WOMEN'S TRAVEL WRITING, 1830-1930: PROJECT OUTLINE
RATIONALE
The mission of Wilson Library's Electronic Text Research Center (ETRC) is to assist faculty and students in exploring new research avenues offered by the existence of primary data in electronic form. Numerous full-text files in the humanities are already available for consultation and manipulation; but in order to increase faculty and student awareness of the benefits of working with SGML/XML-encoded texts, we decided to develop a broad-based text creation project that would a) attract user involvement by concentrating on an area of interest to a range of departments, and b) draw on research materials already available in the Library's general collections. The primary goal of this project is to serve as a research and teaching tool, rather than a major preservation effort.

SCOPE
With these goals in mind we decided to focus on a project in the area of women's studies. Working with faculty and students in various departments, we identified two main areas of interest which now constitute the two components of our project, each headed by a Steering Committee and Advisory Board. One component involves Early Modern French Women Writers (1400-1700), and will focus on important women writers irrespective of genre. The other component involves Women's Travel Writing (WTW).

In narrowing its topic still further, the WTW Steering Committee decided on the following:

• to focus on the period 1830 to 1930
• to emphasize women travellers from and to the United States
• to include selected European women travellers to non-Western areas.

The WTW project begins coverage in 1830, in order not to conflict with the Women Writers Project at Brown University--which covers women's writing 1330-1830 and plans to include travel writing. Our decision to emphasize a US focus represents an effort to complement Indiana University's Victorian Women Writers Project (which focuses on British women writers, 1830-1901).

TEXT SELECTION
The WTW Steering Committee has identified several target areas and a number of associated texts. To date we have identified the following selection criteria:

• we will focus on texts/writers requested by local faculty and interested others;
• we will prefer texts that include significant illustrative material--both because of its importance for travel writing and because this takes advantage of the multimedia capability of the Web;
• we will emphasize texts that are not readily available;
• in some cases we may select editions of texts that are readily available in other editions--but only when the editions available lack desirable features (eg. specialized illustrations).
• we will prefer texts that deal with travel to places of current interest;
• in order to expand our corpus within our limited resources we will prefer shorter texts, and partly for this reason--since travel accounts tend to be long--we will place special emphasis on accounts published in periodicals rather than book-length accounts

As we proceed we will consult with the WTW Advisory Board regarding our initial suggestions, as well as later desiderata.

LANGUAGE
We are currently selecting texts in English or English translation. Coverage may later be expanded to include foreign language material.

TEXT CREATION
Travel documents are usually long and we emphasize use of scanning software; but may employ keyboarding for shorter or poorly printed texts. The nature of our corpus will require considerable incorporation of graphic material.

ENCODING POLICY
WTW encoding practice, its scope and limitations, are all described in our Note on Encoding.

PROJECT ASSISTANCE
At first we proceeded slowly owing to limited resources. Later the ETRC received additional funding from the University Libraries and the College of Liberal Arts. Thus, the WTW Project (and its companion EMFWW Project) are now considered a University Libraries-CLA collaborative initiative. In addition, we are also happy to involve graduate and undergraduate student volunteers. As we proceed, however, our intent is to seek additional financial assistance from other funding agencies. One component of such requests will be for project assistants to speed the digitization process.

TEXT DELIVERY
The texts are made available using Enigma Corporation's SGML/XML-based electronic publishing software suite including DynaText and DynaWeb.

WTW SC 5.21.02