NITLE Shared Academics: Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, and Digital

HumanitiesJacqueline Wernimont

Assistant Professor of EnglishScripps College

@profwernimont | jwernimont.wordpress.com

The problem with definitions: Digital Humanities

PluralStrategic (long term) and Tactical (short term)Creative and CriticalSelf-conscious about modalities and toolsCommunity of practice-Digital Humanists make creative and critical use

of digital technology in humanities scholarship and teaching

Outline of Sorts : What is at stake?

Communicating Value (strategic scaling)AccessAccess, Authority, and TeachingMissing HistoriesCommunities of PracticeFeminist Critiques of DH“Chiffon” Interventions

Communicating Value

Liu suggests that part of what theory can offer DH is the ability to scale from academic inquiry into cultural action/critique

GWS-DH allows scholars and students to (re)assert the transformative power of academic feminism outside of the academy

Opportunities to highlight the value of liberal arts education as well

In Liu’s terms, we have an opportunity to extend issues around text encoding, pedagogy, social media, data visualization, and so on into the “register of society, economics, politics, (and) culture.” It is a chance to make clear that feminist reading, writing, teaching, building, and breaking are also modes of feminist cultural engagement.

Q: What kinds of scaling are already being done? What others approaches should we be imagining?

AccessWomen Writers Project http://wwp.brown.edu

Old Bailey Online http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

http://ggstem.wordpress.com

http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/orlando/

www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org

Access, Authority, and Teaching

Extension of a Different Kind“We no longer have to separate the archive from the classroom, the

specialist from the student, or sentence the researcher to monastic isolation. Intersubjectivity, communication, and exchange are crucial to forging vital humanities communities. Communication makes aesthetic artifacts matter—to someone for some reason…

Given that the “Googlization of knowledge is already a reality,” Drucker argues that “digital tools for humanities scholarship are crucial. Humanities approaches to digital tools are even more crucial. […] We have to engage with new media as a way to extend humanities ideas…

The “humanities” are a living field of possibilities for engagement, and they provide a crucial methodology for doing so. Digital instruments are suited to the creation of new working methods along administrative, intellectual, and cultural lines.

Criticism, Vol 47 No 2, Spring 2005J. Drucker and N.K. Hayles review; response by Liu

“Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives” in forthcoming special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on “The Literary”

Missing Histories“Whence Feminism?” and the history of

feminisms in DH

Wikipedia: Meetup SF

Q: How do we think about complex technological scenes, like those in DH, in feminist or queer terms?

Q: Where might we locate the effects of feminist or queer interventions?

Beyond incorporating cultural studies insights, or a more “general liberatory ethics” into our digital humanities work, we need a robust history of feminisms in digital humanities projects and documentation of feminist engagements with digital tools, technologies, and practices.

Communities of PracticeQ: What resources and opportunities are already

available for those working on Women’s and Gender Studies and DH?

Feminisms and DH

Women in the Archives

Feminist Critiques of DHEven as we are looking to support communities of practice

and develop new models for digital scholarship, as Cecire suggests, we need to do more to recognize the operations of privilege within DH

• DH: dilates the critical power of doing – experiential knowledge

• A “nondiscursive theoretical mode”• Also a masculine, white, industrialist mode

Those working within gender and women’s studies are particularly well positioned to illuminate the political and “ethical dimension” of method and discourse – the ethos of DH.

“Chiffon” Interventions?

Q: What kinds of infrastructural support can we establish to help advance projects that engage DH from GWS perspectives?

Q: How can feminist or queer theoretical perspectives help us think about issues of monumentalism and ephemerality in digital media?

Two final questions

• Is it desirable to federate disciplinarily diverse WS/GW DH work?

• What kind of balance might we hope for between local/national/international interventions?

- Thank you!