Credits

Contributor credits

Project direction

Founding project editors: Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy

The Orlando Project was originally conceived by Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy. Each is a contributor to and has had overall responsibility for a historical section of the textbase. Together they worked with the team to develop the Orlando tagsets, the textbase, and the Orlando 1.0 publication system, which published the project through Cambridge University Press from 2006 to 2021. Each also undertook other research and management responsibilities which brought the project to publication through CUP in 2006 and are ongoing.

Susan Brown, Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship at the University of Guelph as well as Project Leader of CWRC (the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory), oversaw work on writing from about 1820 to about 1890. She took the lead in integrating the literary and the computing sides in the creation of the Orlando publication interface. She was Project Director from 2008 to 2016 and is now Technical Director, continuing to lead the technical development and maintenance. She also is responsible for Victorian material in the textbase and supervises Research Assistants at the University of Guelph.

Patricia Clements, Orlando's Founding Director and Co-Investigator and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, oversaw work on writing from about 1880 to the present. She initiated the Orlando Project, brought the team together, and served as Project Director from the beginning until 2006. She was Principal Investigator in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant which made the Orlando experiment possible, and later team lead in the Canada Foundation for Innovation grant which sustained it.

Isobel Grundy, Professor Emeritus and former Henry Marshall Tory Professor at the University of Alberta, oversaw work on writing from the beginnings to about 1830. She is the project's Research Director, overseeing content and editing semantic markup across the whole history, as well as continuing to direct work pre-1830. She has a major role in mentoring and overseeing the work of Research Assistants.

Literary directors: Katherine Binhammer, Corrinne Harol

Katherine Binhammer, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, became Literary Director in 2019, returning to the project twenty-two years after serving as one of the first Postdoctoral Fellows. As an executive member, she is responsible for the planning and management of literary content, including the administration of project resources at the University of Alberta.

Corrinne Harol, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta specializing in eighteenth-century studies, served as Literary Director from 2016 to 2019. She advanced the project's long-term planning on content and sustainability with a focus on research in the contemporary period, on which she organized a symposium in 2018.

Associate director: Kathryn Holland

Kathryn Holland, Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at MacEwan University, leads the collaborative authorship of profiles in the modernist period and coordinates collaboration with external contributors. She develops new and established initiatives with fellow executive members, trains and supervises Research Assistants, and manages communication with the project's boards. She joined the project as a Graduate Research Assistant and returned as Senior Research Fellow, 2015 to 2021.

Co-investigators: Terry Butler, Rebecca Cameron, Renée Elio, Susan Hockey, Allen Renear, Stan Ruecker, Jo-Ann Wallace

Terry Butler, who was Faculty Service Officer at the University of Alberta, began his work with Orlando as the project's chief technical support person, then was a co-investigator in the first phase of the project. He worked with other members of the technical team to develop the project's working tools and resources.

Rebecca Cameron, now Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, began her Orlando work as a Postdoctoral Fellow and became a co-investigator for several years in the period leading up to publication.

Renée Elio, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, joined the project when it turned to the challenge of developing the publication system to exploit the extensive tagging of the textbase for dynamic online delivery. She provided expert counsel and leadership in this work during the first interface prototyping and implementation phases. She became Associate Vice-President (Research) at the University of Alberta in 2008.

Susan Hockey, now Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at University College, London, was, when Orlando was conceived, Director of the Princeton-Rutgers Centre for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Later she was Professor of Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. A co-investigator in the first phase of the project, she provided expert advice on infrastructure and encouraged Orlando’s experiment in the new use of the Standard Generalized Markup Language for markup of interpretive, critical text as an element of composition of the text.

Stan Ruecker, now Professor in Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, began as a Research Assistant and became a co-investigator thanks to his significant role in the development of the Orlando 1.0 publication interface.

Jo-Ann Wallace, former Chair of Women's Studies and Chair of English at the University of Alberta, and Allen Renear, Dean and Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both provided expert counsel to Orlando, Dr Wallace on twentieth-century writing and Dr Renear at an early stage in development of the publication interface.

Technical work

Technical personnel: Jeffery Antoniuk has led technical development of the project since 2006, playing a major role in development, maintenance, and systems administration, from nursing along ancient servers when code could not be virtualized to architecting solutions as the Orlando technology has migrated from 1990s to 21st-century software: his foresight and ingenuity have been crucial to the project’s ongoing viability. Michael Brundin, Terry Butler, Greg Coulombe, Sharon Farnel, Sue Fisher, Dave Gomboc, Mihaela Ilovan, Nia Kathoni, Ruth Knechtel, Brynn Lewis, Roland Penner, Mariana Paredes-Olea, and Stan Ruecker all made significant technical contributions to the project, which has also been assisted by Ben Chen and Mike Plouffe.

