Orlando's content is structured by the unique XML tagset described in the Introduction and visualized in the Tag Diagrams. To assist in understanding Search result facets and Tag Search, this Glossary provides definitions for tags and attributes (descriptors associated with tags). Some attributes have set values. These are often explained within definitions of attributes. Other attribute values, such as genre names, are defined within the ontologies of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, which hosts Orlando’s production environment. Searches on this page retrieve tags, attributes, and definitions, but not necessarily attribute values.
This sub-element is found in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION.It captures important educational awards given to future writers, and contains the name of the award, or occasionally a sentence concerning it. It has optional attributes of AWARDTYPE and REG. REG allows us to regularize the name of an award when we have not been able to express it in a standard form in the prose.
This attribute is on the element AWARD found within BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION. It distinguishes between the different kinds of awards: scholarship, prize, and other. An entrance scholarship to Oxford or winning first prize in a Spelling Bee: distinguishing between awards will help understand the material conditions affecting women's education.
An optional sub-element in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION, it identifies significant friends, schoolfellows, or important contacts formed during any phase or mode of an author’s education.
CONTESTEDBEHAVIOUR is located in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION. It records instances of significant actions or behaviour in school which was frowned on. This element particularly tracks young women's rebelliousness in the face of restrictive educational institutions. It is placed around the complete sentence(s) describing the behaviour.
This sub-element is found in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION. It captures all degrees (BA, MA, PhD), diplomas, certificates, etc. received by the entry subject. It goes around the name of the degree, and has one optional attribute, REG, which expresses the degree in a standard way. (Oxford gives a D.Phil. where others give a PhD, which would be the REG form.)
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.
CHRONCOLUMN is a mandatory attribute on the element CHRONSTRUCT (available throughout the textbase), which designates a given event as belonging to a subject-specific “column” - that is, to appear in different faceted searches - in Orlando timelines. It has four values: PoliticalClimate, WomenWriters, WritingClimate, and SocialClimate. The same event can be assigned to more than one CHRONCOLUMN, and each may have a different RELEVANCE value. In searches where CHRONCOLUMN is not specified, the event will appear with the icon of the one assigned first. Interpretation of values SocialClimate and NationalInternational is fluid.
The attribute values carry the following connotations:
PoliticalClimate Events
Social Climate: the items in this column will frequently refer not to discrete events but to larger trends or practices affecting women; this means DATERANGES as well as DATES, often approximate.
The following are types of information appropriate to this column:
Writing Climate
Women Writers
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 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.
This optional attribute is attached to BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION. It records the Mode of learning and allows us to distinguish between a domestic or an institutional or an autodidactic education through its values: Domestic, Institutional, or Self-taught. The Domestic mode includes all home schooling, whether by a mother, brother, or goveness. Self-taught covers all forms of independent study. Education in any kind of school ranks as Institutional. This attribute allows us to trace the historical developments in women's access to education, for example, the informal domestic education of women writers in the early periods versus the founding of girls’ schools and eventually women's entrance to post-secondary education. The Self-taught value illuminates the place of self-help in women’s intellectual aspirations. A single educational career may make use of all three values in turn; Self-Taught and Institution apply to a good deal of learning in adulthood as well as childhood.
This content sub-element, available only within BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION, can record either the specific name or a description of an educational institution. Its attributes are REG, INSTITUTION (capturing type of school), INSTITUTIONLEVEL (from primary to post-secondary), RELIGIOUS (to identify schools teaching a particular faith), and STUDENTBODY (with attributes CO-ED and SINGLESEX). Encloses name of institution (Ilminster Grammar School; St Anne’s College,, Oxford University) or description if no name is available (a convent school, a short-lived typing school). May be used in combination with ORGNAME for institutions prominent enough to be potentially named elsewhere in the system, but not for those unlikely ever to be mentioned again (Miss Brodie’s Academy for Young Ladies).
Attribute REG on SCHOOL expresses the name of the school in a standard form if not done in the prose, and is useful for long-established schools that have changed their names. Colleges at collegiate universities take college name, double comma, university name (Trinity College,, University of Toronto). A few ancient universities named for places take the form without of: Oxford University.
This optional attribute attached to the element SCHOOL (within BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION) records whether the school is single-sex or inclusive. This attribute (with values SINGLESEX and CO-ED) helps us to interpret the influence of single-sex education on women writers across historical periods.
I.e. subject of study. This content sub-element in BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION, generally encloses a word or phrase, and records areas of study which are significant to a writer's education. It has one attribute, REG, to explain non-standard terms (<SUBJECT REG="HISTORY”>kings and queens of England</>). We are particularly interested in subjects which influenced her writing (for example, she studied archeology and her first novel was set at an archeological dig), classical language studies for women writers in the early period (recording the importance of ancient languages as a masculine domain, and the acquisition of translation skills), and other subjects which were non-traditional for women (for example, engineering).
Located within BIOGRAPHY > EDUCATION, this tag records texts significant in educational development, early reading matter which exerted a formative influence, rather than even major influences on her writing, if encountered in maturity. Encloses generally just a title or author name, but can enclose a phrase, e.g. "Greek myth and legend," or "German fairy tales."
This has one optional attribute, REG which allows for the standardization of the name of the author or title of the book (either of which might be tagged as TEXT) when not done in the prose. Used for expanding or fully identifying either Name or Title: <TEXT REG="Eliot, George”>Eliot</TEXT>, <TEXT REG="The Mill on the Floss">Maggie Tulliver</TEXT>
Belonging in WRITING > TEXTUALFEATURES, THEMETOPIC is a very flexible tag. It has no controlled vocabulary associated with it, but can contain any information. It may enclose much more than a single word; it may record central themes, side issues in a text, or objects of observation or discussion. Place tags, for instance, often appear within TTHEMETOPIC tags in accounts of travel literature, and NAME tags within accounts of biography and criticism. (Accounts of place as it operates in fiction use a SETTINGPLACE tag.) This element applies to both theme and topic. Theme is the central idea in a text stated either directly or indirectly; topic applies to interesting subjects appearing in a work that might not aspire to the status of a "theme". The tag is useful in describing examples of genres such as educational or non-fictional texts. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes.
