Tag Glossary

Content sub-tag available within INTIMATERELATIONSHIPS, FRIENDSASSOCIATES, and MEMBER (within FAMILY), all in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries. It generally encloses at least a phrase or statement and a tagged name. Using LIVESWITH denotes the material living arrangements of the subject of the biography. It does not assume that the person with whom she is living is her sexual partner nor does it assume that sexual partners are excluded. This sub-element helps to capture the material conditions of a woman's writing (e.g. did she have support? Did she have a room of her own?) and women's non-traditional living arrangements.

Big-bucket tag. Location is one of the 16 major contents elements used in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries, which are defined as integral to mapping a woman's life. May be used several times in the course of an entry to capture places associated with different life-stages of the subject, and different relations to place (living, travelling, etc.). One of the strengths of our electronic literary history is its ability to make connections between people and places hitherto unknown. Researchers will be able to use our resource to discover who was living in a particular place at the same time or to make connections between historical events and women writers who were living or travelling in that place at the time of an event. For these reasons, the Orlando Project emphasizes location and place as one of the major focusses of our research. In addition, we emphasize structuring information concerning location because this makes it possible to generate maps for each writer, tracking her geographical movements over the course of her life. With no content sub-elements,the tag has a required attribute, RELATIONTO, which specifies the kind of location discussed within the element.

This element belongs conceptually within WRITING > PRODUCTION. It details the pre-publication or unpublished history of a text: where it was kept, how and if it circulated before and after its printing. This element incorporates a statement or discussion; note that it refers to the circulation of the manuscript and not the published text, and covers matters like ownership, damage, loss and recovery. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes.

The MARRIAGE sub-element (within MEMBER within FAMILY in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries) is used to capture the event of a person's wedding ceremony or basic facts about her marriage. It has its own DIV2 and CHRONSTRUCT if needed. Marriage is often a central and defining moment in a woman writer's life and we want to systematize this event. Because of the institutional definition of marriage, we want to separate out the legal act of marriage from the details of married life. For this reason, this element is not used for a detailed discussion of her married life but such discussions are placed within the general FAMILY/MEMBER=Husband element. We try (but don’t always succeed) to use this tag for the event of marriage with subsequent changes, rather than for decades of married life. Successive marriages and spouses may occupy separate DIV2s, or occasionally the same one if little detail is available.

The MARRIED element within PERSONNAME (in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries) captures the surname that a woman adopted in marriage. It occupies a DATAITEM tag and encloses the name only. It has attributes of REG (to use in the case of variant spellings) and WROTEORPUBLISHEDAS. We are interested in tracking to what extent women adopted their married names for publishing. However, Orlando has sometimes tagged her husband’s name as the MARRIED name of a writer without positive evidence that she did in fact use his name.

This tag is found in WRITING > PRODUCTION. This tag describes the physical and economic circumstances that governed a woman's writing or a particular text. This category is meant to answer questions like: did she have a room of her own? Was it the laundry room or a posh cabin on the French Riviera? Was she losing her eyesight while writing a particular work? Did she hide the manuscript while writing? This element encloses a full sentence or clause. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements, but one optional attribute, DISPLACEMENT, with a value of DisplacementYes. This might signify migration, or moving out of her home because of marital troubles or failure to pay the rent.

MEMBER is a significant sub-element within FAMILY (in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries), enclosing its own DIV2 and other structural tags. It has a required attribute, RELATION, and sub-elements MARRIAGE, JOB, and SIGNIFICANTACTIVITY. It captures a discussion of a specific family member (who was important/significant to the writer). MEMBER allows us to structure information concerning particular family relations. For example, by including a MEMBER element for the mother of a British woman writer, we will be able to generate a list for our end users of all the jobs of or all the comments on these mothers. We hope to make interesting connections between women writers’ relationships to particular family members (for example, group information concerning the relationship of eighteenth-century women writers to their aunts) but in order to do so we must systematize the discussions of these specific members. One member tag is used for several brothers or several sisters or children if not very much is said; for more detail an individual tag is used. Optional tags include JOB and SIGNIFICANTACTIVITY.

PMODEOFPUBLICATION is connected to WRITING > PRODUCTION. It deals with specific ways in which a book is brought to print; it does not address issues of circulation. It captures specific issues around the publisher (or details about the printer where pertinent and different from the publisher) through capturing particulars of specified types of publishing. It encloses full sentences, with enough information to convey the issues at stake. The attribute values on this tag cover limited, pirated, or private editions, publishing by subscription, and self-publishing. Other publishing issues call for other tags: PTYPEOFPRESS, PRELATIONSHIPWITHPUBLISHER, PEARNINGS, etc. This element has no mandatory or optional sub-elements.

