Tag Glossary

PEARNINGS is conceptually related to WRITING > PRODUCTION. It comments both on the value/amount of her literary earnings and her attitude towards them. This means earnings, direct or indirect, from writing, not from a day job (which is tagged as REMUNERATION, in OCCUPATION, in the BIOGRAPHY section). It also sometimes encloses comment on a writer’s feelings or statements about her earnings. It is often used with PCONTRACT or other tags relating to publication process. 

This element captures information about the nature of the editions that a text went through. This can also provide a space to talk about bowdlerization, revisions, emendations, the author's preference for certain editions, or which edition is preferable from a scholarly point of view because of completeness.

EDUCATION is one of the 16 major, DIV1 elements defined as integral to mapping a woman's life in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries. EDUCATION contains all information about a person's educational experience. Particular emphasis is placed on where and when she went to school (content tagging here will provide important links between different women writers who had the same teacher or went to the same school), gender issues (the conditions affecting women's access to education), and subjects studied (making connections between a subject studied by the writer and topics of her writing). In most instances this element will directly follow the FAMILY element capturing information about the subject’s parents, and education from primary to post-secondary will be included in the same element. But it can be used repeatedly in one entry to reflect chronology or to apply different attribute values - when, for example, the subject attended university later in life. This tag has content sub-elements: AWARD, COMPANION, CONTESTEDBEHAVIOUR, DEGREE, INSTRUCTOR, SCHOOL, SUBJECT, TEXT. It has an optional attribute, MODE, used to register whether the education took place at home, in an institution or self-driven.

This sub-element is located in BIOGRAPHY > OCCUPATION. It captures the names of a person's employers. We are interested in tracking of particular kinds of organizations and institutions that supported women's work or attracted women writers more than others. This element generally encloses just a NAME or ORGNAME, though it may enclose a few words (a series of department stores).

Ethnicity is a sub-tag within BIOGRAPHY > CULTURALFORMATION. It is sometimes also within RACEANDETHNICITY. ETHNICITY captures information about a person's ethnic position. See RACEANDETHNICITY for a detailed description of the complexities of this element. ETHNICITY encloses the word or phrase that best describes the person's ethnicity. It has optional attributes of FOREBEAR, SELF-DEFINED, and REG, which standardizes an ethnic label.

A chronStruct is an element that holds together and therefore associates a date with the prose that describes an event.

This element, used only within AUTHORSUMMARY and normally containing at least a full sentence, is particularly useful in summing up the careers of minor writers. The AUTHORSUMMARY is attached to WRITING in entries, but displayed on the OVERVIEW screen. There are no allowable sub-elements or attributes for this element.

FAMILY is a DIV1 content element, one of the 16 major elements in the BIOGRAPHY section of profiles, defined as integral to mapping a woman's life. FAMILY contains all information about a person's family life (both her birth family and her married family) and, when no MEMBER sub-element is used, captures general family information and allows for a discussion of multiple family members at the same time.

For the purposes of Orlando, we are defining family in the strict sense of the state-sanctioned institution. We acknowledge the politically offensive nature of constructing the family as including only biological, by-marriage and by-adoption members. But, in order to ensure that we do not erase the material and ideological effects of this construction, we do not want to merge alternative families with state-sanctioned families, thereby hiding their very real differences. By including alternative families under another of 16 major life elements in BIOGRAPHY, INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS, we hope to facilitate research on the politics of the family. If the woman had a lifelong relationship with a lover whom she did not marry, but the relationship played itself out in a family-like manner, then we tag family MEMBER=partner. If they defined their relationship in opposition to the heterosexual family, then it would be tagged in the INTIMATERELATIONSHIPS element.

In most instances, a FAMILY element is placed after BIRTH and CULTURALFORMATION to introduce her parents and general early family life. The element (and its sub-elements, MEMBER, CHILDREN, CHILDLESSNESS, SEPARATION and DIVORCE) can be used again later in the profile to discuss her married family, or later developments within her birth family. Any combination of multiple member sub-elements and general FAMILY discussion can be used within one FAMILY element.

This element belongs within WRITING > RECEPTION. It refers to the appearance of author as fictitious character in someone’s later writings - Aphra Behn as freedom fighter, Ada Byron as detective etc. (but not recasting of her works, for which use RSHEINFLUENCED). It should contain a full sentence, and any titles that occur within it should be tagged as such. It has no mandatory or optional attributes or sub-elements.

This element is conceptually a part of BIOGRAPHY > PRODUCTION. It captures the first significant writing activity, published or otherwise, of the subject. It is not used for publications unless there's strong evidence that the publication actually sprang from the actual earliest writing activity. This element should contain a full sentence spelling out if possible (and tagging) the title of the work, its date of creation of publication, and its TGENRE. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes.

