Literary scholarship is poised to benefit immensely from the emerging modular software frameworks that support deep and finely grained investigations of digital texts. Humanities research centers, such as the Brown University Women Writers Project, have invested substantially in enriching bodies of literary texts with semantic and structural information, using XML formats such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Recent innovations in scholarly software design offer opportunities to exploit the semantic depth of TEI collections by creating new tools for textual analysis and collaboration. To this end, the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group (STG) and the Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) propose a new effort to create a prototype suite of software tools to explore TEI encoded texts in the new Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).