A note on self-publication: this attribute doesn't refer only to those works published by vanity presses (or, today, independently on the web). In some cases, where the title page bears the words Printed [sometimes published] for the author, it means that the publisher wouldn't take the risk, so charged the author for publication and any profits then went to her. It was a sign of the author's confidence in her own work and could work out very well financially, or not. 

The motif element pertains to those discussions of a significant scene, episode, or idea in the text where these are not coterminal with the entire text. Motifs are localized or contained within the plot and may recur in multiple works or multiple times in the same work.

This term is available within BIOGRAPHY or WRITING > PRODUCTION. It describes a woman writer's purposes and reasons for writing (or choosing a particular genre or theme) which may be ascribed or self-identified, and may refer to textual motives or personal motives. See ATTITUDES for comparison. Material for this tag relies on sentiments expressed by the writer or the opinions of others (see Attribute values), or else on reasonable deduction. It has one optional attribute, MOTIVETYPE, with values of ascribed and self-identified.

NAME is a global element, available wherever typing is valid, i.e. in CHRONPROSE and <P>. It is used to track people across our history of women's writing. We have tried to use as Standard form the one preferred by the subject of the entry or by her contemporaries. Nevertheless Standard has sometimes to be a cumbersome peerage title (Byron, George Gordon,,, sixth Baron). N.b. triple comma there. The tag contains only the name of a person and excludes any extraneous information or punctuation (Dr, Mrs, etc.). The contents of the NAME element will not only be used to link and to index people but to draw attention to the relationships among people, based on the appearance of names in bio-critical documents, in chronology events, and according to proximity searches across the project.

This sub-tag is available within BIOGRAPHY > CULTURALFORMATION. It could also be within NATIONALITYISSUE or RACEANDETHNICITY to signify a legal nationality not held by the subject of the entry but by one or more of her ancestors, either immediate or distant (if the family is still aware of this heritage). Normally encloses just one word. NationalityHeritage captures information about the nationality of a person's family which contributes to an understanding of their racial and ethnic background. With value Welsh it might record a writer’s emotional connection with Wales despite birth and lifelong residence in England. It gestures towards hyphenated identities such as Japanese-Canadian. While Joy Kogawa's nationality is Canadian, her national heritage is Japanese. See RACEANDETHNICITY for a detailed description of the complexities of this element. It has optional attributes of CURRENTALTERNATIVETERM, FOREBEAR, SELF-DEFINED, and REG. REG represents the national heritage in a more precise or standardised way, whether or not the prose has done so. FOREBEAR provides a means of attributing this heritage to an individual, recognizing an Irish grandmother for instance.

This sub-tag is used to signify the entry subject’s legal nationality and is is available only with BIOGRAPHY > CULTURALFORMATION. Within those tags, it also may or may not be within NATIONALITYISSUE. It normally encloses a single word. May be used several times in cases of dual or serial nationality. N.b. For the purpose of this tag English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish can be used as alternatives to British as if they were (already!!) actual nationalities. This element has optional attributes, CURRENTALTERNATIVETERM, SELFDEFINED, and REG, which expresses the nationality in a standard form if it has not been done in the prose, or when an obsolete or local term (like Hibernian for Irish) has been used in a source. NATIONALITY might be placed not only in NATIONALITY ISSUE but also, if it fits the prose account, within any of the other sub-elements available in CULTURALFORMATION: CLASSISSUE, RACEANDETHNICITY, RACEISSUE, GEOGHERRITAGE, NATIONALHERRITAGE, POLITICALAFFILIATION, ETHNICITY, RELIGION, GENDERISSUE, and SEXUALITY.

Parallel to CLASSISSUE: for contested or changing legal nationality. A significant sub-element within CULTURALFORMATION (in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries), it works in conjunction with the NATIONALITY element to structure the national subject positions of women writers. Used, containing a full sentence or clause, to discuss issues of importance around a woman's nationality as it impinges upon identity. For the most part, writers will have geographical or ethnic heritage to discuss along with the element NATIONALITYISSUE; as well as the related sub-element of NATIONALITY, you can access here any of the other sub-elements designed for discussion of cultural formation may be relevant here: CLASS, DENOMINATION, ETHNICITY, GEOGHERITAGE, LANGUAGE, NATIONALHERITAGE, POLITICALAFFILIATION, RACECOLOUR, GENDER, and SEXUALIDENTITY.

