Abstract

The Orlando Project is one of the longest-running initiatives in feminist DH, founded in 1995 and with its literary-historical textbase published from 2006 onward. In this presentation three co-directors will discuss highlights from its history and ongoing activities, with a focus on how succession and related changes in its executive team have enabled scholarly and technical continuity for the project itself.

Brief Bios

Susan Brown, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship at the University of Guelph and Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta, is a founding member of the Orlando team. Director of Orlando from 2007-2015, she is now a Co-Director. Pursuing intersectional feminist literary history through Orlando led her into research on semantic technologies and critical infrastructure studies, in conjunction with which she directs the Collaboratory for Writing and Research on Culture and the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship.

Isobel Grundy, Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta, was a founding member of the Orlando team, involved in shaping the first schemas and textbase structure. She is now a Co-Director. Her career spans the pre-digital and digital eras. She has published extensively on pre-Victorian women's writing: her recent articles, relying heavily on the Orlando textbase, include "Women Writers Construct Foremothers", forthcoming in Lumen 43 (Fall 2025).

Kathryn Holland is an Assistant Professor of English at MacEwan University and Co-Director of the Orlando Project, having joined the latter as a Graduate Research Assistant during her MA degree. Her experiences in feminist DH set the foundation for her collaborative research practices and expertise in literary-historical studies of modernist women’s writing. Recent publications include contributions to KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies (Summer 2025) and Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres (Edinburgh UP, 2023).

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Holland, K., Brown, S., Grundy, I., (2026), "The Oak Tree Grows: Feminist Succession and Sustainability in the Orlando Project", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.25547/XR9A-C173)

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1. digital humanities
2. feminist DH
3. project management
4. project transition
5. succession
6. transitions and succession