin, Rennie

Mapp, and Jeremy Boggs

New literary histories using large digitized corpora can scale up the
longstanding interest in intertextuality, beyond allusions and
acknowledged influences. Such projects as the Women Writers Project and RECIRC
engage not only textual but also personographic data, as all kinds of
metadata interdependently form rigorous measures of intertextual transmission.
As feminist literary history, such projects are also committed to contexts
of women's lives and networks of representation. The Collective Biographies of
Women (CBW) project studies Anglophone prosopographies (collective biographies,
or a quantitative approach to standardized lives in sets) women of all
occupations in books published since 1830, revealing trends in representation
of women through an annotated bibliography, a database and stand-aside XML
markup of narrative structure and discourse (Biographical Elements and
Structure Schema, or BESS a stand-aside XML schema for marking elements of
biographical narratives at the level of the paragraph). Unlike many feminist DH
projects, CBW is not an archive of women's creative writing, though at least
700 of 8700 persons in the database are writers (one person is likely to
represent several types). We study the collocation of women in books; thus
Harriet Martineau, in 25 collections, is a “sibling” in “one degree of
separation” from the 316 individuals found at least once in those collections.
We have begun with typological cohorts and sample corpora focused on a nodal
woman (all the volumes in which her biography appears) because of the
labor-intensive analysis in our project's design.

This talk introduces the cohort of travel writers in CBW, focusing on the
sample corpus of volumes that include a short biography of the famous mother
and travel writer Frances Trollope (CBW includes 10 books entirely of female
travelers; 17 collections of great mothers or mothers of the great. It should
be noted that CBW assigns 137 collection types- e.g. genre; theme; types of
women in them- and the 1272 volumes may each be assigned more than one
type). Her biography joins assortments of different types:

[255-1]

One exemplary text for this paper will be Una Pope-Hennessy's Three
Englishwomen in America (London: Benn, 1929), on Frances Trollope (for an
earlier account of Frances Trollope as travel writer and mother, see Booth,
2015), Harriet Martineau, and Fanny Kemble, to illustrate the concept
of documentary social networks and the “siblings” who occupy a single volume.
More recently, we study the author of such a collection, in the cohort of some
995 “presenters” (i.e. biographers, illustrators, editors), 567 of whom were
female. Currently, the CBW database relates an author such as
Pope-Hennessy only to the book, not to the persons associated with
its chapters. We would like to visualize the relations among authors and their
subjects as well as we already trace intertextual exchange among versions of
the same lives.

T)/!ME VNA FOPE-HENNESST

THREE

ENQL1SH WOMEN EX ^IMERJCs!

Fatty TntJsff Fatty FtttHt HarUt Mmiictia

[255-2]

Figures 1,2. Kemble: Steel engraving by Johnson Wilson, & Co., after painting
by Alonzo Chappel, after painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Trollope:
Frontispiece: “Francis Trollope from a portrait painted by A. Hervieu,” in
Frances Eleanor Trollope, Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work
from George III. to Victoria, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1895). Harriet
Martineau by Richard Evans (National Portrait Gallery). Mrs. Anna Brownell
Jameson, 1844, Hill and Adamson salt

print, Art Institute of Chicago.

The portraits of British women authors who wrote

famous observations on America in the 1830s, adapted as frontispieces, take on
a family resemblance in spite of the great social and personal distance among
these mutual acquaintances. Covers and illustrations often create composite
portraits (see Booth, 2004:33-42) Pope-Hennessy's Englishwomen had bestselling
books or tours in the 1830s, warranting their then-fashionable portraits (Cecil
Beaton photographed Pope-Hennessy). Whereas Trollope and Kemble, and Martineau
and Kemble, only coincide in Three Englishwomen in America, Martineau
and Trollope share 8 collections, 3 on travelers, others on more miscellaneous
achievement. What common ground justifies narratives of their lives in a
single publication? Pope-Hennessy's title suggests it is their gendered
transatlantic vision. It does not spell out that these Victorian writers
attacked America for its manners and for slavery. CBW finds
distinctive features in lives of women writers who traveled, besides an
increase in geospatial data: a publication event characterizes and types the
author (“Trollopize” is the verb the came from Trollope's offensive Domestic
Manners of the Americans); literary biographies devote a high proportion of
paragraphs to summary of the works, in contrast with biographies of queens or
nurses, for example.