This sub-element is available within BIOGRAPHY > PERSONNAME. It records in a DataStruct any nickname applied to a person by others. Nicknames include both casual, familiar family names and professional nicknames. The attributes attached to this element allow us to distinguish the different types of nicknames. We are particularly interested in honorific or abusive nicknames that are gendered, for example Queen of Romance for Barbara Cartland.

We don’t record every Elizabeth whose family called her Lizzy or Betty or Bess unless the nickname had wide circulation. But Elizabeth Montagu’s family calling her Fidget is interesting, and her public nickname (Queen of the Blues) is, like Swan of Lichfield, White Rose of Gask, etc., a significant phenomenon in the reception of women writers.

It has attributes: NAMECONNOTATION, NAMESIGNIFIER, NAMETYPE (three which variously signify the type of nickname), and WROTEORPUBLISHEDAS.

Attribute NAMECONNOTATION on NICKNAME: Carries more of RESPONSE in it than NAMESIGNIFIER.

Attribute NAMESIGNIFIER on NICKNAME: Comparable to use elsewhere.

Attribute NAMETYPE on NICKNAME: Other would fit Red Countess nickname, since it stems from politics, not family or writing.

This element belongs conceptually with WRITING > PRODUCTION. It refers to a non-textual packaging/format of a written work. If someone adapts a woman's book into an opera, a film, a sound recording or a dance, it is recorded here. PNONBOOKMEDIA captures either a word or more frequently a full statement. There are no mandatory sub-elements or attributes for this element.

This element belongs conceptually within WRITING > PRODUCTION. It addresses texts that we do not have today for some reason or another. Describes any mishaps or disasters that happen on the road to publication. If the manuscript burned, or flew out the stage coach window; if the work was unfinished; if the publishers went bankrupt and lost her manuscript; if nobody knows what became of it: all of these incidents can be recorded here. Encloses a statement; used with or without also using rDestructionofWork. PNONSURVIVAL can be used of actual destruction (a manuscript casualty of fire or flood, a single surviving copy seen but since lost) or absence of knowledge (she claimed to have written plays, but none appears to have survived). One attribute modifies this element: TYPEOFNONSURVIVAL, with values for accident, and unknown.

One of the 16 big-bucket, DIV1, content tags in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries defined as integral to mapping a woman's life, OCCUPATION is the element for capturing work both paid and unpaid (with sub-tags JOB and SIGNIFICANTACTIVITY, plus EMPLOYER and REMUNERATION). We are particularly interested in the gendered nature of employment and emphasize the need to include unpaid, underpaid, and domestic jobs under occupation. We are also interested in the sexual division of labour and hope to track the types of jobs women held and how these jobs changed and developed across historical periods.

The ORGNAME element, a core tag available throughout the textbase, is used to identify schools, companies, and any other type of recognized organization. It includes the name of the organization only, with no comment or punctuation. We aim to avoid duplication in naming but have not always succeeded, since organizations can last for generations and repeatedly change their names; nor have we been consistent in dealing with multiplicity, e.g. organizations that have many local branches. This tag is modified by the attributes REG, STANDARD, and ORGTYPE. REG is used to indicate the regularized form of the organization name at the time contemporary to the reference (for clarification or correction); STANDARD is used to indicate the standard non-historically specific organization name.

OTHERLIFEEVENT is one of the 16 big-bucket tags found in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries. It is used for what doesn’t fit elsewhere: often accidents, crime, legal issues, imprisonment. A DIV1 content element that captures unclassifiable biographical events not covered by any of the other DIV1 elements, it has no content sub-elements or attributes.

This element belongs conceptually to WRITING > RECEPTION. It encloses at least a sentence, or a statement long enough for clarity, about negative or harmful consequences of writing—family disapproval, legal action, imprisonment, banning of text (see attribute CENSORSHIP), etc. It has one optional attribute, CENSORSHIP, with a value of CensorshipYes.

This element is used in WRITING > PRODUCTION. It is often in a CHRONPROSE. This element should contain all the available specifics of the performance of a woman writer's work, whether of a stage play, monologue, a radio drama, or a television film script. Also covers significant public readings, etc. Often used for the opening of such a work in preference to a publication event. Name the performed text if you can, but a significant work will also be named in a corresponding TEXTSCOPE if this is its debut. This tag has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes.

This element belongs conceptually to WRITING > PRODUCTION. It provides a home for commentary about a writer's (or text's) publication history in periodicals. It captures a statement, often a CHRONSTRUCT. For serialized novels an entry-writer must choose whether to supply a CHRONSTRUCT for volume publication or for the first part of a serialization (or very occasionally both). It has no mandatory attributes or sub-elements.

