Technologizing Women's Travel Writing: Issues & Implications

Technologizing Women's Travel Writing: Issues &
Implications

Miranda
Beaven
Remnek
University Libraries University of
Minnesota
m-remn@tc.umn.edu

Mary
Skemp
University Libraries University of
Minnesota

Sarah
Wadsworth
University Libraries University of
Minnesota

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Recent developments in feminist criticism and electronic text have
revolutionized humanities scholarship. By decentering canonical works, they
liberate marginalized writers, and provide alternative criteria for textual
interpretation. A new wave of scholarship has highlighted travel narratives
as rich sources for understanding women's identity. Digitization provides
access to these sources, and strengthen interdisciplinary connections.
The Electronic Text Research Center at the University of Minnesota Libraries
is thus engaged in a project entitled Women's Travel Writing, 1830-1930. WTW
selects feminist texts not in wide circulation and encodes them to
facilitate textual analysis. We focus on American travellers, but include
selected European women. We emphasize Africa and Latin America, but are
beginning to cover the Far East and North America, as well as certain themes
(eg. texts by women naturalists).
WTW uses XML-compliant DynaWeb software to deliver TEI-encoded texts over the
Web. In addition to support for research, our project has a strong teaching
mission. We assist both faculty and students in learning more about
digitized texts, and their potential teaching uses. There are three modes of
access: 1.Basic Full-text Search; 2.Expanded (Thesaurus) Search; 3.
Analytical (Metadata) Search. Our work has raised issues in three main
areas: gender; language; geography.

I. Text Encoding and Gender Identity
Travel writing by women has been doubly marginalized. It has not been
accorded the same value as male writing. Moreover, travel writing as a genre
is marginalized. While the American literary "canon" includes travel
accounts, these are narratives or fictional works by men like John Smith and
Samuel Clemens. WTW provides a valuable corrective by publishing female
travel narratives spanning the years 1830-1930. This period is of interest
in terms of national expansion, colonialism, and new opportunities for
geographical and intellectual exploration by women.
Our first phase of development has involved selection, digitization, and
structural encoding. Our goal is a sample of significant texts, emphasizing
those that are less accessible. The second phase involves enhancing the
texts with analytical categories. These enable the user to conduct searches
for thematic and cultural analysis. A user may retrieve all paragraphs that
contain specific content even if they lack the keywords of a word search.
Thus, a search for tags will retrieve passages dealing with women as
students, whether or not the word "education" appears in the text.
Creating a taxonomy of markup categories presents a challenge. There is
potential for limitless intervention in the text--a cause for unease on the
part of many. The possibilities for analytical encoding are various, and
subject to interpretation by encoders. Limiting the scope helps ensure
consistent markup and the allocation of resources to the expansion of the
archive (rather than the endless markup of a few texts). Two of the
categories determined by our steering committee ("Ethnicity" and
"Transportation") derive from features of travel writing. The others
("Gender Marking"and "Women's Occupations") derive from women's writing
itself. Clearly, "gender" is an essential category that we use to reflect
male dominance, or transgression of gender lines. Admittedly, the categories
are politically- and ideologically-charged, but these four groups are likely
to be of the greatest interest to most users. And since a major project goal
is to help students read the texts critically and intelligently, we will
have met our goal nicely if our encoding is merely suggestive. It has been
noted that SGML-encoded text "has qualities of intelligence" that allow "us
to focus on the problems that interest us most and hold the rest in
abeyance". In the case of data tagged with categories like gender and
ethnicity, this observation is doubly true.

2. Language Issues: Facilitating Undergraduate Access to Non-English
Travel Sources
WTW has emphasized English-language texts. But SGML-based interpretive
categories can help render foreign-language sources more accessible.
Consider a text by Flora Tristan: Pérégrinations d'une
paria (1833-34). In this account of travel to Peru, Tristan
reminisces about her unionizing experiences. A digitized copy is available
to a French civilization class which includes coverage of the worker's
movement. Working class history is difficult to recreate because of the lack
of sources; the material is also difficult because of textual "otherness."
There are three levels of estrangement: linguistic, geographic, and
historical. The first is not always problematic. But the instructor must
also deal with student alienation caused by a foreign text's "other"
differences (historical and geographic). These are compounded in Tristan's
memoir--since she was a French woman travelling in Peru. The challenge is to
decrease these differences for the American student.
We attempt this by encoding vital categories of "difference": gender, class,
and politics. Parts of the text are linked to broaden the context of the
theme treated. This gives students a different method to collect data. The
categories become critical tools through which they study images, symbols,
and stylistics. Each category used for the Tristan text is subdivided. Gender is divided into "male," "female," and
"other." Class is subdivided into "privilege,"
"working class," "wealth" and "poverty." Politics is encoded according to references to revolution and
the labor movement.
Consider a section in which Tristan describes the costume of Lima and how it
functions in the daily activity of women. In Tristan's discourse, the women
become an allegory of the idea of Freedom. This interpretation must be
understood in the context of Tristan's own experiences as a French woman
whose husband's problems have motivated her travel to Peru. And we have used
details found in the text's three prefaces to elucidate her presentation of
Peruvian culture and politics. The first preface is a dedication, the second a philosophical essay revealing her political thought, and the
third an autobiographical essay. We have linked
the prefaces and narrative to draw out the personal politics behind
Tristan's text. Not used as in other WTW texts, in this narrative "Gender:
women" represents the appropriation of a custom particular to women in a
foreign culture as a symbol through which the author exposes her own desires
and reasons for writing.
For example, in the travel section we encoded: "On doit... aire remarquer
combien le costume des Liméniennes est favorable et seconde leur
intelligence pour leur faire acquérir la grande liberté... dont elle
jouissent." From the philosophical essay we
encoded: "On a observé que le degré de civilisation auquel les diverses
sociétés humaines sont parvenues a toujours été proportionné au degré
d'indépendence dont y ont joui les femmes." The student can thus understand
how the description of sayas and women of Lima supports Tristan's politics
as described in her prefaces.

3. Geographic Issues: Obstacles and Possibilities
Issues of geography are clearly intrinsic to the primary texts with which we
deal. Although our work in this area has not progressed as far as in the
first two categories, we are nevertheless developing new access mechanisms
in two main areas:
Image map access from our project website;
Thesaurus-based place name searches

Partial Bibliography

Julia
Flanders

The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the
Electronic Text

K.
Sutherland

Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and
Theory

Oxford

1997

Mary
Suzanne
Shriber

Introduction

M.
Shriber

Telling Tales: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century
American Women Abroad

DeKalb

1995

Kathryn
Sutherland

Challenging Assumptions: Women Writers and New
Technology

W.
Chernaik

C.
Davis

M.
Deegan

The Politics of Electronic Text

Oxford

1993