Databases tend to label persons by nationality and familial role. Our research
shows the temporal or narrative dimension of supposedly fixed traits as well as
the unstable scope of events. Englishness (the event “birth”) should be
modified by later adopted countries; Trollope and Kemble emigrated to the
US for some years, and both primarily resided in Italy in later life. Married
mothers, novelist Trollope and actress Kemble later separated or divorced;
political theorist Martineau was unmarried and childless; these relations shape
their representation. Many events challenge the researcher to affix GIS or
standard dates, such as the bankruptcies (tied to family relations)
that enabled all three writing careers; these crises had far-reaching
continuance in creating their opportunities or need to travel. We have
identified the most frequently narrated events in all versions of the
three writers' lives, potentially mapping their travels, works, and lives in a
way adaptable for any intertextual biographical cohort (see http: //
cbw.iath.virginia.edu/cbw db /events.phpl

Events

E00170

Type:

Name: Move to Georgia Plantation

Note: December 1838; Butler Island Plantation, which was about 1 mile south of
Darien, GA (GIS: 31° 22' 16" N, 8l° 25' 51" W) Latitude: 31.371111 Longitude:
-81.430833

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Edit Primary Fields

Persons

1. Frances Ann Kemble • —

The talk shares portraits, visualizations of documentary social networks, maps,
and innovative interface (rich-prospect browsing) to reveal analyses of
versions of the same person or persons within networks of text. We sample
intertextuality in which these and other women enter into the body of
each others' life narratives. Like any biography, Pope-Hennessy's chapters
assemble citations and redactions of previous versions, from letters,
archives, and autobiographical records to biographies; the textual methods of
RECIRC or a tool like Juxta http://www.juxtasoftware.org/, as well as
BESS analysis, fruitfully compare versions. The paper will reflect on the
intertextuality of representation of women writers and travelers, as well as
the challenges of a comprehensive prosopographical study using digital tools to
develop a large-scale and finely grained analysis of women’s biographical
histories.

Acknowledgements

The Collective Biographies of Women Project is supported by the E-Text Center,
Scholars’ Lab, and Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH)
as well as English Department at the University of Virginia, CBW has received
ACLS Fellowship and NEH ODH Level-II Startup funding

Intertextual Networks: Theorizing and Encoding Textual Connections in
Early Women's Writing

Sarah Connell and Julia Flanders

Introduction

Intertextual Networks is an initiative of the Women Writers Project (WWP) at
Northeastern University aimed at exploring and theorizing the representation of
intertextuality, with a focus on the citation and quotation practices of the
authors represented in the WWP’s digital collection, Women Writers Online (WWO)
. The WWP’s work on Intertextual Networks incorporates several strands: focused
projects conducted by individual research collaborators; sustained examination
of the modalities of intertextuality as revealed by the work of our staff
and collaborators; and a large-scale encoding project creating a bibliography
of all the texts named or quoted in WWO, linking the texts in that
bibliography with their occurrences in the WWO corpus, and substantially
expanding the encoding of intertextual phenomena in our textbase. In this
paper, we will discuss the aims and methods of the project, offering models for
encoding complex intertextual features and setting out some processes for the
systematic application of additional markup to an existing corpus. We will also
consider the implications of this project for the larger ecology of digitized
collections focused on gender and on women’s writing.

Contexts

While Intertextual Networks is a recent initiative of the WWP, it has grown out
of several decades of previous research as manifested in WWO and other WWP
publications-particularly Women Writers in

Review, a collection of around 700 reviews and publication notices responding
to the authors in WWO. The almost 400 texts published in Women Writers Online
are primarily print English-language works, representing a broad cross-section
of texts written and translated by women from 1526 to 1850. These texts have
been transcribed and encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
Guidelines. Intertextual Networks also builds on and contributes to ongoing
research into the digital representation of intertextuality, including the
substantial work already evident in the TEI Guidelines’ recommendations
for encoding titles, quotations, and other textual references. Additionally, we
are working with the Orlando Project’s (see also, Brown et al, 2004) and the 
RECIRC project’s (The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s
Writing, 1550-1700) bodies of research into developing taxonomies of
reception, circulation, and intertextuality. Intertextual Networks is equally
grounded in literary and historical scholarship on the ways that women from the
early modern period to the mid-nineteenth century read and responded to texts
(e.g., Horrocks, 2008; Rumbold, 2006; Winterer, 2008).