The only big-bucket tag using Datastructs instead of prose (which it does not allow), and a reminder that most writers had, or have, more than one name in use. PERSONNAME is the first DIV1 content element placed within a BIOGRAPHY section, one of the 16 major elements defined as integral to mapping a woman's life. While the NAME element indexes all standard names, PersonName allows the researcher to provide the details and all the variants of one person's name(s). It has the following sub-elements to capture specific names: BIRTHNAME, GIVEN, SURNAME, INDEXED, MARRIED, NICKNAME, PSEUDONYM, RELIGIOUSNAME, ROYAL, SELFTITLED, STYLED, TITLED.

PLACE is a core tag globally available, the largest bucket holding together the sub-elements defining location. It must enclose every set or nest of more specific tags signifying place: GEOG, REGION, SETTLEMENT, etc., where it structures information about geographical location. All content information --- i.e. the names of places -- is placed inside its sub-elements. Place does allow free prose which can be used for untagged descriptors like 'near' or 'the tiny village of' and to enter punctuation.

Locating events and people is a priority of our Project. By indicating where events occurred, we will be able to bring together people and places, and to uncover geographical connections between writers as yet undiscovered.

There are two main goals for tagging place: mapping and indexing. We hope automatically to provide our users with maps of literary history. For example, by using the places tagged with biography documents, we might generate a map for each woman writer's life which places her in specific places at specific dates. We also hope to allow users to see a map of events for a particular year which would bring together geographical information from all Project schemas. In order to automate mapping, it is crucial that we provide place information in a structured and recognizable way. In addition to mapping, we want to provide a user with an index of places, for instance of all women writers who lived in Bloomsbury or all events which took place in Bath.

While we prioritize the tagging of place, not all places require tagging. We hope to enhance our geographical information by context-specific tagging. For example, by tagging only places where events occurred in the material of a CHRONSTRUCT rather than all places mentioned in the prose, we will be able to map that event to the place tagged. 

PLACE is available within most elements which contain prose. It has the following content sub-elements which divide PLACE into smaller units: PLACENAME, ADDRESS, SETTLEMENT, REGION, and GEOG, with AREA hopefully to follow.

This field in the Bibliography Database records the place of publication of a text. Encloses a settlement and sometimes region name.

The TPLOT element belongs conceptually in WRITING > TEXTUALFEATURES. It addresses overview summaries of narrative actions. Encloses a statement, either brief (the complicated plot involves several switched partners before the multiple marriage ending) or a whole paragraph (or more) tracing the way the story unfolds. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes.

This sub-element within POLITICS and CULTURALFORMATION (in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries) tracks the beliefs, affiliations, connections, activities, and associations which designate a person's political life. Encloses the names of political parties, but also of broader movements: imperialist or pacifist or vegetarian. These affiliations can be both formal connections to a party or organization and informal political positions held by the writer. We hope to point our readers towards women writers associated with different political positions and help researchers make links between political beliefs and writing. For this reason, we are defining POLITICALAFFILIATIONs broadly and include things like being against capital punishment or a strong supporter of the Empire (imperialist), or a campaigner against vivisection or for animal rights, in addition to more straightforward affiliations such as Marxist or Conservative.

POLITICALAFFILIATION has optional attributes of ACTIVISM, INVOLVEMENT, MEMBERSHIP (for three alternative levels of commitment: only one is used for a single element), and WOMAN-GENDERISSUE, to specify the level and type of affiliation described. Other optional attributes are REG (which captures a standard term if the prose does not: "strong supporter of the Empire" REG=”imperialist), CURRENTALTERNATIVETERM (used when a historical term has been replaced with a new one: Whig Reg=Liberal), and Id.

POLITICS is one of the 16 major content DIV1 elements in BIOGRAPHY sections of entries defined as integral to mapping a woman's life.It has one content sub-element, POLITICALAFFILIATION, that captures specific political positions taken up. We have interpreted this big-bucket tag broadly—holding that it covers not only established political parties, but splinter groups, pressure groups, campaigners, resisters, ideology, and public goals. Women's involvement in political activities and organizations is a central critical concern in our literary history; we are interested in both how political awareness influenced women's writing and how writing influenced feminist political activity. 

This element belongs in WRITING > PRODUCTION. It records the number of copies in an issue or edition of a printed text. This can be expressed in numeric form or in prose, such as "a short run." Encloses either a number or a statement. Not often mentioned, but useful historical information when known. It has are no mandatory sub-elements or attributes.

This element belongs to WRITING > PRODUCTION. It defines the selling price of a book, pamphlet, or other piece of writing. Encloses a number or sometimes a statement establishing meaning and context. May be used of original editions, reprints, or auction prices of unique copies or rare historical items. It has no mandatory sub-elements or attributes.

