| CHWP A.8 | | Brown & Clements, "Tag Team: Computing, Collaborators, and the History of Women's Writing
in the British Isles" |
1. Introduction
The Orlando Project begins in a book too big for its bindings. In 1991,
The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, a reference book
on women writers, was published by some of us who are now part of the Orlando
Project (Blain, Clements &
Grundy 1991). Isobel Grundy, Patricia Clements and Virginia Blain
started that work believing that its discoveries would easily fit within
the covers of a chunky little reference book. They were wrong. During the
course of their research, becoming increasingly aware of the extent and
range of women's writing, they several times renegotiated the length of
The Feminist Companion with its generously flexible publisher. The
hard work of condensation and the publisher's flexibility notwithstanding,
however, when the book was published it had no index. They'd had to leave
it out. The index to the Companion -- which offered readers a few
basic pathways into the several inches of densely packed information in
the book -- was a hundred A4 pages in typescript. Printing it would have
broken the bindings. Literally. Had the book been bound at that length,
it would have fallen apart. For scholarly users of the Companion,
this means that there are only two ways of accessing the book's information:
the alphabetical order of biographical entries, and the rough chronological
groupings of writers. The image of the bursting book links with another
-- that of Feminist Companion filing cabinets -- on three continents
-- also full of information about women's writing in English, not published
because there wasn't room for it in the book.
Those two images have a lot to do with the genesis and the character
of The Orlando Project. This research tool won't burst the bindings, and
it won't leave relevant research in the filing cabinets. And this one will
offer its readers -- or end-users, as we also call them -- many different
ways of accessing the information it contains. In what follows, we will
outline the major principles on which the project is built, provide some
examples of the work we are doing, and consider some of the wider implications
of the kind of work the Orlando Project has undertaken.
2. Project Team and Funding
The Orlando Project, the full title of which is "An Integrated History
of Women's Writing in the British Isles", is based at the University of
Alberta and directed by Patricia Clements. There are currently more than
twenty participants in the project, including two principal investigators,
four co-investigators, three postdoctoral fellows, a project librarian,
a research collaborator, and eight graduate research assistants. One co-investigator
and two graduate students work at the University of Guelph. The Social
Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada is supporting the project
with a Major Collaborative Research Initiatives Grant for five years from
1995-2000. Both host universities have also supplied key financial support. [1]
3. Project Aims
The Orlando Project aims to produce the first full scholarly account of
women's writing in the British Isles, and to do so in two formats. It will
finish up with five printed volumes of literary history, four of which
will be individually authored, and it will create electronic products to
be delivered on CD-ROMs or on the Internet or both. The project is named
after the panhistoric character in Virginia Woolf's historical fantasy
of 1928 (Woolf 1928). This "escapade", as Woolf
called it, figures the development of women's writing, and the conditions
under which such writing has been possible, in a fantasy-biography which
gives a shifting identity but a changeless name to the writing woman, and
registers the flux of history as the ground on which she develops. Orlando,
beginning to write as an Elizabethan, emerges as a fully developed writer
in Woolf's own time. The work she is writing throughout this whole span
of time is a poem called The Oak Tree. At first male, Orlando becomes
scandalously female in the eighteenth century, when, by Woolf's account,
the woman writer became part of the record. Over the course of this modern
history, Orlando is the representative woman writer. The Oak Tree
is the representative collective text.
We've named ourselves after Woolf's historical speculation because of
its double focus on women's writing and history, and because of its feminism
and its sensitive registration of the complexity of the shifting conditions
under which women have written. Our vision of literary history assumes
the complex integration of a number of fields: writing by women, the changing
conditions of women's lives, writing by men, historical processes, and
the broader cultural environment. We are paying particular attention to
the construction of gender, looking at the ways in which it is always uneven
and contested, always in flux, always in dialogue with and constituted
inextricably from such factors as class, national identity and sexual
orientation. The interactions among the elements of what we are calling
cultural formation -- both of the social, historical, and writing
culture, and of individual women writers and groups of women writers --
is crucial to our sense of how literary history needs, now, to be investigated.
Traditional literary history has been charged with contributing to a
totalizing or linear view of the past, and recent historical projects,
such as The Columbia Literary History of the United States (Elliot
1987), have sought to articulate more fully a sense of the untidiness,
the raggedness, of literary and social change, often opting, as a result,
for depth or thick description of historical moments rather than for broad
and sweeping slices of chronology, periods which are assumed to have a
stable character -- the kind of history Virginia Woolf satirized in stating
"in or about December, 1910, human character changed" (Woolf
1950: 91). We've opted for chronological sweep, but we intend to give
a sense of the thickness, the layering and the untidy multiplicity of
the historical moment together with the larger temporal shifts that differentiate
those moments from one another. The complexity of women's relationship
to writing demands multiple narratives with many different focal points,
like the branching Oak Tree in Orlando.
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Notes
[1] The Orlando Project web site contains further
information on project members and activities, <URL: http://www.ualberta.ca/ORLANDO/>.