FRIENDSASSOCIATES is one of the 16 major content elements defined as integral to mapping a woman's life in the BIOGRAPHY section of her entry. Because of the ability of our digital literary history to make links between people, mapping the friendships and personal connections of writers is a very high priority. Systematizing the people that a woman writer knew will allow us to make hitherto unrecognized connections between writers. This original research will provide users with a wealth of information about personal, political, intellectual, and other relationships. The title Friends and Associates is meant to reflect the fact that not all of a woman's associates may be friends. This element may discuss enmities, business relations, or associations that are not strictly friendships. Discussions of friendships or relationships that impinged upon the woman's sense of her own sexuality, would be best captured within either Sexuality or INTIMATERELATIONSHIPS. Sometimes, however, the same name needs repeating in both FRIENDSASSOCIATES and INTIMATERELATIONSHIPS. This element has one content sub-element, LIVESWITH.

This element is designed to capture the gender of the subject to whom it is applied in a single word or phrase. The GENDERISSUE tag is available for more substantive discussions of gender and gender identity. Gender is a historically constructed and linguistically complex category that can shift over the course of a person's lifetime, in which case multiple elements can be used. The GENDER tag has multiple attributes: GENDERIDENTITY, CURRENT, ALTERNATIVE, SELFIDENTIFIED [etc], with definitions for the latter attributes the same as for other sub-tags within CULTURALFORMATION.

The element GENERICRANGE is designed to work only within AUTHORSUMMARY statements (which are composed in the WRITING section of profiles. It cannot be used elsewhere). It takes in a sentence or sentences discussing a writer's whole oeuvre and the kind of generic choices she made over her lifetime. It has no allowable sub-elements or attributes.

TGENRE is an element used in the Writing section of entries and in free-standing events. It has a single attribute, GenreName, which captures the name of the genres written by an entry subject or addressed by a free-standing event, according to a project-generated list of genre names. This tag may be used more than once on the same word, since the world contains more genrenames, and mixed genres, than can be listed. This is a mandatory attribute; the element is meaningless without it.

GENREISSUE is an element belonging to WRITING > TEXTUALFEATURE. It talks generally about the genre issues raised by a specific text, or about an unusual mixture of genre forms. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes, but it has an ancillary element in TGENRE with attribute GENRENAME, which should occur in every use of TGENREISSUE.

GEOG, a sub-element available within PLACE element in every kind of document, captures names of places which are nation states or larger conceptual geographical entities. It goes around name only, excludes punctuation, and has two attributes, CURRENT and REG. The following is a list of the types of places that GEOG captures:

• Nation states: Italy, China, Canada
• Groups of Nation States: Low Countries, Baltic Countries
• Colonies: French Indo-China, British North America [Note: Current attribute wherever possible gives present-day name, with REG attribute giving name at the time referred to.]
• Conceptual Geographical Groupings: Far East
• Historical Geo-political units: For example, Siam and Ceylon use CURRENT attribute to record these as Thailand and Sri Lanka; Siam and Ceylon are used in Reg attribute to ensure obsolete names are searchable.

GEOGHERITAGE is a subtag within BIOGRAPHY > CULTURALFORMATION. It captures information about powerful early geographical influences, or about the geographical origins of a person's family which often contributes to an understanding of their racial and ethnic background. It offers a way to capture women identified as South-Asian, for example, when no more precise national heritage is indicated. It should enclose the word or words that best describe(s) the relevant place. It has attributes, FOREBEAR, SELF-DEFINED, and REG (which last enables a more standardized description than the prose). See RACEANDETHNICITY for a detailed description of the complexities of this element.

This tag contains any type of heading, for example the title of a section, or the heading of a list, glossary, manuscript description, etc.

HEALTH is one of the 16 major DIV1 content elements in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries defined as integral to mapping a woman's life.This element discusses all serious events and issues associated with her health, both mental and physical. We are particularly interested in women's health issues and this element has an associated attribute value to indicate them. We hope to make connections between social, political and historical health issues (for example, the gendered nature of mental health) and the personal lives of women writers (the experience of a woman writer being incarcerated in a mental institution). While we are not interested in listing all health problems a woman writer encountered, we are interested in analyzing the effect of her health on her life and writing.

A single optional attribute, ISSUE, distinguishes various aspects of HEALTH through attributes PHYSICAL, MENTAL, and FEMALEBODY.

This term belongs to BIOGRAPHY > PRODUCTION. It records the effects of specific people, texts, events, or places that formed or developed the writer's thinking or practice as an artist. Influences can pertain to her individual texts or her work as a whole. It contains at least a full sentence, and usually at least one tagged NAME or TITLE. It is modified by an attribute, INLFUENCETYPE, which has three values: literary, intellectual, or familial.

