Intertextuality in Early Women’s Writing

Intertextual Networks was a three-year research project funded by a generous $290,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, focusing on intertextuality in early women’s writing. Starting in October 2016, the WWP began work on this collaborative research initiative, which examines the citation and quotation practices of the authors represented in Women Writers Online (WWO) to explore and theorize the representation of intertextuality.

The major elements of the project included:

• Developing research and encoding protocols, documentation, training materials, and tools to support the creation of the intertextual bibliography and the expansion of the encoding in the WWP texts.
• Identifying all of the quotations, references, citations, and other “intertextual gestures” within the texts of the WWP collection, and creating a comprehensive bibliography that is linked to the corresponding references points in the WWP texts.
• Researching and developing a set of collaborative research exhibits that were published as part of Women Writers in Context.
• Exploring more specialized forms of data modeling that might reveal intertextual nuances not captured in our broader encoding.
• Designing and developing the various interface tools through which the intertextual data can be explored and visualized.
• Developing methods for making the intertextual data itself available (e.g. through APIs and downloadable data sets) to researchers for further experimentation and tool-building.

For this project, the WWP assembled a collaborative research team that includes faculty, graduate students, and members of the WWP staff, representing a diverse set of perspectives and expertise. Each member of the collaborative group has pursued a research project engaging with materials from WWO, published in Women Writers in Context, the WWP’s open-access publication series.

Launched in May 2022, Women Writers: Intertextual Networks (WWIN) is an web-based exploratory environment dedicated to the intertextuality data developed under this grant. WWIN offers four starting points for readers: the Intertextual Networks bibliography, the index of intertextual gestures, the list of WWO authors, and the list of topics and genres we developed to categorize the bibliography entries.

For more information, please see the white paper and proposal. To read a list of the projects being completed by our collaborators, please visit this page. And, for notes on our progress and discoveries, as well as the work being done by our collaborators, see the WWP’s blog.

Intertextual Networks has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.