Orlando 1.0

The Orlando Project's technical personnel work closely and creatively with the literary team to develop the project's data structure, its project management tools and environment, and its publication system. Working at different times in the project's development, these colleagues have addressed many different aspects of the project, sometimes renewing or replacing the work of their predecessors. Sue Fisher and Terry Butler provided technical support in setting the project up. Terry worked with the literary team and led the technical development of the Orlando Document Archive, the project's document management system. Greg Coulombe added functionality to the Archive.

In the first development phase, while Orlando was building its new application of SGML, Susan Hockey provided expert consultation for Sue Fisher and Terry Butler on development of the project's tagsets. As the first team member to master SGML, Sue worked to integrate the literary and computing work, trained others in encoding practice, and was responsible for managing the encoding system as it began to acquire text. Later, Sharon Farnel became the project's Textbase Manager, with responsibility for ensuring the integrity of the encoded text.

In the second major phase, after the data structure and the systems managing it were complete and functional, the project turned to development of a dissemination, or publication, system capable of making the encoded text dynamically functional on the Web. In this phase, Renée Elio provided critical consultation for Dave Gomboc, who was systems analyst and project programmer for two years, and for Roland Penner, who did extensive work on the early development of the Orlando publication system and later made himself available for consultation.

Jeffery Antoniuk and Sharon Farnel did the core technical work in the final stretch to completion of the first publication system. He did extensive systems development; she did the high-level management of the encoded textbase. Both collaborated closely with Professors Susan Brown, Isobel Grundy, and Stan Ruecker on interface design and documentation of the interface. Jeffery Antoniuk works with Cambridge University Press on technical matters relating to publication. Throughout the period before and shortly after publication, Orlando's technical colleagues provided support to team members who were working on documents, and oversaw the use and acquisition of equipment. Ben Chen provided assistance early in the project and Mike Plouffe assisted Jeffery Antoniuk for a few weeks in the last stages of development of the Orlando 1.0 interface. Mariana Paredes-Olea followed Sharon Farnel as Textbase Coordinator, responsible for encoding consistency and authority list management. Some of these responsibilities have been taken on successively by Ruth Knechtel and Mihaela Ilovan.

Orlando 2.0

The new phase of the project called Orlando 2.0 involved the migration of the project’s data from its original server to its home in the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, the setup of its production environment in the same location, and the production of a new interface launched in 2022, fifteen years after the textbase was first published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Planning towards Orlando 2.0 began in 2016 with the formation of new Editorial and Advisory Boards. The complex work to migrate from the original Orlando Document Archive production environment was led by Jeffery Antoniuk with help from Mihaela Ilovan. Foundational interface design and accessibility compliance work was supported by Cambridge University Press through a contract with Make It Clear, whose team, particularly Sarah Edwards, Tina Remiz, and Arya Alatsas, also provided further design work. Abigel Lemak managed this early process, and with Kathryn Holland and Mihaela Ilovan produced additional mockups. Nem Brunell helped with the tag diagrams.

Planning and development of the new interface was managed by Mihaela Ilovan with contributions to content and design from Susan Brown, Kathryn Holland, and Abigel Lemak. Nia Kathoni led the front-end development in Drupal, while Brynn Lewis developed the back-end functionality for faceting and advanced search using a BaseX XML database, with support from Jeffery Antoniuk on optimization. Mihaela Ilovan did the data transformations and collaborated with Jeffery Antoniuk on data transfer. Pieter Botha set up and ran the development environment, and Joe Brown, Andri Johnson, Stephen Pocock and Katie Silvester managed the transition to the new system for Cambridge UP. Kathryn Holland and Abigel Lemak led user testing; we are grateful to Kanika Batra, Katherine Binhammer, Amanda Golden, Isobel Grundy, Amia Khosla, Kathleen McCulloch-Cop, Dawson MacPhee, Alliyya Mohammed, Samuel Peacock, Michaela Rye, and Thomas Smith for their feedback. In addition to the images generously donated (see below) to the new site, data was cleaned up and images researched and ingested by Gregory Blomquist, Susan Brown, Isobel Grundy, Megan Gannett, Amia Khosla, Kathleen McCulloch-Cop, Rachel Narvey, Michaela Rye, Thomas Smith, and Hannah Stewart, with leadership from Mihaela Ilovan, Kathryn Holland, and Alliyya Mo. Documentation for the new site was created by Katherine Binhammer, Susan Brown, David Calloway, Abigel Lemak, Megan Gannett, Isobel Grundy, Mihaela Ilovan, and Rachel Narvey, led by Kathryn Holland. Karen Bourrier provided feedback on the Preface and the revised Introduction.