Design and goals

This project is working to create a much clearer and more textured picture of
the rhetoric of intertextuality: what female authors read; what they felt it
important to quote, paraphrase, or cite; and what mechanisms connect their
writing to that of other authors. In addition to the relatively
straightforward instances of explicit quotations, citations, and references to
specific titles, the project is also invested in developing practices for
marking up subtler forms of intertextual engagement that emerge from
verbal echoes, stylistic or topic similarities, imitation, parody, and other
transformative ways of responding to what one has read.

Because WWO is chronologically broad and generically diverse, it provides a
considerable range of opportunities to test different encoding
practices against textual exemplars. The textual references in WWO are often
densely layered and quite complex— for just a few examples, Lady Eleanor Davies
inserts the full text of other documents into some of her political pamphlets;
the 1706 Ladies’ Diary constructs short poems, called “Enigmas,” out of lines
from several other poetic works; and Elizabeth Craven’s 1789 A Journey through
the Crimea to Constantinople inserts a poem that she wrote based on,
and sometimes “literally translated” from a pamphlet, with citations to the
pamphlet itself (43). Thus, an important goal of this project is not only to
reveal early women’s intertextual practices but also to test and model methods
for representing the considerable complexity of these practices in TEI markup,
working with formal categories without flattening out useful levels of nuance.

Encoding and bibliographic development

In developing a bibliography for the texts named in WWO, we have found that a
balance of programmatic intervention and human attention can
effectively accomplish systematic adjustments across our corpus. Using XQuery,
we have generated a spreadsheet with the distinct titles—and authorship details
where they are available—referenced in WWO. The WWP’s encoding staff has been
gathering basic publication details (standardized titles, authors, and dates
and locations of initial publication), removing duplicates, disambiguating
wherever necessary—such as with the many texts that are titled “Poems”—and
adding unique identifiers. Our bibliographic data follow Functional
Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) recommendations. Preserving the
titles as they are represented in WWO, with the XPaths used to locate each,
means that we can automatically add the unique identifiers back into the corpus
when we have completed the initial bibliographic work. This approach enables us
to identify the more than 6,000 <title> elements in WWO relatively quickly,
while ensuring from the outset that there are no duplicate entries and laying
the groundwork for the future additions of texts and textual details as we
expand our source identification to quotations and other textual references.

We have also found that human and programmatic intervention can be fruitfully
combined in establishing and implementing methods for encoding
those intertextual features that are not straightforward <quote>s and <title>s
and in expanding our understanding of how quotations and titles are being used
by the authors in WWO. XPath and XQuery can reveal usage patterns and identify
cases that might warrant additional investigation—such as the relatively rare
instances in which titles are named in dramatic verse. Corpus-wide queries are
also useful in locating additional examples of textual phenomena in order to
decide how best to encode them. For example, we have reviewed emendations and
translations of quotations, indirect references to titles, instances in which
textual materials are elided from quotations, quotations within quotations, and
incorrect or partially correct citations to develop consistent

encoding practices that are applicable across our corpus, despite its variety.

Conclusion

This project is concerned with both discovering textual reverberation (the
traces of women’s reading that emerge in their writing) and with making
that reverberation legible within the new digital systems of textual
circulation. Within the boundaries of the Women Writers Project, that
legibility is effected through the encoding that makes intertextuality
an explicit feature of our modeling of texts. The use of a community standard
like the TEI and the future availability of an API to the project’s data extend
that legibility—in principle—beyond the project’s walls, but these methods do
not in themselves build the complex web of interconnections that
would constitute digital intertextuality. By placing the WWP’s work alongside
that of Collective Biographies of Women and RECIRC (two out of a much wider
field of relevant connections) this panel will suggest what that larger
intertextuality could look like, and what further work would be needed to
realize it.