One of only three big-bucket tags in WRITING section of entries (in combination with TEXTUALFEATURES and RECEPTION). It encloses information about the process of a text's production whether they be material or cultural. All other influences on the writer's life will be covered by the BIOGRAPHY section. PRODUCTION addresses the facts and factors of text creation and distribution, and the description of the text as object (bibliographic description). This category can address a single text, or a group of texts.

PRODUCTION encloses as many CHRONSTRUCTs and SHORTPROSEs as are needed to relate how a text or group of texts came into being: inspiration, conditions of work, copying or publication, obstacles along the way, plus later embodiments in revised editions, adaptations, etc. Subtags which belong logically or conceptually within Production are flagged with an initial P in their name, like PANTHOLOGIZATION, PCONTRACT, but any tag named with an initial T or R (for TEXTUALFEATURES or RECEPTION) is also allowable within PRODUCTION, and vice versa (tags with initial P allowed in TEXTUALFEATURES and RECEPTION). We chose this flexibility because of the interrelatedness of the topics: production elements like decorative features may relate closely to textual features like imagery, which in turn have elicited particular responses from critics.

This term is found in BIOGRAPHY > PERSONNAME. It must go inside a DATAITEM. PSEUDONYM includes all names -- both proper names and descriptive phrases (for example, A Lover of Her Sex is a pseudonym for Mary Astell) -- if used in publishing or circulating work. This tag has optional attributes of NAMESIGNIFIER, REG, and WROTEORPUBLISHEDAS.

This element is globally available. It is modified by one attribute, DIRECT. The attribute options are yes (y), no (n), or unspecified (unspecified). These govern whether the words within the quote will be set off with single or double quotes. DIRECT=Y is used whenever a direct quote is included; DIRECT=N is used for quote within quote. 

RACEANDETHNICITY is a significant sub-element within BIOGRAPHY > CULTURALFORMATION. It encloses the structural elements containing the discussion of a person's racial and ethnic subject position, capturing information and discussion in light of the unstable, historically constituted categories of race and ethnicity. It works in conjunction with four content, subject-specific sub-elements: RACECOLOUR, NATIONALHERITAGE, GEOGHERITAGE, ETHNICITY (each of which can be used without RACEANDETHNICITY). 

The following applies to both the general discursive discussion of RACEANDETHNICITY and to the specific sub-element categories.

Despite anxiety over the ways in which categories of race or ethnicity circulate and serve various kinds of undesirable interests, to ignore the question or choose a totally free-text route is not a responsible solution for this project, though it would certainly be easier and simpler. The aim here is to make the complexities of the question of race and ethnicity emerge, and to make it clear that these are shifting, historically constituted, and interestedly deployed categories whose use must be understood contextually. The discursiveness with which we present these categories should, hopefully, help to do this and also allay the anxiety we feel about labelling in a vacuum. In other words, the project has no notion that we could or should come up with what is in any way an exact, fully defined, or mutually exclusive set of categories: the point is the overlap within them. Within this system, counting per se becomes highly problematic; the user has to do some work (and some thinking/active defining) before arriving at any kind of list or count, and will hopefully arrive at it with a sense of how problematic such an activity is. We want, as we go, carefully to build sets of associations around terms that are controversial or hard to interpret.

Parallel to the issue tags, this element is important because this is such a charged issue, and has remained so through seismic shifts in scientific and other concepts of race. This tag can be used to chart developments in self-awareness as well as in social placing.

This sub-element is found in BIOGRAPHY > CULTURALFORMATION. It might also be within RACEANDETHNICITY; within those tags, it captures information about a person's perceived or lived racial identity. See RACEANDETHNICITY for a detailed description of the complexities of this element. It encloses usually a single word, occasionally more, and has optional attributes of FOREBEAR, SELFDEFINED and REG (allowing for the standardization of the RACECOLOUR if expressed otherwise in the prose). We have tried to counter the effect of white as default by sentences like "She was presumably white" or by inserting an empty RACECOLOUR tag with REG value white.

This element belongs conceptually in WRITING > PRODUCTION. It is meant to capture a significant and interesting statement or discussion about any rare or decorative features of the book as a physical text: material most obviously about illustrations, but also special bindings, experiments with typeface, inscriptions, even systematic annotation of a copy. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements. 

RECEPTION is one of the three large buckets in the WRITING section of entries (in addition to TEXTUALFEATURES and PRODUCTION). RECEPTION charts the effects and results of an individual's writing, and the responses of self and others to individual texts or whole oeuvres. May contain one or more CHRONSTRUCTs about a particular review, comment, or consequence.