Digitization helped literary scholars uncover works by Chinese Canadian women writers

Interviewed by Helen Wu

As a research assistant, Sydney Lines began her collaboration with Mary Chapman, a professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC, with the Winnifred Eaton Archive which has since expanded to other projects, including an exhibition on Chinese diaspora in Montreal. 

Much of their work focuses on the Eaton family. Sisters Edith and Winnifred Eaton, both of Anglo Chinese heritage, have used multiple pseudonyms. Their bestselling novels and journalistic pieces remained obscure for years. Recently, Chapman and Lines uncovered a novella written by the sisters’ mother, Grace Eaton (Achuen Amoy), about her experiences in China.

In the interview, Chapman and Lines discussed their use of various digital tools and methods, including the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), CollectionBuilder, and StoryMap. These tools help them annotate, analyze and digitize texts and share temporal-spatial research, ensuring greater accessibility and sustainability.

 

Both of you are literary scholars. Are your specific areas of research overlapping?

Sydney Lines: One of our key overlaps is the Eatons. Mary is one of the leading experts on the Eaton family and initially focused on Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far). My primary research revolves around Winnifred Eaton, Edith’s younger sister.  

I also study 19th- and early 20th-century North American and transatlantic literature and culture. I’m working on an Icelandic Canadian author, Laura Goodman Salverson, who operates within the same literary sphere as Winnifred Eaton. Mary is a feminist scholar who has done research on suffragist literature and literature by women, so we often find common ground in our work. 

 

How would you define digital scholarship in literary studies? 

Mary Chapman: I think literary scholarship has turned to textual editing for digital projects. Traditionally, literary recovery work was shared in print. Now, by sharing this work digitally, we can make these texts available online for free, significantly expanding accessibility. This is especially valuable for educators and students who might not be able to afford costly new editions or textbooks.  

Lines: Digital scholarship takes many forms. What Mary described is also tied to digital preservation. If a physical text is too delicate, scans allow you to make it accessible while preserving the original. It’s a more sustainable way of displaying these texts.  

 

 

What digital methodologies have you used in your projects on the Eaton family? 

Lines: One approach is using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). TEI allows us to incorporate various encoding elements to work with texts in different ways. Since TEI is based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), it works well with tools like Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), which can transform XML into HTML for digital publishing and XML Path Language (XPath), which enables me to write path expressions to query the XML. For example, if I’ve tagged speakers by their gender, I can run a quick XPath query to see how often different genders speak in a given text—something that might take years to count and mark manually. TEI not only speeds up this process but also expands the scope of analysis. 

I also explore how pseudonyms function in texts. Winnifred Eaton wrote under multiple names, such as Onoto Watanna, Winnifred Reeve, and Mrs. Francis Reeve. One of the questions I’m interested in is whether there are ways to tag these different personas that show distinct political stances they take. How does the voice of Winnifred Eaton differ from the voice of Mrs. Francis Reeve? Based on your own encoding, you could ask different questions of the text and get results much faster. 

Chapman: My work also involves mapping. While researching a biography of the Eaton family, I wanted to track where family members were at different points in time. My students and I built a story map focusing on the mother’s childhood acrobatic career. She toured globally, but there’s not much documentation. By mapping her physical locations at different moments—say, a performance in New Orleans in late 1852 and another in Cincinnati in early 1853—we could see that she probably went up the Mississippi River, performing in small towns and cities along the way. So, using a simple mapping platform helped my students and me figure out a more complete narrative. 

 

You recently found a new piece of writing. Has a digital tool helped you in the process? 

Chapman: That’s the autobiographical, serialized novella written by the Eaton sisters’ mother, Mrs. Grace Eaton about her work as a missionary in 1860s Shanghai. We knew she had written fiction published in a newspaper but not much beyond that—until Sydney found a letter that mentioned the title of the novella. That was a breakthrough because then we could search digitized newspaper archives, where we found two versions of the novella, one published in a daily newspaper and one in a weekly. Digitized historical newspaper archives have been invaluable. We’ve also found hundreds of unknown stories and journalism by the Eaton sisters. 

Lines: One thing I’d like to point out is that digital tools themselves can be flawed. These texts were digitized using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which often misreads older, damaged texts. We kept running into this problem because the OCR metadata was also terrible. Sometimes OCR throws in or omits characters or words that aren’t there in the original.  

For example, in this copy of facsimile with bad OCR [see figure below], you can see the random letters pasted into images on the cover of this magazine. Even the old address label at the bottom has illegible characters in place of the original address. The jumbled characters are what the machine reads, so if it’s wrong, results won’t return what you’re looking for. 

To work around this, I tried to use different sets of keywords to see if I could pull something back in a search. If I could just get one or two of those words to show up somewhere within a set timeframe, I might be able to find it. And that was the trick—this process of trial and error and working around the confines of the machine.   

 

Chapman: Our process is a mixture of going to digitized newspapers and databases that we know are promising, like HathiTrust, and vague-searching with built-in errors—to have a bit of flexibility so that material that has been scanned imperfectly might show up. 

 

Who would you turn to for help when learning new digital tools? 

Chapman: We’d probably both say the same name: Joey Takeda, who is currently a developer at the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at SFU. 

Joey joined the Winnifred Eaton archive project early on when he was an MA student in English. I knew I wanted to do a digital project, but I wasn’t sure how. Jean Lee Cole, a collaborator on the Winnifred Eaton Archive, suggested using Omeka, but then Joey introduced us both to static sites and minimal computing principles. He was trained at the Humanities Computing and Media Centre University of Victoria (HCMC), so he could draw on all the experience he had there.  

Lines: I’ve also taken workshops at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), which offers intensive training in TEI, CollectionBuilder, and coding languages. But having someone like Joey—who bridges humanities scholarship and technical knowledge—made a huge difference to the project. Without that guidance, I also wouldn’t have integrated TEI into my dissertation. 

 

Are there ongoing or upcoming projects you are particularly excited about? 

Lines: One thing is CollectionBuilder, an open-source framework for creating digital collections and exhibit websites. It doesn’t require a dedicated server—it’s built locally and deployed through Jekyll, making it highly sustainable. If the university shuts down this WordPress blog, for example, it could still exist on something like CollectionBuilder. 

My work on the Laura Goodman Salverson archive is a recovery project. I found a significant number of short stories, serials, and poems that aren’t cataloged in any bibliography. After taking a DHSI course on CollectionBuilder, I quickly created a prototype for her digital archive.

Chapman: Recently, I’ve been studying Edith Eaton’s journalism about 1890s Chinatown. She mentioned several people and provided some details, but little else was known. My graduate students conducted deep dives into the digitized sources—newspapers, immigration networks, naturalization records, and more. Now we have detailed information on 22 different residents of Montreal’s Chinatown in the 1890s. 

With Sydney’s help, some materials have been uploaded to CollectionBuilder, while others have been featured in exhibitions in Montreal and Toronto. Digital projects like this allow students and scholars to share their work and to contribute to a broader conversation about these communities.