Research work

Postdoctoral fellows: Katherine Binhammer, Rebecca Cameron, Kathryn Carter, Kathryn Harvey, Jane Haslett, Aimée Morrison, Janice Schroeder, Jeanne Wood

Throughout Orlando's first phase, Postdoctoral Fellows made varied contributions to the project. While each took a key role in supervising the work of the Research Assistants, assigning and evaluating research and encoding, each also participated in both the literary and the technical work of the project, as a member of the Team Planning Group. Most Orlando PDFs conducted library research and used this to contribute to the historical and critical accounts that make up the textbase; individuals contributed in varying measure to this aspect of the work. The work of the Orlando PDFs changed over time, as the project developed. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood participated in the development of the Orlando DTDs (document type definitions), and helped to establish procedures, standards, and training programs. They edited Women and Literary History: 'For There She Was' (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), essays from the Orlando Conference. Kathryn Harvey helped to establish the draft lists of women to be included in the study and worked on the chronologies; Kathryn Carter continued, after her work as an Orlando PDF, to perform the critical task of vetting each document's use of the full potential of the DTDs; Jane Haslett, in succession to Jeanne Wood, assumed responsibility for the extensive Orlando bibliographical database. Rebecca Cameron participated in early conversations about the publication system; Janice Schroeder worked particularly on chronology content; Aimée Morrison brought her experience in DH to the project just when the first publication interface was being completed, and she assisted with editorial finalising of text.

Research associates: Rebecca Blasco and Kathryn Holland did substantial work (research, drafting, encoding, checking) on twentieth-century writing. Anna Ford worked on several twentieth-century documents, as did Sylvia Vance, who also did some document tracking and supervision.

Textflow management: Kevin Spencer oversaw the movement of documents through the several stages from research, drafting, encoding to finalized versions. Deanna Kruger and Ben Authers also managed the nineteenth-century documents for significant periods of time.

Bibliographical profiles: Jeanne Wood in the early years and later Jane Haslett compiled, verified, and checked all bibliographical listings and references in the Orlando textbase to the point of publication, after which that responsibility was distributed across team members.

Research assistants:

Research Assistants conduct fundamental library research on assigned topics or writers, research answers to specific problems, write the results of their work into documents and tag them according to the project's tagsets, check the work of their colleagues for fidelity to sources or for overall coverage, and implement revision changes in documents of various kinds. Some Orlando Research Assistants "graduated" into other roles on the project: Rebecca Blasco and Kathryn Holland became Research Associates; Kevin Spencer, Deanna Kruger, Ben Authers became Textflow Managers, and Abigel Lemak assumed that role with major responsibilities for the biannual updates from 2015 to 2019; Jane Haslett and Kathryn Carter, both part of the project from beginning to publication, became Postdoctoral Fellows; after his appointment as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alberta, former Research Assistant Stan Ruecker became a co-investigator. Many Orlando research assistants "graduated" to other digital humanities projects or to positions in Canada and elsewhere.

External contributors

Orlando’s collaborations have evolved from the start. Besides scholars beyond the core team who have generously shared research findings, Mary Waldron and John Clarke each drafted material toward an author profile for Orlando 1.0. In Orlando 2.0, external contributors undertook primary responsibility for the researching, writing, and tagging of the profiles listed after their names. The profiles went through the same process of collaborative production, editing, and quality control as the rest of the textbase. Our first external contributors with lead roles in the writing of author profiles are Kanika Batra of Texas Tech University and Maryse Jayasuriya of University of Texas at El Paso (Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti), and Heidi Kaufman, University of Oregon (Maria Polack).

Special thanks to those who have volunteered as Research Assistants: Justine Baskey, Abigail Chapman, Emily Hass, Sydney Kruth, Brynn Lewis, Katie Louise McCullough, Alexandra Ross, Alison Uttley, and Melissa Walker. Erik Drebit and Kirsten Nicholson also contributed to the project in connection with coursework.

