Organising and Discovering Texts in the Oxford Text Archive with Subcollections

As one of the oldest continuously operating archives of digital resources for literary and linguistic research, the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) currently preserves and provides access to around 70,000 assets. This includes fiction, plays, poetry, songs, letters, diaries, court documents, and advertisements, covering topics as diverse as acrobatics, adultery, and admiralty, and bringing together works from 2000 BCE to the present day. Having such an extensive archive offers challenges as well as opportunities: it can be time consuming to find the most relevant resources. While using the OTA for my own research, I have also been creating subcollections to make it easier for researchers to discover and compare texts with shared features, such as period, genre, country of origin, or topic. So far, I have assembled twenty-eight collections, including seventeenth-century travel writing about Asia, diaries and logs, twentieth-century Irish literature, and historical manuscripts. Below is a brief introduction to one of the subcollections, and an outline of all the content currently included in the broader set.

The largest of the subcollections I have created brings together poetry published in the eighteenth century that is attributed to female authors. It currently includes over forty works by poets from the United Kingdom and the United States, among them well-known figures such as Anna Letitia Barbauld and Hannah More, as well as many writers who are the subject of far less discussion in modern scholarship. While many of these texts come from the Evans Early American Imprints collection, others derive from the OTA Core and Early English Books Online collections, and some poems appear in multiple versions, allowing comparison across editions and digitisation methods. 

To create this collection, I conducted a search for resources from 1700-1799, and then used the Subjects filter to explore any items that were categorised as relating to poems or poetry, resulting in around 500 items. Finally, I reviewed each resource to ascertain whether a woman was listed as an author and to confirm that it contained poetry attributed to the female author. 

Having these works grouped into a single subcollection offers the opportunity to compare how they approach similar topics and formats, including quantitative analysis at a scale that would be impractical, if not impossible, when consulting the texts individually in print. As part of my research, I used AntConc to analyse the works in this collection to explore how women are represented. Examining these texts together makes it possible to recognise recurring themes and phrases that are difficult to perceive through close reading alone. For example, I created a list of the most frequent collocates for the words “she”, “her”, “woman”, and “women”, and then used AntConc’s Key Word In Context function to compare the ways in which repeated phrases, such as “old woman” and “young woman”, were used by different authors. 

The range of texts available in these subcollections will, I hope, lend themselves to a variety of different research approaches—highlighting unexpected connections, enabling both qualitative and quantitative examination, and sparking further exploration. Below are the resources contained in the three largest subcollections.

Poems by Female Authors

Works predominantly containing poetry by female authors

Broader works containing some poetry by female authors

Irish Writing

Travel Writing

If you have ideas for other subcollections that may be useful to researchers, feel free to email your suggestions to contact-dr-lib@clarin.eu.