Call for Proposals: Extension of Deadline (10/10/05)
Roundtable Discussion: Preserving/Digitizing the (Re)Collections of Women
Writers
British Women Writer's Conference (March 23-26, 2006)
http://www.english.ufl.edu/bwwc/

We propose to hold a general discussion about the problems of preserving
early modern and Romantic women's writings. We invite any kind of
discussion about difficulties of editing and preserving, no matter what the
media. What follows are some questions that might possibly be addressed by
the panelists, among others: Why should academics be concerned with how
these texts are preserved/disseminated in digital media? Or, more
pointedly, what are the potential drawbacks to outsourcing this type of
editorial/preservationist work to corporate entities? Essentially, why
should academics spend their intellectual energy learning code? Do we
create an edition or a new work by digitizing (TEI-ing, hypertext-ing)?

Katherine D. Harris (creator of the Forget Me Not Hypertextual Archive) will
moderate the panel. Zach Weir will represent the Poetess Archive:
 

As editors of the Poetess Archive
(http://www.muohio.edu/womenpoets/poetess), we have experienced first-hand
some of the issues surrounding the task of digitizing women's texts. We
code our texts in TEI P4 (http://www.tei-c.org), following the lead of the
Women Writers Project at Brown University which also uses TEI
(http://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/wwpmarkupdoc/). Some version of TEI, we
believe, insures that transcriptions of works by and about the early
nineteenth-century British and American women writers who identified
themselves as "the poetess" will continually be updated, avoiding the
pitfall of obsolescence in a rapidly changing media environment. We believe
this to be true partly because TEI P4 code is an application of XML, the
encoding metalanguage now used by all major businesses and by RSS feeds, and
partly because those engaged in transcribing major literary and historical
documents very often use TEI. Zach will address these issues: is this
coding task valuable, ultimately, in insuring "screen immortality," as we
imagine? Does code in anyway restrict what we can represent of women's
writings? How does this coding task affect workflow? interpretation?

Please email questions and 300-word proposals by October 10, 2005 to
Katherine D. Harris, kharris_at_email.sjsu.edu.

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Received on Mon Sep 26 2005 - 17:35:41 EDT