About the Women Writers Vector Toolkit

This project was generously supported by a Northeastern Tier 1 Seed Grant and is part of the Women Writers Project’s WWP Lab. Bringing together expertise across humanities, information sciences, and computer science disciplines, the Women Writers Vector Toolkit is a resource on the analysis of TEI-encoded XML documents using word embedding models. This toolkit demonstrates how to transform TEI-encoded data using XSLT and XQuery, train word embedding models on the transformed texts, conduct exploratory queries and research, and implement different pedagogical approaches to using word embedding models in the classroom. While this project primarily uses the Women Writers Online corpus, many of the processes described here can be applied to other TEI-encoded corpora. We hope to be an example for others who wish to implement similar tools with their own corpora.

The Women Writers Project is a long-term research and publication project focusing on early women’s writing in English. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader. We have been working since 1988 on building an electronic collection of rare and less familiar texts, and on researching the complex issues involved in representing early printed texts in digital form.

“Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist”

Thanks to a generous grant from the NEH’s Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program, the WWP held a series of advanced workshops to introduce teachers and researchers at varied levels of expertise to the text analysis methods and interpretive questions arising from word embedding models. We held four institutes in all: two focused on teaching and two focused on research, with an introductory and intensive event for each. Schedules and resources for each of the four institutes are below:

• Introductory, Research-focused
• Introductory, Teaching-focused
• Intensive, Research-focused
• Intensive, Teaching-focused

Citing the Women Writers Vector Toolkit

If you use material from the toolkit, please cite as such:

To cite a page on the website:

["Name of Page"]. Women Writers Vector Toolkit. Women Writers Project, [Link to Page]. [(date accessed)].

To cite the site as a whole:

Women Writers Vector Toolkit. Women Writers Project, [link to interface]. [(date accessed)].

To cite a specific model:

[Name of the Model]. Women Writers Vector Toolkit. Women Writers Project, [link to interface]. [(Training date of the model)].

For more information on citing the Women Writers Project, please see our citation guide.