Critical Introduction to Wandering Women: Women’s travels in the Early Modern Literature

Wanderig Women Dataset

Wandering Women: Women’s travels in the Early Modern Literature

The Wandering Women dataset will be a collection of bibliographic information of the texts on the topic of women’s travels in the early modern period, before the 1800s. Here the word “travel” embraces all activities beyond the domestic spaces, including walking on the streets, journeys within and outside the country and abroad. It also accommodates imaginative travels in literary texts. This dataset contains the texts by both male and female authors. The project aims to collect the data about travel writing about and by women, and translated by women in the early modern period and build a dataset. Furthermore, the other goals of this project are to know how women are involved in travel writing, either as authors or as characters or as translators in the era of discovery and exploration, and how early modern women actively participated and engaged with their new world in their own ways. However, as the data collecting processes showed, the number of writings about women’s travels is extremely low compared to the counterparts of men’s. Thus, the Wandering Women dataset includes both literary texts dealing with women’s travels and female authors’ writings about their actual travel experiences. What the project focuses on is women’s voluntary travels such as journeys for adventures, education, pastime, sightseeing, and other private and public affairs, and thus, this dataset does not include the data about involuntary travels like religious or political persecutions or any other coercions. Under the “purpose of travel” metadata, some involuntary travel information is added to give context. For instance, in the data number four, William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the metadata column U (Purpose of travel) says that “Rosalind is exiled by the Duke, Celia follows her exiled cousin” to expound why Celia travels to the Forest of Arden following her cousin.
The Wandering Woman dataset took the following methodologies to collect individual data and build the whole dataset.

1. Research books: the Wandering Woman dataset includes literary texts dealing with women’s travel both as major and minor themes. However, whether individual literary texts deal with women’s journey is a matter of content, so it is necessary to refer to each text to know it. For this reason, it is hard to search for literary texts dealing with women’s travel with its title or any other keywords from online databases. Therefore, the Wandering Woman dataset project takes reference books as one of the main references. To collect data from reference books, the project curator read and browsed reference books about travel writing and women’s travel writing before the 1800s, and transcribed the data collected from the references to the spreadsheet. To verify and add more detailed information on each data, such as the author’s biographical information and text’s bibliographic information, the curator accessed online databases such as Early English Books Online (EEBO), English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), WorldCat Identities. So far, nineteenth books have been referred for the Wandering Women dataset, and the bibliographic information can be referred to at the “Bibliography” tap.
   
2. Online Databases: the second reference for the Wandering Women dataset is online databases. The curator has searched for data from the following online databases, English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), Women Writers Online (WWO), and Women’s Travel Writing, 1780-1840. The most data have been searched at ESTC (77out of 133) with keywords selected by the curator and created by ESTC. The selected keywords are related to or synonyms of “travel,” author, and regions, and the keywords are classified as follows.
   

• the mode of travel (adventure, excursion, ramble, travel)

• the author’s name (Anna Trapnel, Aphra Behn, Eliza Fowler, Elizabeth Craven, Francis Burney, Katharine Evans)

• region (Europe, Russia)

• genre (romance, travel literature)

• the mode of traveler (wanderer)

• author’s gender (women as authors)

The curator used more keywords such as expedition, journey, missionary, pilgrimage, Quaker, and voyage, but the desired data could not be obtained with those keywords because all texts searched with those keywords are authored by men or about men. The entries’ outcomes with those keywords were scratched by Zotero, and a spreadsheet including all entries’ bibliographic information was created. After that, the curator took the second collecting process, collecting the data about texts by women and/or about women’s travel out of all entries. Compared to ESTC, the rest online databases include a relatively small amount of data. So, the curator set the search criteria with publication year from the 1500s to before the 1800s, and collected the entries’ bibliographic information. After collecting data, the curator took the cleaning-data stage. In this stage, the curator added and cleaned messy data. To add the author’s biographical information, such as the year of birth and death and status/job, the curator accessed ODNB and searched for individual author’s information. To clean messy data such as printer information, the curator used the Regular Expression tool as much as possible, and erased and regularized symbols such as semicolons and commas in bibliographic data. Also, the curator added travel information of individual texts, referring to the titles and reference books.

