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. 

In the 1980s, Carole Gerson received a SSHRC grant to research writing as women’s work in Canada and began compiling a list of the names of women whose works had appeared in print. As the digital became more integrated into humanities research and Gerson’s list grew longer, including these names in a print resource no longer made sense. “What do you do when you’ve got the names of 5000 obscure women writers about whom little is known?” Gerson asks. “You create a database.”