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Welcome to Olive Schreiner Letters Online!
A major new, free research resource for
researchers and students across the social
sciences, humanities and arts
www.oliveschreiner.org
Universities of Edinburgh, Sheffield, and Leeds Metropolitan Funded by the ESRC (RES-062-23-1286)
The Olive Schreiner Letters Project & the Letters Online
PI, Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh
Co-I, David Shepherd, University of Keele
Co-I, Helen Dampier, Leeds Metropolitan University
RA, Andrea Salter, University of Edinburgh
AHRC PhD Studentship-Holder, Donna Hetherington,
University of Edinburgh
ESRC PhD Studentship-Holder, Sarah Poustie, University
of Edinburgh
Principal Technical Officer, Dr Michael Meredith, University
of Sheffield
Data Developer, Dr Kiera Chapman, University of Sheffield
Advisory Board: John Brewer, Aberdeen; Jan Broadway,
QMC Lives & Letters; Ann Heilmann, Hull; Stevi Jackson,
York; Howard Phillips, UCT; Aileen Christianson,
Edinburgh
What is the Olive Schreiner Letters Online?
• A website & resources through which digitised
transcriptions of Schreiner’s letters can be accessed
• It enables world-wide access to Schreiner’s letters
entirely free of charge
• It supports research on a wide range of topics by
students & family & other researchers
• It provides many tools to aid reading and analysing the
letters, including sophisticated search and find tools,
collections of letters by analytical topics & a detailed
bibliography of Schreiner’s shorter & longer publications
www.oliveschreiner.org
This is what the Schreiner Letters Online looks like …
Here is an example of a Schreiner letter viewed through
the website…
Why Olive Schreiner?
• Feminist and socialist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was one of the most important – and radical – social commentators of her day
• Schreiner’s published writings include
novels (The Story of An African Farm, Undine, From Man to Man), allegories (Dreams, Dream Life and Real Life, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland), and influential works of social theory (The Political Situation, Closer Union, Woman and Labour, Thoughts on South Africa)
Why Olive Schreiner’s Letters?
Written between 1871 and 1920, her letters provide an unparalleled source for:
• exploring the unfolding thinking of one of the great feminist theorists and key New Woman writers
• examining letter-writing practices in the Schreiner networks over a time-period when many technical and technological changes massively impacted on epistolary exchange
• and most of the extant letters have never been previously published or discussed …
Schreiner’s fascinating letters open up for reading and analysis many important topics, including:
• the social & political history of Britain & South Africa as lived & interpreted by a keen social commentator
• epistolary insights into a period of great change & momentous events
• the emergent features of Schreiner’s social theory appear in her letters
• the ‘great and the good’ & the now obscure are her correspondents, in a complex network of letter exchanges
How was Olive Schreiner Letters Online produced?
The focus of the Olive Schreiner Letters Project has been on
researching & analysing Olive Schreiner’s letters, as well as
publishing them --- see www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/
The Olive Schreiner Letters Project …
a 39 month major ESRC funded project
the largest letters project since Thomas & Znaniecki on The
Polish Peasant…
multi-disciplinary within a sociological frame:
• Sociology; Cultural History; Literary Studies; Social
Geography
• Computer/software technologies
and its outputs are:
• the research project and academic publications
• publication of Olive Schreiner Letters Online
• knowledge transfer – inter/national users with world-
wide free access to the letters
The Schreiner Letters Project has transcribed all extant
Olive Schreiner letters, located in some 40 major
archive collections worldwide:
Manuscripts and Archives,
University of Cape Town
Harry Ransom Center,
University of Texas at Austin
British Library,
London
There are c4800
Schreiner letters,
in 16 archives, on
3 continents
National Library of South Africa,
Cape Town
William Cullen Library,
University of the Witwatersrand
The manuscript letters, postcards, letter-cards, telegrams,
notes, birthday cards look like this, but thousands more
of them, with many of them much more difficult to read
than these …
Some more examples…
How we got from manuscript letters to digitised
transcriptions…
• The Project team transcribed the letters,
postcards and so on, including every
insertion, deletion, omission & mistake
• We checked this once, twice, three times
while in the Archive
• Then another member of the team later
returned to the Archive & checked the
transcriptions against the originals and
corrected any mistakes - what resulted can
be seen on the next slide …
‘Mark-up’ here is turned on in Microsoft Word to show things
spotted by the checker: being very accurate regarding the ‘bird in
flight’ aspects of how letters are written is surprisingly difficult &
needs pains-taking attention to the detail.
