A Web of Words: Forging Writer-Researcher Alliances in the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

  • Susan Brown University of Guelph
  • Aritha Van Herk University of Calgary

Keywords:

Collaboration, gender, writing, scholarship, digital

Abstract

The history of collaboration in relation to writing is rich and varied; all writing performs as collaboration. The digital context in particular offers opportunities for collaboration in new modes, although digital connotations engender curiosity, resistance and reformulation.

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (www.cwrc.ca) builds on that potential in the creation of an online space for research into writing in and about Canada, drawing on the extent to which collaboration and exchange between writers and researchers are built into the fabric of Canadian cultural life. Notwithstanding that symbiosis, certain kinds of exchange are anathema to writers and critics alike. We are torn between the impulse to keep our words our own and a recognition that they emerge from the kind of surfing and sifting endemic to web research, a process and praxis of using. Being inspired by and responding to other people’s words and ideas is the basis for all literature—and literary scholarship. Women’s writing is particularly collaborative, whether we attribute that to gendered permeability of boundaries or to the embattled position of women within a masculinist literary establishment. The CWRC-enabled group of projects on Canada’s women writers aims to produce a rich, multi-faceted, and bilingual trove of insights into that ongoing process of dialogue, response, and repudiation. CWRC offers, then, a precise moment of opportunity, but also the challenge of how to benefit writers as well as scholars, so that collaboration between scholars and writers is supported. Most of all, its goal is to enable a feminist aesthetic and a space for women to speak that at this point competes in the pressure cooker of a digital world still very much a male domain.

Moving through Lorraine York, Margaret Atwood, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland and Nicole Brossard via Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, this essay explores the dimensions of connection at a time when the digital has opened a wonderfully generative space that nevertheless does not privilege women’s voices or discoveries. It outlines some early CWRC projects, its mentoring potential, and the need to keep more women’s writing and writing about that writing in circulation and preserved for our cultural record. CWRC can enhance readerships, offer a place to sample new Canadian writing, and provide a larger context in which to explore its many alliances, transgressions and betrayals.

Author Biographies

Susan Brown, University of Guelph
Susan Brown is Professor of English at the University of Guelph and Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. She researches Victorian literature, women’s writing, and digital humanities. These interests inform Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, an ongoing experiment in digital literary history published by Cambridge UP since 2006 that she directs and co-edits. She leads development of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, an online research environment for literary studies in Canada. Her current research focuses on digital tools for literary study and the impact of new technologies in literature of the Victorian period.
Aritha Van Herk, University of Calgary
Aritha van Herk is the author of five novels, Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address, Places Far From Ellesmere, and Restlessness. Her critical work is collected in A Frozen Tongue and In Visible Ink. Her irreverent but relevant history of Alberta, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, frames the Glenbow Museum’s permanent exhibition on Alberta history. Most recently she has published two works (with photographer George Webber) of place-writing, In This Place, a meditation on feral Calgary, and Prairie Gothic. She teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta.

References

Published
2013-12-18
Section
ARTICLES