Julia Flanders

Biography

Julia Flanders is an established professor, author and scholar specialising in her practice of English at the Northeastern University College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Julia is the head and director of the Digital Scholarship Group at the Northeastern University's Library. Julia's special interest into research of women’s writing eventuated into her becoming the director and editor in chief of the Women’s Writing Project, her name also engrained on an extensive list of external publications of her own. Julia Flanders is the editor and chief of the Digital Humanities Quarterly, a peer-reviewed and open access online journal with regard to digital humanities. Julia began an apprenticeship in the digital humanities in the early 1990s at the Women’s Writer Project. Julia continued her work in developing the digital humanities organizations that included the Text Encoding Initiative and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

Julia Flanders began her education in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature at Harvard University, before continuing her studies at Cambridge, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature during 1989. Flanders continued at Brown University, graduating with her masters in English literature during 1991, furthering this knowledge in 2005, becoming a doctorate in English literature. Julia has served as chair of the TEI Consortium and doubled as the president of the Humanities and Association for Computers faculties at Northeastern University. She has also taught a wide range of workshops on text encoding and served as a consultant and advisor on numerous digital humanities projects. Her research interests focus on data modelling, textual scholarship, humanities data curation, and the politics of digital scholarly work. She is the co-editor with Neil Fraistat of The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, and the co-editor with Fotis Jannidis, of The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-based Resources (Routledge, 2019).

Works

Julia Flanders holds an extensive track record of publications, from her contributions to academic journals, books, research projects, academic lectures and involvement in peer-reviewed conference presentations and professional workshops, Flanders has made quite the name for herself as a scholar in the literary realm. A large majority of her published works, reflect her large interest of text encoding historic manuscripts of women’s writing. The best examples of her work in this field begin with the publishing of 'The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory’ (1997). Flanders was responsible for the supervision and documentation of the journal’s transcription and encoding procedures that addressed nineteenth century development theories of women’s participation in art, writing and the human body. Another excellent example of her work in this field is demonstrated in, ‘Learning from the Past: The Women Writers Project and Thirty Years of Humanities Text Encoding’ (2017), a book that decoded medieval artefacts of women’s writing and recounts many of the lost voices of women writers throughout this period of history.

Moreover, Flanders’s enthused participation in the world of digital humanities led her to produce a variety of texts addressing feministic themes. These hints of feminism are largely portrayed just in her titles, ‘Looking for Gender in Digital Humanities’ (2018), ‘Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities’(2017), and ‘Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives’(2010). History often recounts women for the part they played in their gender roles, such as domestic upkeep and being a mother or a wife, depicting women as incapable of being remembered as anything more. Julia Flanders has devoted her career to recovering the many accounts of women writers and their work, that had become archived voices in history. Julia Flanders has proven that these historic women writer's were so much more than just remnants of their sex, they were esteemed authors during their time, women who deserve to be remembered for their intelligent qualities and the work they produced.

It is notable to mention the invited academic lectures that Flanders’s has presented to universities, academics, theorists and scholars throughout her career, ‘Cultures of Reception, the Discontinuity in the History of Women’s Writing’, ‘Demand for Diversity in Digital Systems: The Women Writers Project’, ‘Encoding Identity, Networking Women’s Writing’. These academic presentations demonstrate her large interest into the field of research regarding feministic textual scholarship and the modern curation of digital scholarly archives.

Reputation/Legacy

Julia Flanders has generated a legacy that is largely enriched with academic knowledge and education throughout her journey from humanities student to literary scholar. Julia Flanders’s has played an active role in recovering and honouring the historic women writers that came before her. Julia’s reputation reflects her drive for better scholarly practice in the modern digital humanities. Through her active part on the Women’s Writing Project, Julia has enhanced accessibility to the digital collection of women’s writing during the pre-Victorian era. Julia has accessed the assistance of scholars, technologists and archivists to improve the digital archives that hold the most historic accounts of early women’s writing, which has made these works more visible in the new digital literary canon.

Julia has dedicated her work to the digital humanities, playing part in digitizing women’s writing, exploring new methods of scholarly communication and theorizing technology related scholarship. Julia’s most recent two decades of work have largely focused on innovation through researching the impact of digital scholarly tools and how they can promote availability of writing by women. Julia Flanders prides herself through teaching her students the correct methods, approaches and strategies that are required to ensure proper accuracy and functioning in her student’s publication projects. The courses that Julia has taught to university students for over fifteen years, has seen her involvement and support in her former students’ research, professional conferences, presentations and published works. Julia’s legacy is reflected through her students and their accomplishments, many of whom looked to her as a professional mentor throughout her time as their teacher.

References + Further Reading

“Data and Wisdom: Electronic Editing and the Quantification of Knowledge,” vol.24, no.1, 2009, pp.53–62.

“Detailism, Digital Texts, and the Problem of Pedantry,” Text Technology, vol.14, no. 2, 2005, pp. 41-70.

Digital Humanities and the Politics of Scholarly Work. Doctoral dissertation. Brown University, 2005. “Looking for Gender in Digital Humanities.” In Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminist Digital Humanities, ed. Jacqueline Wernimont and Elizabeth Losh. Under contract; anticipated publication 2018.

“Feminism in the Age of Digital Archives.” The Women Writers Project Author: Jacqueline Wernimont and Julia Flanders, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2010, pp. 425-435, Published by: University of Tulsa https://www.jstor.org/stable/41337287

“Learning from the Past.” The Women Writers Project and Thirty Years of Humanities Text Encoding, co-authored with Sarah Connell, Elizabeth Polcha, and William Reed Quinn, no. 4 (2017).

“The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the Electronic Text.” In Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, ed. Kathryn Sutherland, Oxford University Press, 1997.

[Julia Flanders’s Lectures:]

Women Writers Project (1992-present): A digital research and publication project focusing on the representation and publication of early women’s writing in English using the TEI Guidelines. Currently serve as director.

Digital Humanities Quarterly (2005-present): An open-access, peer-reviewed journal of digital humanities. Founder and editor in chief.

Cultures of Reception: Readership and Discontinuity in the History of Women's Writing, keynote lecture at the conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), University of Victoria, June 2017.

The Women Writers Project at 30: The Data of Writing, Reception, and Intertextuality, Wellesley College, May 2017.

Diversity in Digital Systems: The Women Writers Project, Johns Hopkins University, April 2017.

Encoding Identity, keynote lecture at Queer Encoding: Encoding Diverse Identities symposium, New York University, April 2017.

Writing, Reception, Intertextuality: Networking Women’s Writing, keynote lecture at Reception, Reputation and Circulation in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800, National University of Ireland, Galway, March 2017.

Building Otherwise: Gender, Race, and Difference in the Digital Humanities, University of Oklahoma, September 2016.