A. CLASSIFYING INFORMATION
Letter date [20 April 1899]
Address from [2 Primrose Terrace, Berea, Johannesburg]
Address to [Lyndall, Newlands, Cape Town]
Who to [William Philip (‘Will’, ‘WP’) Schreiner]
B. EDITED COLLECTION
Editor [Rive 1987: 348-9]
C. ARCHIVE COLLECTION REFERENCE
Archive name [University of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town]
Archive ref [Olive Schreiner BC16/Box2/Fold1/Jan-June1899/16]
The next stage was to ensure accurate & consistent ‘meta-data’ for
each letter, postcard and so on.
‘Meta-data’ is the basic information for working with the letters ‘as
data’ using computer-assisted methods of ‘managing’ them all as a
data-set, and also for analysing them. An example is shown below:
We then wrote Legends and Notations:
• Legends acknowledge the Archive which holds the manuscript letters and are mainly concerned with explaining uncertainties and oddities in the meta-data, for example:
The Project is grateful to the Sheffield Archives, Sheffield Libraries, Archives and Information Services, for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Archive Collections. The date has been written on this letter in an unknown hand. Schreiner was resident in Chenies Street between June and August 1889.
• Notations provide information about references to Schreiner’s unpublished or published writings in the letter, as well as commenting on differences between our transcription and any other version that has been published, for example:
The book referred to is: Edward Carpenter (1885) Towards Democracy Manchester: John Heywood. Rive's (1987) version omits part of this letter.
But Project work didn’t stop there!
• The letters were then prepared in an XML format – this
is a way of coding or ‘tagging’, for example, underlining,
deletions, paragraphing & so on.
• Importantly, the kind of XML we have used is ‘future-
proofed’, enabling letters to be shown in successive
versions of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and so
seen ‘as letters’ are meant to look via a web-browser.
The next 3 slides show what meta-data and letter content
looks like in XML and in HTML …
Metadata in XML …
<letter> <!-- defaults to type 'letter' -->
<date>28 December 1885</date>
<addressfrom>London</addressfrom>
<!--<addressto></addressto>-->
<to>Daily News</to>
<editor>Rive 1987: 70-1</editor>
<archive>Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin</archive>
<ref1>HRC/OliveSchreinerLetters/OS-DailyNews/1</ref1>
Metadata in HTML …
From XML to HTML: An example
Letter content in XML …
<text>
<p>Sir,</p>
<p></p>
<p>...in London no Englishwoman was safe from the hands of the police.</p>
<p></p>
<p>I regarded this statement with the cool scorn with we are apt to <add>regard</add>
<del><ur/> those <add>statements</add> which we regard</del>
<add>consider</add> <add>as</add> <add>who make</add> uncritical <del>,</del>
<add>statements</add> <del> & nothing we <ur/> ?away</del> A few miserable
& for-lorn women with out money or friends might suffer; but the mass of English
women armed with friends & intellectual power were safe from insult</ p>
<p></p>
<p>...... a wellknown <sup>wordspace </sup> ph<sup>wordspace</sup> ... offered to
<del>accompany</del> <add>conduct</add> me home. ...</p>
<p></p>
<p>London Dec: 28th 1885.</p>
<p></p>
<p><not>This is one of very few draft letters in the Schreiner collections.
......</not></p>
</text>
Letter content in HTML …
What are all these technicalities for?
• Working with c4800 letters, ranging from 300 or 400
words to 40 densely-written pages, is not easy in itself.
However, analysing this number of letters, and letters
of such size and magnitude, is even less easy!
• Large-scale datasets (c4800 ‘cases’ is large-scale in
anyone’s terms) are often analysed using a ‘social
science standard’ commercial package called SPSS
– but this is designed to analyse very simple
information (such as yes or no; age; single or
partnered) for a lot of cases, not immensely and
intensely detailed information as with the Schreiner
letters.
However, CAQDAS software was not the answer either
The analysis of qualitative text-based datasets often
makes use of CAQDAS (computer assisted qualitative
data analysis software) packages –
• But c4800 cases, many of them a huge size, and
containing different ‘genres’ of data, is beyond
their capacity.