Images have been shared with Orlando by Diana Bell, whose Ring Cycle artwork provided the textbase banner; photographs of rare and unpublished texts, primarily for use in the Exhibit area, have been shared by researchers Michael Londry (Hilda Londry Collection) and Maureen E. Mulvihill (Mulvihill Collection), and by Chawton House and the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing.

Colleagues and friends, and one or two professional researchers like Elizabeth Murray, have shared material and tracked down knotty points of research.

Administration: Janice Beaveridge, Inge Brown, Kris Calhoun, Kendel Ferrier, Cathy Grant, Dianne Johnson, Joanna Langille, and Katherine Woodman dealt with Orlando's accounting and administrative needs at various times. Inge Brown administered the 1997 Orlando Conference on Women and Literary History.

Acknowledgements

Sustaining and publishing a digital project on this scale for more than a quarter of a century requires significant institutional support and funding. The Orlando Project is grateful for outstanding support given to its work in women's writing and to its experiment in the application of technology to scholarly text. Over the whole period of the development of the Orlando textbase, the University of Alberta has, through the offices of its Vice-President Research, Dean of Arts, Dean of Graduate Studies, Director of Libraries, and Department of English and Film Studies, given unwavering support and encouragement. From the beginning and throughout its history, the Vice-President Research, Dean of Arts, and School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph have generously supported Orlando's work.

We are grateful to Linda Bree, her successor Bethany Thomas, and their colleagues at Cambridge University Press, with whom it is a great pleasure to work to make the Orlando textbase accessible online. The founding editors’ royalties from Cambridge are reinvested in the project to provide crucial resources, including funding the overhaul of the interface for Orlando 2.0, to which the Press also contributed directly.

The first phase of the Orlando experiment was made possible by a Major Collaborative Research Initiatives Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the second was sustained in part by a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Individual researchers have received research grants from SSHRC and the Killam Cornerstone Fund for work related to Orlando's narrative history, and a SSHRC Connection Grant funded the Digital Diversity conference held jointly at MacEwan University and the University of Alberta in 2015 to celebrate the project’s 20th anniversary.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation funded the creation of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, whose infrastructure includes Orlando's current content production system in company with other digital projects, many of which focus on intersectional literary and cultural studies. CANARIE’s Research Software program provided vital funding for enhancing and maintaining CWRC. The CFI also funded the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship which is supporting the dissemination of Orlando Project data as linked open data through a renewed CWRC platform. The University of Guelph’s support for the project has increased through the support of Susan Brown’s position as a Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship.

The Orlando team is moved by and grateful for personal donations from Don Buchanan and Edythe Markstad, and Christopher and Shirley Head, as well as from anonymous donors through the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.

Orlando has a particular debt of gratitude to Peter Lown, Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Alberta, for his generous counsel on a range of critical matters, and to Pamela Freeman, as Acting CEO of TEC Edmonton, for her commitment to and expert help with the project of sustaining Orlando financially.

Members of the project hugely appreciate the encouraging support of the digital humanities community in Canada and elsewhere, and particularly of Ian Lancashire of the University of Toronto, Ray Siemens of the University of Victoria, and Geoffrey Rockwell of the University of Alberta. We want to thank Julia Flanders, Director of the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University, for collegial generosity and advice on a number of matters relating to the creation, publication, and sustainability of electronic scholarly resources.

The Orlando research team wants to acknowledge the sustaining support it has had from the libraries and the inter-library loan departments of the University of Alberta and the University of Guelph, and we want also to acknowledge a longstanding debt of thanks to the British Library and the Bodleian, and to other research collections, too many to name, in Britain and elsewhere. We are grateful also to colleagues who have generously given their time to help test our publication system, or to offer feedback, over the years.

Advisory and editorial boards

Orlando 1.0

In its early planning phase especially, and sometimes since, the project sought and gratefully received the advice of members of its original Advisory Panel:

Orlando 2.0

When the project moved into its expansive 2.0 phase of activity in 2016, it established new advisory and editorial boards, for whose support and input we are grateful:

Advisory board

Editorial board

The Orlando editors, of whose lives this work has for years been a rewarding and demanding part, are keenly and thankfully aware of the many kinds of support they have received from their families and friends.

