The Tag Glossary: I

This attribute attached to indexed name, allows us to distinguish between the Library of Congress' and the British Library's indexed names.

INFLUENCETYPE is an optional attribute found in WRITING > PRODUCTION > INFLUENCESHER. It is used to indicate how someone or something influenced a woman writer. It has three values: Literary, Intellectual and Familial. If a text or person influenced a woman writer's literary style of techniques, literary is used; if it influenced her ideas or opinions, intellectual is used; if she took inspiration or advice from literary practices or ideas of a parent or other relation, familial is used.

This optional attribute is found in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION > SCHOOL. It records the significant differences between types of institutions. We are interested in the effect of institutional structures on women's lives and hope to capture, for example, how institutional differences between trade schools and boarding schools influenced women. Because of the complicated range of (especially British) educational institutions, this attribute has ten attribute values: boarding, grammar, private, state, dameSchool, daySchool, comprehensive, secondaryModern, tradeSchool, prep:

Boarding: a boarding school is a school at which the students sleep. Common in the fee-paying system, less common in the state or free system, though in some areas like the Highlands and Islands of Scotland boarding schools are (or maybe were) standard at secondary level because of the far-flung nature of terrain. Often weekly boarding (home for weekends) rather than for whole term.

Grammar: Grammar schools date back to the middle ages; grammar in title means education in Latin (occasionally Greek as well). They were for boys only, though some took a few girls almost without noticing. Grammar schools for girls began in the nineteenth century; academic education was thought of as a needing single-sex environment. Entrance from 1944 was by an exam called the "Eleven Plus" from age at which children sat it. Grammar schools creamed off the top 10% or so of the population. They gradually died out after Comprehensive Schools came in during the 1950s and 1960s. Currently making a come-back.

Private: The broad category private (or fee-paying) includes the subcategory of “public schools” which are a particular group of high-status, now private schools with a particular history.

State: Schools provided for out of the taxes for free education are called state schools.

DameSchool: A totally informal school run by a woman on her own initiative, usually at a primary level: teaching elementary alphabet, etc.

Day school: a day school applies in contexts where boarding schools are common. Attending a day school is different from being a day pupil at a boarding school.

Comprehensive: Brave new idea of putting whole ability range in same (therefore typically larger) school. In many communities the grammar school and the “secondary modern” were each converted into a comprehensive and the teachers had to spend a decade convincing the local residents that both were equally good.

Prep: a private school (historically single-sex male, and boarding) not secondary as in US terminology but primary (typically to the age of 13).

SecondaryModern: These replaced trade or vocational schools when another Education Act went through, as the schools for those who failed the 11+ exam. A well-meant system but children felt rejected. Harrowing tales of those who actually made it to university in the end despite having failed the 11+ and attended a Secondary Modern.

TradeSchool: A secondary or post secondary institution where students learn a trade.

This optional attribute is found in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION > SCHOOL. We are interested in how many women writers went to university, how many had access to primary (elementary) education but not secondary, and the different institutional levels of women's education across historical periods.

This optional attribute is used to modify the element of TINTERTEXTUALITY, found in WRITING > TEXTUALFEATURES. It allows greater specificity to indicate how any earlier text has been used in connection with any later text. This attribute, which works in conjunction with a sibling attribute, GenderOfAuthor, has eleven values associated with it.

AllusionAcknowledged applies in situations where the author explicitly acknowledges her debt to a particular text or set of texts. By contrast, if the allusion is clearly evident, but unacknowledged, AllusionUnacknowledged is used.

Quotation applies when the author lifts words or phrases directly from another work (in a prominent position, e.g. a title); Misquotation is used when she gets it wrong or deliberately alters it.

Parody and Satire are used when the author performs a send-up of another text.

Imitation or Adaptation-update suggests a favourable reaction to a text previously written.

Prequel is useful for something like Wide Sargasso Sea which attempts to pre-date or speculate about what came before Jane Eyre.

Continuation (equivalent to sequel, but to someone else’s text) and Answer signify two separate ways of responding imaginatively to a text. They differ from Imitation or Adaptation-update because they do not directly rely on the previous text. Answer generally means opposition.

This optional attribute is attached to BIOGRAPHY > POLITICALAFFILIATION.

It can also be found in WRITING > PRODUCTION > PLITERARYSCHOOLS.

In conjunction with its sibling attributes, it designates the degree of engagement with the political affiliation or literary school specified. Involvement denotes an intermediate level of activity between ACTIVISM and MEMBERSHIP. The political weight of INVOLVEMENT implies more than simply being a member of the Labour Party but does not entail sustained activism. Examples might include participating (but not in a leadership role) in a labour strike or a WSPU march, holding a position within an organization's executive, writing letters or canvassing for Greenpeace. They might include interest in and response to literary modernism in a writer who still had some reservations about modernism. This attribute has sibling attributes: ACITIVISM, MEMBERSHIP, and WOMAN-GENDERISSUE. It has attribute values, InvolvementYes and InvolvementNo.

The optional attribute ISSUE denotes the specific type of issue described in BIOGRAPHY > HEALTH. Its attribute values will allow us to separate health issues pertaining to PHYSICAL and MENTAL health and to specifically FEMALEBODY health concerns. We are interested in facilitating research into the gendered nature of women's relation to the medical institution, female-dominated illnesses such as breast cancer, and women's oppression by mental health institutions, to name only a few.