• The Schreiner letters are too many and too large
for CAQDAS, and too long, detailed & complicated
for SPSS.
Therefore we transcribed and ‘XMLed’ the Schreiner letters to
enable us to:
• devise our own project-specific tools for analysing a
very large, but also qualitative, dataset.
This was driven by:
• our analytical needs for software which can both help in
‘project management’ aspects of this large qualitative
dataset and also support our analytical concerns.
And this involves our Project
Virtual Research Environment or VRE:
THE OSLP VIRTUAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT (VRE)
The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) …
Important for Project Management …
Data packaging – helps us work with the letters as ‘a set’
from contents which are both very large in number, and
also internally diverse
Data organisation – constrains us to devise basic
organisational principles (for the OSLP = around the
collection, the archive, the date)
Data identification & retrieval – provides search & find on
both meta-data headings & full-text indexing
Important for providing Computer-Assisted Analysis
Tools …
Avoids variable analysis & hierarchical indexing of
contents, constrained if not determined by most
CAQDAS ‘off the peg’ software packages
Delivers project-specific
research tools, to analyse
the letters in exactly the ways
we want …
In addition, the VRE is crucial to publication of Olive
Schreiner Letters Online …
• The ‘user interface’ of the Olive Schreiner Letters
Online has been developed alongside the VRE and is one
of the products of our analysis of the Schreiner letters
themselves.
• Making HTML versions of these has enabled electronic
publication so readers can easily access & read
Schreiner’s letters.
• So the ‘user interface’ refers to all the webpages &
facilities you can access through the Letters Online ….
The Letters Online webpages support readers in asking
– and answering – their own research questions, by
reading & searching the letters how they want:
The webpages provide:
• Notations: concerned in particular with Schreiner’s writing
• Letters by Topic: collections of key letters on major themes
of concern to Schreiner
• Archival locations: guides to where Schreiner’s ‘actual
letters’ can be found
• Essential Schreiner: a compendium of ‘must read’ letters
• ‘Dramatis Personae’ listings: just click on the name and see
detailed information about people
• Schreiner’s publications: Both Schreiner’s longer & also
her many shorter publications
• Chronology: a chronology of major events and changes in
Schreiner’s life
And much more besides … so please visit
www.oliveschreiner.org
The next three slides show screen shots of some of these
features:
If you’re interested in:
• Olive Schreiner
• the past between 1870 and 1920
• Southern Africa
• feminist theorising
• capitalism & imperialism
• ‘race’ & racism
• social movements
• war & pacifism
• social change
• letters
• writing and publishing activities ......
then the Olive Schreiner Letters Online & their extensive
research facilities will provide inside information as seen
& interpreted by one of the great feminist theorists &
social commentators
More examples of important topics you can use Olive
Schreiner’s letters to explore are:
• Colonialism under transition
• Metropolitan feminism and socialism, prostitution, marriage
• Changing understandings of ‘race’, capital & labour
• imperialism 'on the ground' in southern Africa
• the South African War and its concentration camps and
women’s relief organisations,
• International perspectives on women's franchise campaigns
& international feminist networks
• the Great War, pacifism and war economies, and political and
economic changes in South Africa post WW1
Got a research project but not sure how
you might use the Olive Schreiner Letters
Online to facilitate this?
Please contact us - we can help! Email:
Project publications …
For more information about Project ideas and
publications, and detailed discussions of its key
theoretical ideas, please visit the Schreiner Letters Project
Edinburgh website: www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk
From the ‘Team Publications’ live-link, you can download
many of our publications concerned with theorising of
letters and ‘letterness’, and also analysing many of the
substantive concerns that Schreiner wrote about in her
letters
Members of the Schreiner Project Team:
Principal Investigator, Prof Liz Stanley, University of Edinburgh,
contact [email protected]
Co-Investigator, Prof David Shepherd, University of Keele
Co-Investigator, Dr Helen Dampier, Leeds Metropolitan University
Research Associate, Dr Andrea Salter, University of Edinburgh
AHRC PhD Studentship-Holder, Ms Donna Hetherington,
University of Edinburgh
ESRC PhD Studentship-Holder, Ms Sarah Poustie, University of
Edinburgh
Principal Technical Officer, Dr Michael Meredith, University of
Sheffield
Data Developer, Dr Kiera Chapman, University of Sheffield
Olive Schreiner Letters Online
www.oliveschreiner.org