The Orlando Project is the beneficiary of unceasingly generous encouragement and scholarly support from research colleagues and students across the English-speaking world, many of whom are named in the textbase notes and bibliography. We are deeply grateful to all of these for their constructive feedback and creating interest in the project and for their careful and committed research on the lives and works of women, which continues to give us new and expanding understandings of our literary pasts and our human story.

Image credits

For the attribution and licensing information associated with individual images displayed as part of author profiles, please click on the images.

The table below lists credits for other images included on the site, such as the the Homepage banner or the Browse catalogue cards. Click on the thumbnail to see the full image. 

"Ring Cycle" by Diana Bell,	Title: Ring Cycle Artist: Diana Bell Medium: Oil, paint, sawdust, and ink on wood Date: 1993 License: CC BY 4.0
oii_image_credit	Title: Vintage words Artist: Thom Milkovic Medium: Photograph Date: 11 November 2017 License: Unsplash License Origin information and URL: Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/FTNGfpYCpGM
oii_image_credit	Title: Library Database Artist: Jan Antonin Kolar Medium: Photograph Date: 9 December 2018 License: Unsplash License Origin information and URL: Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/lRoX0shwjUQ
oii_image_credit	Title: Wrens operating the 'Colossus' computer, 1943 Artist: Chris Monk Medium: Photograph Date: 31 March 2003 License: CC BY 2.0 (Attribution 2.0 Generic) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Origin information and URL: Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/101251639@N02/9669449367/in/photostream/
oii_image_credit	Title: Hepworth tools at the Barbara Hepworth Museum Artist: fotologic (Flickr user) Medium: Photograph Date: 8 April 2005 License: CC BY 2.0 (Attribution 2.0 Generic) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Origin information and URL: Wikimedia, File:Hepworth tools.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
oii_image_credit	Title: A silhouette of a human head, seen in profile Artist: N/A Medium: Watercolour Date: c. 1827 License: CC BY 4.0 Origin information and URL: Wellcome Library via Wikimedia, uploaded by Fae (Wikimedia user), 28 October 2014, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_silhouette_of_a_human_head,_seen_in_profile._Watercolour,_Wellcome_V0009713.jpg
oii_image_credit	Title: N/A Artist: Jon Tyson Medium: Photograph Date: 8 August 2018 License: Unsplash License Origin information and URL: Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/FlHdnPO6dlw
oii_image_credit	Title: White Paper Artist: Pixabay Medium: Photograph Date: 23 February 2016 License: CC-0 Origin information and url: CC 0, https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-paper-51159/
oii_image_credit	Title: The Lending Library Artist: Isaac Cruikshank Medium: Photograph of watercolour on paper painting Date: Painting created between 1810 and 1811 License: Public domain Origin information and URL: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, https://images.collections.yale.edu/iiif/2/ycba:e24339a2-60b3-4ba1-b4d1-25b7228c07f2/full/full/0/default.jpg
oii_image_credit	Title: Bermondsey Market Artist: Ellen Lanyon Medium: Photograph of oil on linoleum painting Date: Painting originally created 1951 License: Thumbnail photographic image available under fair use https://britishart.yale.edu/using-images-works-under-copyright Origin information and URL: Yale Center for British Art, https://images.collections.yale.edu/iiif/2/ycba:411c6964-f811-45a3-b51f-d884ec2c13d1/full/full/0/default.jpg
oii_image_credit	Novissima Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula, Auctore Nicolao Visscher Artist: Nicolai Visscher Medium: Photograph of map Date: Map originally published 1690 License: CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 Origin information and URL: David Rumsey Maps Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~301178~90072178:Novissima-Totius-Terrarum-Orbis-Tab?sort=pub_list_no_initialsort&qvq=w4s:/when%2F1690;q:World_Area%3D%22World%22%20;sort:pub_list_no_initialsort;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=0&trs=2
oii_image_credit	Title: Orlando Life Diagram Author: The Orlando Project Medium: JPEG file Date: 2022 License: CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 Generic) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
oii_image_credit	Title: Orlando Production Diagram Author: The Orlando Project Medium: JPEG file Date: 2022 License: CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 Generic) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
oii_image_credit	Title: Orlando Textual Features Diagram Author: The Orlando Project Medium: JPEG file Date: 2022 License: CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 Generic) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
oii_image_credit	Title: Orlando Reception Diagram Author: The Orlando Project Medium: JPEG file Date: 2022 License: CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 Generic) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
oii_image_credit	Title: Orlando Core Tags Diagram Author: The Orlando Project Medium: JPEG file Date: 2022 License: CC BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 Generic) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/