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COST Action IS0901 “Women Writers In History”
Second Training School 9-13 May 2011



The second Training School of the Action took place, again, in Huygens ING, The Hague.

Objective of this Training School was that in the near future:

  • participants will be able to use the WomenWriters database for their own research questions,
  • they might also have the capacity of explaining to assistants or students how to work in the database,
  • they can formulate their needs for features to be added to the database or to the Virtual Research Environment to be developed.

Twelve Action members (see names below) came together in order to familiarize themselves with the Action’s online database WomenWriters. Trainers Suzan van Dijk and Astrid Kulsdom helped them testing it for their own research material and research questions, and two members of the IT-department of Huygens ING, GertJan Filarski and Joris van Zundert, presented the planned evolution of the current database into a more advanced Virtual Research Environment.

These days provided a perfect occasion for adding 300 new reception data for countries up to now little represented to the current 20.000 records concerning the reception of women’s writing in Europe. While working together the database and its use were permanently under discussion, obliging participants (trainees and trainers) to adapt or change decisions taken previously.

The Training School was also an occasion to meet possible “new” Action members: a Lithuanian colleague, currently working in Leiden, joined the group, and started adding information about Lithuanian women authors.


Global programme

Trainees worked individually on their own research material, but each day there were also some short presentations: not only (by the trainers) of the database (structure and content), but also by the trainees, who presented to each other their research and the ways in which they want to use the database.

  • Monday 9 May
    • Ton van Kalmthout: welcome
    • Participants: presenting themselves briefly and starting work on database, with help of the Instructions in the NEWW site
    • Astrid Kulsdom: the structure of the database, and work on English sensation novels received by Dutch women

  • Tuesday 10 May
    • Suzan van Dijk:
      • Place of the WomenWriters database in the NEWW collaboration and COST Action
    • Kim Heuvelmans:
      • Starting work in the database (19th-century schoolbooks in literature)
    • Zsuzsanna Varga:
      • The role of women in the Hungarian translation industry

  • Wednesday 11 May
    • Birgitta Johannson:
      • The supposed impact of the sentimental and melodramatic tradition on Swedish women authors
    • GertJan Filarski, Huygens ING:
      • Technological aspects: further developing the WomenWriters database

  • Thursday 12 May
    • Ramona Mihaila:
      • The impact of Romanian women’s presence on the literary scene
    • Carmen Dutu:
      • Women and translation in 18th-19th-century Romania
    • Ines Castr:
      • Rescuing from oblivion Portuguese authors writing in Latin
    • Carolina Blutrach-Jelín:
      • Spanish noblewomen’s participation in the literary field (17th-18th century)
    • Ingrida Bakutyte:
      • The reception of 19th-century French literature in Lithuania

  • Friday 13 May
    • Joris van Zundert
      • Interedition - The Fourth Paradigm - distributed systems
    • Anne Birgitte Ronning:
      • Comparing the experiences of the first and the second Training School - and work on female Robinsonades as part of a project about gender and value assignment
    • Participants: conclusions




SvD, June 2011




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