Articles and Reviews

Orlando is “[o]ne of the most successful transhistorical collaborative feminist projects in DH,” according to members of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). In their contribution to the cluster “From Practice to Theory: A Forum on the Future of Modernist Digital Humanities,” the MAPP team connects the ethos of Orlando to those of modernist women … Read more

In her discussion of Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Ross notes Haraway’s assertion “that we should respond to this recontextualization of scientific values and practices not by ‘holding out for a feminist version of objectivity,’ but by creating ‘an earthwide network of connections, including the … Read more

In her article “Digital Humanities for Social Good” on the data mapping project Torn Apart/Separados, McKenzie quotes Jacqueline Wernimont on the commitments of some DH research: “there has always been a social justice element within digital humanities. Some of the oldest and most well-known projects like The Orlando Project and the Women Writers Project have always been engaged . … Read more

Here, Risam identifies Orlando as “a watershed project for feminist recovery in digital humanities in general and in digital literary studies in particular.” Roopika Risam, “Introduction: Gender, Globalization, and the Digital”, in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 8 (2015).

Wernimont takes Orlando, together with Women Writers Online, as “exemplary instances of digital literary scholarship.” Orlando’s DTDs or interpretive markup, she writes, are tools which are generative and transformative, not merely declarative. They “can be read as paratextual with respect to the absent primary texts — the literary texts written by women that Orlando articles … Read more

“Like most scholars today, I make frequent use of digital databases . . . . Most of these sessions have left me jaded about the motivations (grant capture before research questions) and limitations (potential obsolescence) of such initiatives. Orlando is, and hopefully will remain, one of the exceptions in this landscape. . . . the … Read more

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the number of digital Restoration and eighteenth-century archives and databases has proliferated.  . . . . With diminishing resources for many universities, however, distinctions need to be made. Worth the investment, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present . . . … Read more

Most readers of this journal will be familiar already with Cambridge University Press’s magisterial database, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, overseen by Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy. The database . . . has changed the parameters of the scholarship and teaching of British women’s writing. … Read more

The experiment is unquestionably a successful one. Orlando‘s most obvious utility, as with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, involves the ability to turn to its entries on more than 800 individual British women writers for specific biographical or bibliographical information. For example, Orlando‘s entry on Jane Austen or Frances Burney is in many ways more useful than … Read more

Orlando features not only British women writers but rather a wide range of male and female writers in some way related to literature associated with the British Isles. As a modernist, I welcomed entries on American writers H. D., Djuna Barnes, and Marianne Moore (Hickman 181). It is inspiring to see such richly collaborative work … Read more