Week 4: The Victorian Women Writers Project

As I am interested in literature, I chose a project in relation to literature. The Victorian Women Writers Project is an initiative which hopes to bring more awareness of the works of the lesser known women writers from the Victorian era - specifically those women whose work did not make it to the literary canon (Text Encoding Initiative, 2011). The projects provides some information on the how, meaning the implementation of markup language of the project: "by transcription and originally encoded in the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) following the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, version P3, using the TEI Lite DTD (version 1.6)" (Indian University, 2016).

Additional information on who does the encoding and on the future of the project is also available on the site:

Most of this new content is encoded and authored by graduate students and undergraduate students at Indiana University and beyond. While still in an experimental stage, we are hoping to successfully integrate the VWWP into courses not just here at IU, but also at other colleges and universities. To this end, we are updating our encoding guidelines to facilitate distributed contributions.
The most recent version of the VWWP encoding guidelines, which now support richer, scholarly encoding and the encoding of related contextual materials can be found at the Victorian Women Writers Project wiki portal. (Indiana University, 2016)

After taking a closer look at the project's wiki portal, I noticed that the guidelines for encoding are quite descriptive and it seems as though they are also very well-developed. 

I was unable to find any mention of methods and challenges faced by the project during the encoding initiative., however, the project does provide the ability to download the .xml file in order to view the code! Below is an example of a piece of work as is presented to the public:



And this is the .xml file of the same work that I downloaded and opened in Oxygen:




As mentioned in the blog question for this week, the availability of code may be restricted to certain groups, however I did not have to sign up or request access to download the .xml file! This blog entry and the exploration of encoding projects has made me better understand what the encoding challenge for our class entails!

References:
Indiana University (2016). Victorian Women Writers Project. Retrieved from http://www.dlib.indiana.ed/collections/vwwp/

Text Encoding Initiative (2011). Victorian Women Writers Project. Retrieved from http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/vi03.xml