Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is a highly dynamic and rich resource for researchers, students, and readers with an interest in literature, women's writing, or cultural history more generally.
Orlando's encoding (the extensive tagging which we describe below), together with its custom production (or delivery) system, makes it capable of retrieving and remixing all sorts of interpretive and qualitative material from its extensive textbase—comment of the kind you expect to find in a work of humanities scholarship—and of displaying this online.
Because of this, Orlando material is capable of a high degree of interaction. For users who take the time to master its strategies, its capacity to search is unprecedented, capable of answering a wide range of queries, from the simple request for information about a single writer to more complex questions seeking material from across the textbase.
With about 8 million words of text, it is full of factual, critical, and interpreted material. The first release of Orlando included biographical and writing career profiles on over a thousand writers, more than eight hundred and fifty of them British women. The number is now (2022) over 1430. The list also includes selected non-British or international women writers, and British and international men, whose writing was an important, sometimes a shaping, element in a particular writing climate. Orlando also includes more than 42,000 dated items representing events and processes (in the accounts of these writers, but also in the areas of history, science, medicine, economics, the law, and other contexts). In all of these categories, Orlando continues to grow over time, as it is incrementally enlarged by scheduled updates.
Orlando is not a text archive: it does not print the texts its subjects wrote. Instead, it provides new biographical and critical accounts of the lives and works of its subjects, together with contextual materials relevant to critical and historical readings. Orlando’s content is researched and created collaboratively by members of the Orlando team (see Credits). It fully documents the materials it references, and it includes a bibliographical database of more than 30,000 titles.
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