Title of Dataset
Wandering Women: Women’s travels in the Early Modern Literature
Description of Dataset
The Wandering Women dataset will be a collection of (mainly) bibliographical information of the texts with the topic of women’s travels in the early modern period, before the 1700s. Here the word “travel” embraces all activities beyond the domestic spaces, including walking on the streets, journeys within and outside the country and abroad.
This dataset will contain both imaginary and real texts/records of women’s journeys by male and female authors. This project’s main goal is to familiarize with writings about women’s travels and understand how early modern women attempted to expand their space, roles, and authority by crossing the traditionally allocated sphere for them—the domestic sphere. Therefore, the travel type in this dataset will be limited to voluntary travels such as journeys for adventures, education, and participation in national affairs or events, not involuntary travels because of religious or political persecutions or any other coercions. Also, this dataset will accommodate the texts deal with both fictional and actual journeys, authored by male and female writers. By doing so, it is expected to discover and learn about how women’s travels are described depending on the author’s gender.
For the project, the data will be collected from various sources, from anthologies of (travel) literature to online archives. After several trials to search for texts about women’s travels at online databases such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) with the keywords including journey and travel, this research method was found to be less effective than it had been expected since the keywords those online databases suggest/create are inadequate to search for the texts about women’s travels exactly. Nonetheless, those online databases will be used as one of the main tools in order to search for the bibliographical information. Furthermore, more refined keywords will be employed to research the aimed texts as the project progresses.
Metadata
The dataset will consist of three primary metadata, author, text information, and travel information, and each metadata will hold sub-metadata.
Author
-
Author: author’s name
-
Gender: author’s gender
-
Status/job: author’s social status or job such as aristocrat, professional writer
Text Information
-
Title: text title
-
Genre: text genre
-
Format: text format, printed or manuscript
-
Publication/circulation year: the first year of publication or circulation
-
Edition: edition information
-
Year: the year of a certain edition published
-
Publisher: publisher’s name
-
Publication place: the place where the text was published
Travel Information
-
Traveler(s): the main character of the text
-
Status of traveler: the main character’s status or job
-
Travel regions: the places where the main character travels such as cities, countries, England, overseas, imaginary places
-
Type of travel: the information whether the travel(s) narrated in the text is fictional journey or actual one
-
Purpose of travel: the information of why the main character travels, such as for adventure or public affairs
The target audiences
-
Hyekyung and her colleagues who are interested in texts about women’s travel or travel writings and Digital Humanities research
-
Scholars, researchers, and graduate students specialized in early modern women’s writings and travel writings, book history, and Digital Humanities research
-
Researchers and graduate students who major in other fields of studies but want to experience early modern English literature and DH research
-
General audience who might have an interest in early modern literature
-
Unexpected Visitors of Hyekyung’s blog
Questions
The Wandering Women dataset could help the audience(s) to answer those questions:
- How many texts related to women’s travels were produced in the early modern period?
- Which gender, either male or female, did contribute to or produce women’s travel texts more?
- What percentage/how many manuscripts by female authors (mainly aristocrats) was/were printed and reprinted?
- What kinds of genres/modes of travel were contributed to deal with women’s travels?
- Which social class was interested in travel writings?
Existing Related Scholarly Datasets
1. Women’s Travel Writing, 1780-1840: A Bio-Bibliographical Database (DWTW)
This project provides a collection of records about women’s travel writing published in Britain and Ireland between 1780 and 1840. The conspicuous differences between this project and Wandering Women dataset are the period dealt with, text genre, and the main author’s gender. Contrary to the Wandering Women dataset that includes fictional adventures and travelogues and personal records such as diaries by male and female authors, Women’s Travel Writing project aims to provide more focused scope of genre—travel narratives—and the records about women’s travels by only female authors. With a similar topic but a different time span, this project would offer a guideline that would be conducive to building the Wandering Women dataset, such as how to set inclusion/exclusion criteria for the scope of genre and how to develop the initial stage of the Wandering Women dataset further.
This project offers an extensive collection of manuscripts related to travel writings from the later medieval period to the sixteenth century. This project accommodates travel writings written in various European vernaculars, Latin, and partially Chinese. Another noticeable difference between this project and the Wandering Women dataset is that Medieval Travel Writing mainly contains texts authored by male travelers such as Marco Polo and their journeys to the East; and their purposes of travels are relevant to real events and affairs such as pilgrimage, commercial and slave trade, and missionary. This project also could present an effective direction of how to define the genre of travel or travel writing for building the Wandering Women dataset.
More information of related or relevant projects or datasets will be posted if they are found.