A Critical Examination of the Wandering Women

The Wandering Women dataset has its significance in that it is presumably an original dataset. There are numerous references about women’s travel writing from the 1500s to 1800s, but the curator has not found any relevant database or datasets. Given that more travel experiences and travel writings appeared in the early modern period, women were presumed to participate in those social and cultural phenomena. Therefore, the curator speculated and hypothesized why there are not relevant databases or dataset about women’s travel writing in this period. In spite of the development of technology for voyages, traveling still accompanied various hardships from robberies, shipwrecks, and pirates, and thus, it was particularly difficult for women. Secondly, there was strict gender ideology and rigid division of spaces that confined women in the domestic spheres. Third, after the English Reformation, the pilgrimage, one of the travel types that women participated in a lot, was no more flourished in England. Those hypotheses were the reasons why the Wandering Women project began.

The Wandering Women dataset aims to offer the answers to those questions: how many texts related to women’s travel were written and published in the early modern period? Which gender, either male or female, did contributed to women’s traveling writing more? What kinds of genres of texts deal with this theme? Which social and religious groups were interested in and contributed in producing and publishing the texts about women’s travel? And which regions/countries/places were frequently visited? Although the data included in the Wandering Women dataset was limited and incomplete, it would be able to answer those questions.

So far, 133 data have been collected and included in the dataset. If more literary texts that deal with women’s travel in any form and any documents about women’s travel are discovered, more data could be collected. Generally, the data for the Wandering Women dataset shows that before the 1700s, texts about women’s travel are literature, and the texts dealing with women’s actual travel are religious texts. It means that women before the 1700s (actively) participated in religious activities such as pilgrimages or missionary works.

According to Pivot Table 1, out of 106 data that authors and their gender are known, 78 data are authored by women, and one is co-authored. And women mainly took correspondence to talk about their actual travels or imaginary travels. Why women’s journeys are discussed and dealt with in the form of correspondence can be assumed and explained that correspondence was one of the most common methods of communication by women. Compared to men who engaged with duties outside the domestic spheres, women were confined within their domestic spaces, so they wrote letters to communicate with their family and friends. Therefore, women took correspondence (narrative letters) to talk about travels. Interestingly, poetry is ranked second, not novels or fiction. It can be explained with a variety of terms indicating narrative writings. In the case of male authors, most of them wrote plays to deal with women’s travel, because there are 5 data about the one author, William Shakespeare, in the dataset.

Pivot Table 2 shows the statistics about authors’ social status and job depending on their gender. According to the Pivot Table, most both male and female authors are writers. Particularly, out of 78 data, 46 are writers, and out of 27 data, 11 are writers.

Pivot Table 3 shows what regions, countries, and places were visited. The Pivot Table indicates that Europe is the region that was most visited or most written about—65 data out of 114. The most visited or referred country is England, and next is France by female authors. And male authors visited or dealt with England most and next Italy. The reason why England is frequently dealt with in the texts is that most data in this dataset were produced and published by English authors and in England. Thus, for both male and female authors, England is the most familiar to deal with. Particularly for female authors, there were more hardships and restrictions to travel beyond national borders than men, so it is not difficult to speculate why women talk about traveling in England. Also, it is understandable that France can be the second-ranked country due to its geographical closeness to England. Interestingly, the dataset presents that out of 12 data about traveling to France, 11 data are about women’s travel after the French Revolution (1789). Of course, it cannot ensure that women traveled to France more after the French Revolution; but it can be assumed that female authors might become more interested in France or talking about France after the revolution. Also, some data shows that there are writings about visiting Asian countries by male and female authors. However, most are about visiting Turkey, the country near Europe. Given that Asia is far from Europe, traveling to Asian countries would be difficult for women, so the data about women’s traveling to Asia are less than the texts about men’s traveling to Asia.

The Pivot Table 4 suggests the relation between travel regions and the purpose of travel. The data shows that tour and sightseeing is the most common reason for traveling. Most texts about this purpose are about visiting European countries, but regarding countries, the data indicates that more tourist books are about visiting Turkey.

The Wandering Women dataset began with the ambition that it was expected to provide the audience with as detailed information about the authors and texts as possible. So the dataset includes the author’s religion and travel information section. Particularly it follows the model of Women’s Traveling Writing: 1780-1840 database which includes the information on travel regions. However, while the data was being collected, it was found out that it is hard to collect those kinds of information without precise contexts about the authors or reviews of the whole texts. Except for several cases, it is not easy to know one’s religion. To get travel information, the curator used Dreamspace tool in Voyant, but this tool is imperfect and has a limitation in providing the desired information. Moreover, the data about literary texts are deficient. Including those data might be nearly impossible for individual researchers because there are countless literary texts produced and published during the early modern period. If the literary texts need to be included in the dataset, the curator should review whole texts to find out whether the individual text contains women’s travel stories or not. So that is why the databases about women’s traveling writings do not include literature as their data.