Digital Representation, Intertextual

Relationships, and the Impact of Early Modern Women's Writing

Marie-Louise Coolahan and David Kelly

This paper emerges from the research of the team working on the RECIRC project
(The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 15501700; see
www.recirc.nuigalway.ie), funded by the European Research Council (2014-2019)
and led by Marie-Louise Coolahan. It will describe the project, its development
of digital tools, collaborations, and plans for interoperability with cognate
projects. It will focus in particular on our development of taxonomies
of reception and circulation, designed to capture data that reflects early
modern source material, as the basis for our dialogue with the Women Writers
Project and Collective Biographies of Women project - a dialogue that is
centrally concerned with questions of intertextuality, circulation and the
collaborative generation of digital standards.

The RECIRC project is essentially a study of intellectual impact. Its
fundamental research questions include: Which women were read? How, where, and
by whom were they read? RECIRC is structured around four interlinking ‘work
packages’, each of which takes a specific entry point in order to amass
quantitative data relating to the reception and circulation of women’s writing
between 1550 and 1700. The first of these posits the Catholic religious orders
as transnational channels by which devotional and polemical texts were
translated and transmitted; it investigates the martyrologies and
bibliographies of the various religious orders, as large-scale compendia of
texts that included female-authored works. The second ‘work package’ examines
scientific correspondence networks (and therefore also complements the research
currently brought under the umbrella of Women’s/Early Modern Letters Online
(EMLO, WEMLO) and Reassembling the Republic of Letters (led by Howard Hotson);
the wealth of data to be found in the scriptorium operated through Samuel
Hartlib has meant we have focused specifically on this circle. The third
approach aims to rebalance the bias of digitization projects toward
print culture by harvesting data from early modern manuscripts. It does so by
focusing solely on the category of the manuscript miscellany (a compilation of
miscellaneous materials) in order to assess the contexts for excerpting and
transcribing women’s writing. It differs from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s
Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) initiative, which is a full-text
transcription project, in its harvesting and structuring of data
relating specifically to reception and circulation. The fourth RECIRC approach
is concerned with early modern library catalogues; it captures data on the
proportion of female-authored items in order to facilitate statistical analysis
relating to the gendering of such book collections.

RECIRC, then, is testing these methodological approaches for understanding the
‘big picture’ of textual transmission, reception and circulation of women’s
writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The focus on women’s
writing enables investigation of the routes to impact that were exploited by
early modern women, as well as of the ways gender inflected the construction of
writerly reputation. It also delimits the corpus, facilitating our testing of
methodologies for studying the circulation of non-elite, non-canonical writing
in the period. Rather than producing a full-text digitization of primary
materials, the project has been centrally concerned with developing taxonomies
of reception and circulation - and these are the basis of collaboration with
the WWP's current Intertextual Networks project and the Collective Biographies
of Women project. This encompasses productive conversations around the kinds of
intertextuality (quotation, excepting, citation of text and/or author) that
occur in relation to women’s writing, and their modes of digital
representation. There are also important areas of divergence: RECIRC is
working with metadata categories rather than xml tags; although each instance
of reception evidence is supplied as full-text, these instances are
themselves extracts from significantly larger texts. Moreover, RECIRC is
concerned with all - women’s and men’s -reception of female authors, which
allows for equally productive conversations about gender and reception.

RECIRC data are stored in an online database, which will be made publicly
accessible at the project’s close, and is intended to be interoperable with
cognate projects, such as the NEWW Women Writers Virtual Research Environment.
The database architecture (built using a RESTful API approach) enables
multiple output formats and we will discuss possibilities for interoperable
outputs. Moreover, the project is now (October 2016) at the stage of data
cleaning, in preparation for experimenting with visualization tools and
quantitative analysis. We aim to create network visualizations and analyses
that embrace both the gendering of reception and the relationships of
texts with each other. Questions include: Which genres of female-authored texts
were most popularly circulated? What forms of circulation
(translation, excerpts, citation) were most conducive to their transmission?
How important (and prevalent) was attribution to their circulation? Which
female authors were reading and using other women writers? What circulation
contexts promoted women as authors? If accepted to DH2017, we intend to present
our preliminary answers to the questions and patterns that emerge during this
quantitative analysis phase.