Database of Canada's Early Women Writers Launched

On May 25th, 2018, the Canada’s Early Women Writers project announced that their two sister websites, Canada’s Early Women Writers and the Database of Canada’s Early Women Writers, were both fully populated and available online. 

The Database of Canada's Early Women Writers (DoCEWW) was built here at the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab as an easily navigable database of all English-language Canadian women writers who have been identified by the Canada's Early Women Writers project (CEWW).

CEWW began research in the 1980s with snail mail and typewriters, identifying writers who published before 1950. Considerably grown since then with the development of the internet and its ever-expanding online resources, CEWW has augmented an original 471 authors of books of poetry and fiction to include rich bio-bibliographic entries for over 730 early Canadian women writers publishing in any format, and expanding their audiences and genres to include travel journalism and scientific writing. CEWW is housed within the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, although the now-static database can still be found through the Simon Fraser University Library. 

The DoCEWW aimed to take the extensive information offered by CEWW and create a user-friendly database of all the authors identified by the project. The DoCEWW records (where available) each author’s name, their alternative names, the dates and places of their births and deaths, their places of residence, the titles they have published, and the collections and periodicals to which they have contributed. While DoCEWW already contains some 4800 authors, the list is far from comprehensive, and the project invites the public to contribute new names or additional information about the women who are already listed.

To contact CEWW about an author or title that could be included or updated, please submit a comment in the form on an individual DoCEWW page, or leave a comment on the CEWW project blog, being sure to specify the author or title.