cholars face certain choices when technologies and methodologies interface, and in the case of WWO, there are many choices: to efface material difference or incorporate its difficulty; to acknowledge issues of incompleteness explicitly or "paper" them over; to engage with genre-busting texts on their terms or attempt to wrangle such texts into conventional boxes.

his grappling both foregrounds the heterogeneity of women's writing and requires digital humanities theory and practice to attend to the ways in which earlier forms of categorization and accumulation in brick and mor- tar archives were fundamentally insufficient-

hile a collection of women's work is clearly still necessary to help make women's contributions visible, we need to consider if this archive of women's writing constitutes a simple "addi- tive approach," as well as whether and to what degree it resolves the issues around systematic exclusion.

The project's emphasis on canon reformation through expanded access to rare materials (a theme that runs through much early digital humanities work) mirrors the early feminist sense that literary scholarship on the work of women was itself a kind of activist project that proceeded, fairly straightforwardly, by bringing lost information to light

If we say of a digital collection like WWO that it opens up new approaches to the study of women's writing, we must immediately ask what we mean by these terms. "Study" by whom and in pursuit of what kinds of questions? Is the term "women's writing" a deliberate sidestep from more specific formulations - from words like "literature" or firm designations of authorship and publication? And what do we mean by "new"?

the impact of technol- ogy on serious scholarship is not simplistically progressive

How do we make legible the inclusion and exclusion of texts so that "the archive" does not inadvertently appear to claim comprehensiveness

e advent of the web has shown us, in a sense, that "access" is not a simple problem of inclusion but a complex adjudication of competing views. We need ways of reintroducing an awareness of discipline, theory, and method into our understanding of access, rather than seeing digital production as a form of transparency

While WWO satisfies a certain initial project to recover women's voices, even if that project has to be problematized, it runs up against an archival limit when asked to satisfy later feminisms that require more than just the recovery of white women's voices

For the WWP, however, the project of broad recovery serves precisely to highlight and capture the generic and formal diversity of this writing and hence to destabilize the traditional categories of value on which con- cepts like "the literary" depend.

The early modern period is particularly amenable to the inclu- sion of non-belles-lettristic texts in literary analysis given that the concept of "the literary" as such was a production of the seventeenth century and did not solidify into a disciplinary category until some time later.6 This might open WWO to criticism, like that made by Lillian S. Robinson, that a focus "merely on women" - or on the writing of women - is not only not feminist enough, it is also, and perhaps primarily, not literary enough.

cholars use tools that exert consti- tutive pressure on the acts of reading and interpretation; as Ellen Rooney observes, reading is transitive, which is to say that it is an interested and generative act (pp. 7-8).

A number of questions might be generated here: What is the historical context for a yoking together of history and romance? Is there a political or religious perspective that unites these women, or are people from several differ- ent positions concerned with history and romance after the English civil war? Are all of these instances actually about genre or even about a single genre

"women's writing" rather than "women's literature.

the kinds of literary technologies and strategies

the “came out”

In a March 7, 2007, blog post, Andrew Keen compared Wikipedia’s dealings with Essjay to the Czechoslovakian Communist Party’s ability to make people vanish: “The communists, of course, were particularly adept at forgetting.”

Further, as with most websites, Wikipedia is continually archived by the Internet Archive, a site that should remind us how difficult it is to “disappear” online.

I use scare quotes because Jordan was not really anonymous. Rather, he created another identity that would help him navigate Wikipedia. Thus, these edits were not written anonymously—they were written by Essjay. Further, even those Wikipedians who do not register for a username can still be traced to an IP address (an IP address is included next to each edit on Wikipedia).