The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada is an web-based service-oriented platform that combines a database (Online Research Canada, ORCA) to house born-digital scholarly materials and a toolkit for empowering new collaborative modes of scholarly writing online.
According to CWRC:
CWRC involves more than one hundred scholars from across Canada, with the aim of engaging the Canadian writing research community at large and researchers worldwide, as both contributors and users, in the task of devising new tools and methods of scholarship to meet the digital turn. The CWRC infrastructure builds on the Orlando Project’s expertise in collaborative online scholarly production.
CWRC’s international team of more than 100 affiliated scholars includes leading Canadian digital humanists, and prominent Canadianist scholars and projects. And because words pose some of the thorniest problems for advanced computing analysis and computing tool usability, the team boasts experts in software engineering, GIS, and business. Such interdisciplinarity is needed to scale up Orlando’s pioneering features to enable a globally distributed community of literary researchers to study highly contextualized, multi-lingual content, and, through their experimentation with new-generation tools, to transform academic protocols for a whole field.
The project is multi-lingual and interdisciplinary in expertise and approach: literary studies, humanities computing, computing science, business, and earth science. CWRC will be mainly open-access, accessible to Canadians and the world.
The EMiC UA projects “Editing the Wilfred Watson Archive” and “Editing the Sheila Watson-Wilfred Watson Letters” form part of the fabric of CWRC’s Collaboratory and are considered “Pilot Projects” that test the functionality of CWRC’s ORCA database.
