Progress Report

1) Working title:

Somerville College and its Literary Heritage

2) Abstract:

Somerville College was one of the first Oxford colleges to admit women, during the period leading up to Somerville’s first granting of degrees—1920—the school was attended many writers and literary figures. Vera Brittain and Dorothy Sayers are perhaps the best-known of Somerville’s literary alumni, but many other female fiction writers who attended during approximately the same period have received little attention or recognition for their contributions to their respective genres and to women’s writing as a whole.

This project sheds light on the literary figures who attended Somerville College between approximately 1910 and 1920. It provides both a visual representation of Somerville’s overlooked literary alumni and a digital catalogue of authors from this period. In doing so, this project seeks to highlight the lives and works of authors overlooked by the literary canon and demonstrate the power of one location as an intersectional point for feminist intellectual networks.

3) Data

biographies, autobiographies, dictionaries of literary biographies/bibliographies, Wikipedia, Oxford/Somerville college website

4) VisualEyes

5) I’m still collecting some of my data (have had to wait on ILL for some resources), but I’ve begun adding biographies for the authors I know for sure will be included and adding relevant images. I’ve also started adding events to the timeline and map.

As for dilemmas, I still need to determine how much detail I want to include for each author. I also need to enhance the aesthetic appearance by playing more with the mapping tools and adding more images/playing with the layout. At the moment, I’ve just copied bios from Wikipedia pages, so I need to rewrite them in my own words (hearkening back to the question of how much detail I need to include).

My main concern related to the whole project is that it tell a compelling story/makes a point, and is not simply a “list” of interesting people. I’m still learning my way around VisualEyes, but I’m trying to use other VisualEyes projects (thankfully many examples are available on the site) to help me think about ways that I can use its features for storytelling.