This content sub-element is available within BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION. It captures information regarding influential instructors in a person's life. Placing tags around instructors will allow us to discover whether a number of women writers had the same teacher and whether or not a specific teacher supported and encouraged writing in women. We wish to honour teachers who were also writers or who had significant effect on literary development, but not to record every name given in writer’s memoir about her education. The sub-element should be placed around the NAME of the Instructor. If name is unknown, occasionally it encloses a description, e.g. an eminent concert pianist.

TINTERTEXTUALITY belongs conceptually to WRITING > TEXTUALFEATURES. It provides a place to talk about all those textual markers that acknowledge the existence of or imply a relation with other texts. It encloses a statement, nearly always including an author’s name and/or a title. This tag has no mandatory or optional sub-elements but it has two optional attributes: INTERTEXTTYPE and GENDEROFAUTHOR. The attribute INTERTEXTTYPE has values of allusionAcknowledged, allusionUnacknowledged, quotation, misquotation, parody, satire, imitation, adaptation-update, prequel, continuation, answer. The attribute GENDEROFAUTHOR has values of male or female.

INTIMATERELATIONSHIPS is one of the 16 DIV1 major content elements defined as integral to mapping a woman's life in the BIOGRAPHY section of her entry. An intimate relationship is defined, for the purposes of this Project, as a relationship that involves any type of intimacy whether that be emotional, psychological, material, or sexual. This element seeks to counter the traditional assumption that women's only intimate relations happen within the context of marriage or heterosexual relations between sexual partners. It understands lifelong female friendships, defining psychological connections, non-sexual intimacies, or erotically-charged same-sex or different-sex relationships as important to a woman's life. This element captures information concerning both brief sexual affairs and lifelong non-sexual relationships (see attribute EROTIC for distinguishing between the two). This element also seeks to redress the historical and ideological silence around women's same-sex relationships; it recognizes that biographical information concerning these relationships is often impossible to uncover; therefore this element allows us to recognize these relations as significant while not assuming, in the absence of biographical proof, that they were sexual.

This element has sub-elements of LIVESWITH and SEXUALIDENTITY, and an optional attribute, EROTIC.

JOB, a sub-element available within OCCUPATION and also under MEMBER, within FAMILY, is meant to capture the types of non-literary employment done by women writers and their families. It encloses just a word or phrase describing the job. We are interested in comparing the kinds of jobs women did in different historical periods and the kinds of jobs family members did. We want to facilitate research, for example, on the influence of living in a parsonage on women writers and would therefore like to track women who had fathers and mothers who were ministers. The tag has one optional attribute, REG, which standardizes the name of a job. By regularizing, the attribute REG serves to group jobs: professor, reader (Britspeak), lecturer are all REG=academic.

This element belongs within WRITING > RECEPTION. However, it is used in a CHRONSTRUCT if possible, and a CHRONSTRUCT marking publication is generally within a PRODUCTION tag. It refers to a work that, in our opinion, broke new ground, was in some way shocking or notorious or illuminating, or had major social or literary repercussions. It should contain a full sentence and the one title that specifies the landmark text. If used in CHRONSTRUCT, this element contributes to the MILESTONES section of the profile. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes.

LANGUAGE is a content sub-element available within BIOGRAPHY > CULTURALFORMATION. It captures the names of languages the person knew at an early age. This tag is for specific names such as German, Gaelic, etc. We are interested in the various languages women writers used or knew, and how different mother tongues affect writing. We are interested in capturing information about British women writers whose first language was not English (including how Gaelic, Welsh, and Irish relate to women writing in English). This tag has optional attributes of COMPETENCE (values Mother and Other) and REG. REG is used when the language name has not been expressed in a standard fashion in the prose.

This tag belongs conceptually within WRITING > PRODUCTION. It records the final significant writing activity, published or otherwise, and should be used with all authors where evidence exists. It should contain a full sentence, and the only title tagged within it should be the title of the last work. If this tag is used in a CHRONSTRUCT it will display in the MILESTONES section of the profile. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes.

LEISUREANDSOCIETY is one of the 16 major DIV1 content elements within BIOGRAPHY sections of entries defined as integral to mapping a woman's life. It captures information concerning the cultural and social activities of a person, including hobbies, sporting life and non-literary cultural or social life. Individual friendships are captured under FRIENDSASSOCIATES and volunteer philanthropic activities are captured under OCCUPATION. For the purposes of this Project, we are not defining leisure as what she does with her free time because this assumes a gendered and classed notion of labour. Society in this context refers to the larger community and her social life within it, not primarily to an elite, fashionable social circle - but things like being presented at court or having her portrait painted do figure here. This tag has no content sub-elements or attributes.

This element belongs conceptually within WRITING > PRODUCTION. Though, it can equally be used within TEXTUALFEATURES or RECEPTION. It is meant to identify named literary or artistic schools that influenced an author’s writing or in which she was a participant or at least with which she had significant contact.