Moderated by Karen Bourrier (University of Calgary)
Presenting recent insights from "Collective Biographies of Women" (CBW), this lecture explores Victorian social networks and gender ideology through prosopographies of women published in Britain, its empire, and former colonies. Many of the volumes claim that women are the moral leaders or mothers of the world, and that one sample of a dozen or so biographies represents extensive collective history. While CBW, with Orlando, seeks linked open data on women writers (a subset of CBW persons), it studies a concentrated corpus of printed texts (excluding reference works) for mid-range reading of narratives about explorers and scientists, mistresses and rulers, and so on. The "world" of nineteenth-century female prosopography generates circumscribed data structured by tables of contents, cross-references, and language, time, and place (of the life or text). But CBW records, surprisingly diverse, are linked with SNAC, HathiTrust, and Wikipedia, opening horizons for digital research.
Presentation available here.