The Wandering Women data would ask the following questions. Why did the authors before the 1700s, particularly female authors, write about women’s travel in their texts? Among the female authors in the data, Margaret Cavendish mainly deals with women’s travel in her texts, and it raises questions about why Cavendish deals with women’s travel in her texts. Did her personal experience of being politically exiled impact her writing? And among her four texts in the dataset, only one text, including both her philosophical theories and prose fiction, was published, which also raises the question of why only one of her texts was able to be published. And how did her contemporaries consider her and her text? Also, as the data shows that some Quaker women traveled for religious reasons, missionary works, and their travel experiences were produced and published. And according to the text’s full titles, those women seemed persecuted in the places they visited. Then, how those writings about female Quakers’ travels were accpeted by their contemporaries with different religions. Moreover, as the dataset shows after the 1700s, there is a relatively high number of texts about women’s actual travel compared to their counterparts before the 1700s. What made the flourish of texts about actual travel after the 1700s? This question would be related to the changes of women’s life or traditional notion of gender ideology.

Reflections

The Wandering Women dataset project was quite an interesting task in that it allowed the curator to practice what she had learned from the class. While doing this project, there came some reflections regarding the project. The first one is how to employ and apply proper and efficient skills and tools to do the project. Although the curator had learned various skills to use tools for the DH project when the project began, the curator found out she needed to find other skills or tools for her own project. To do her proejct, the curator took a more traditional methodology; after the professor’s advice, she could find a more proper and efficient tool for her project, Zotero. Not only collecting and analyzing but also applying appropriate skills and tools is also significant part in doing DH project. But the skills cannot be obtained and employed immediately right after learning. As Ted Underwood says, “It just takes time”[^1]. It just takes time to familiarize with new skills and discover new skills and tools for further work.

The second issue is how to clean the data. Some information about the early modern period is messy because, as Katherine D’lgnazio and Lauren Klein say that “there is actually rich information about the circumstances under which it was collected”¹. The printer information looks messy and dirty because they would have been collected from various sources. It could explain how they documented and organized their records. However, the desire of “‘correct’ order” (Rawson and Muñoz) was so great that the curator deleted publishers’ and booksellers’ addresses following their names from the printer metadata. By doing so, the print metadata looks clean and normative, but the potential of fruitful information about them has disappeared. On the other hand, the tex full titles are too long and “messy,” but they have not been corrected, and the consequences were different. In their long and “messy” titles, the texts include information that provides the audience and gives expections about the texts. The contrary examples of “cleaning” show that in collecting data, building a dataset, and doing DH research, even single “messy” data could offer practical and plentiful information.

The third one is the number of data. In exploring Voyant, it was discussed that the number is not essential in the data or the dataset. Nonetheless, in building a completely new dataset, the number of data became the most significant concern: how much data should be included in the new dataset to suggest hypotheses, raise questions, and find answers. And most of all, how much data can assure the audience that women were also active participants in early modern travels. That is, “the numbers speak for themselves” as Chris Anderson contends(qtn. D’lgnzio and Klein)². For instance, the number of texts by Mary Wortley Montagu and Helen Maria Willaims reveals that they energetically engaged in writing texts with the topic of women’s travel. Therefore, the curator of this project attempted to collect as much data as possible by searching for various references. But while collecting, organizing, and analyzing the data, what realized was that it is not the number but the context that can expound how the number has been deducted as D’lgnazio and Klein argue. For example, the writings about female Quakers seem to have different features from other women’s travel writings. Those texts mainly discuss how the Quaker women were persecuted in foreign countries rather than show any hints of the female Quakers’ interest in traveling. For this reason, it can be suggested that travel writings about the female Quakers’ have religious propaganda with the theme of women’s travel, not the writings about how women functioned to promote travel literature and cultures. Therefore, the numbers do speak for themselves but does not speak for themselves.

Afterword

The Wandering Women dataset project is incomplete yet developing. The dataset has been created within a few weeks but needs slow digitalization to contain and provide more cornucopia data for the audience. From the single data to the whole dataset, it connotes and produces various issues that the DH research has encountered. It contains weaknesses the novice DH researcher might show and present, but it also raises relevant questions such as women’s travel writing in the early modern period as well as the creation of a new dataset. From this project, more fruitful data and outcomes, and newly developed DH project are expected to come.

[^1]: Underwood, Ted. “Digital Humanities as a Semi-Normal Thing,” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, 2019.