Feminist Digital Humanities is a more recent development in the field of Digital Humanities, a project incorporating digital and computational methods as part of its research methodology. Feminist Digital Humanities has risen partly because of recent criticism of the propensity of Digital Humanities to further patriarchal or hegemonic discourses in the Academy. Women are rapidly dominating social media in order to educate people about feminist growth and contributions. Research proves the rapid growth of Feminist Digital Humanities started during the post-feminism era around from the 1980s to 1990s. Such feminists’ works provides examples through the text technology, social conditions of literature and rhetorical analysis. Feminist Digital Humanities aims to identify and explore women's digital contributions as well as articulate where and why these contributions are important.
Feminist Digital Humanities highlights not only the role of women, but also feminism, and cyberfeminism in technology.Hamilton, P. & Spongberg, M. (2017) Twenty Years On: feminist histories and digital media, Women's History Review, 26:5, 671-677 Some of the research in feminist digital humanities centers on the women exclusion from histories of technology and the use of technology to promote feminist scholarship. Feminist Digital Humanities also discusses diversity, gender, and sexual issues as well as contemporary feminist awareness. It has contributed to enabling a new combination and collaboration based on women's knowledge and interpretation. Feminist Digital Humanities Collection will preserve the feminists' works, processing their efforts scholarly, thus, had been considered as the only way to represent histories and engage with the past works of feminists. The Feminist Digital Humanities Project is needed in order to discover and make sense of women's work of writings.
A list of women in the digital humanities begun by Jacqueline Wernimont makes available a compendium of women working in the field.
History Background
The early history of feminist digital humanities was uncertain to where the movement can be precisely pinpointed to its exact date, or even when digital humanities created a specific section and platform for women’s works and feminism. In "Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives", Jacqueline Wernimont composed a reflection on the potentiality of a feminist analysis of digital literary archives and the cross-disciplinary instruments, where she elaborated through ideal exemplary such as the Women Writers Project (WWO) and The Orlando Project when it came to digital literary scholarship.Wernimont, Jacqueline (2013). "Whence Feminism? Assessing Feminist Interventions in Digital Literary Archives". Digital Humanities Quarterly. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Through her writing, she unfolds the early origin of feminist digital literary history and the birth of this feminist digital humanities movement.
Women Writers Project (WWO) and the Orlando Project began as two of the earliest feminist digital humanities efforts where feminist literary scholars gathered to speak about the existing gap in literary history dispute in the 1980s through these projects. The co-founders of Orlando, Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, described the prospects of the new electronic approach as a strong opportunity to alleviate the occurring marginality of women writers’ works.Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy and Sharon Balazs. "An Introduction to The Orlando Project". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 26: 1 (2007), pp. 127-134 Their view corresponded with the founders of Women Writers Online as well where they shared that "the electronic archive appeared to be the ideal theoretical successor to the physical archive, since it assured to curb the issues of inaccessibility and dearth which had rendered women’s literary works invisible for so long".Women Writers Project. History. Women Writers Project. https://www.wwp.brown.edu/about/history/ .
Feminist literary scholars take these efforts earnestly as they aim to recover women’s work to visible archives as one of their longtime ambitions, due to the unsettling loss of early digital literary projects. Earhart expresses her concern that these blueprints attest a primal touch where digital literary scholarship acted as a mechanism that might be implemented to fulfill the theoretical demands of academic literature that reinstated "women, people of color, queers into the canon" at the unfortunate loss of many recovered projects of the late 20th century. Through these two projects, one can still read positive responses on the existing abundance of works under them. Susan Frairman expresses her joy at this platform as a boundless list that functions electronically filled with "history-making women". Anne Lake Prescott and Betty Travitsky processed that "editing women to edit everything available and use the Internet as an infinitely expandable archival space" in their article.Travitsky, Betty S., and Anne Lake Prescott. "Studying and Editing Early Modern Englishwomen: Then and Now". In Ann Hillinshead Hurley and Chanita Goodblatt, eds., Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. pp. 1-17 They further added that running digital archives is a tenaciously productive and "grand" procedure that satisfy feminist’s preference by manifesting through the formation of an abundant storage and extraction medium for an inclusive and diversity of women writers. This movement determines to retrieve all the work made by the neglected groups because it is suggested that through that attainment, women’s past literary history can be viewed as more accurately and a whole if the missing literary works can be found again to be used as a significant resource.
Intersectional Feminism in Digital Humanities
The term intersectionality emerges from the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s and it aims to revise the lack of articulation between feminists and critical antiracist practices, which have too often been addressed with either gender or race but not coextensively.King, C. S. (2018). "If It’s in A Word": Intersectional Feminism, Precarity, and The Babadook. The Popular Culture Studies Journal, 166-189. Therefore, intersectionality is commonly regarded to perceive race, class, and gender as beyond entirely separate structures. Formerly described by Crenshaw, intersectionality analyzes the additional aspects of difference including sexuality and ability.Risam, R. (2015). Beyond the margins: Intersectionality and the digital humanities. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 9, Number 2. Intersectionality has been progressively incorporated into the field of digital humanities.
As an outlook for scholarship in digital humanities, intersectionality advocates complex analysis and highlights differences while resisting binary logic. As new media studies are often known to be an academic dominated by apolitical white heterosexual male, a found relationship between media studies and intersectionality may create a safe and insightful space for intersectional analysis. These developed visions in new media brought attention to the ideas made by feminists, queers, and scholars of critical race theory in questioning the connection between digital media and various categories of identity, simultaneously changing the general understanding of the link between digital media, networks, and individuality. Feminism is called to be central to the identity and methodologies of digital humanities.
Intersectional feminism focuses on the dynamics that were often ignored by past movements and theories, challenging the prejudiced ideas about feminism and proposing a positive environment for women, men, and others, consequently dismantling the rigidity of a gender binary society for the benefit of all people.Speed, H. P., & Jones, L. (2019). Intersectional feminism and fact Women’s experience in practical workshops. free libre, 63. As intersectional feminism acknowledges the relationship between the power structures (race, class, sexuality, and abilities included), incorporating it within digital humanities practices may ensure the possibility of a fight against what should be impermissible such as normalized sexual harassment, predation, and racism within higher education institutions or organizations across the world.Wernimont, J., & Losh, E. (2018). Introduction. In Losh E. & Wernimont J. (Eds.), Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities (pp. Ix-Xxvi). Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.5749/j.ctv9hj9r9.3 It may also bring positive changes within the community as a whole. Intersectional feminism provides the best guidance in ethical approaches to digital humanities and has been taken up by digital humanities scholars across a range of disciplines, which, according to Roopika Risam, offers "a viable approach to cultural criticism in the digital humanities."Eearhart, A. E. (2018). Can We Trust the University?: Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities. In Losh E. & Wernimont J. (Eds.), Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities (pp. 369-390). Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.5749/j.ctv9hj9r9.23 Risam calls for an intersectional approach to digital humanities that invites a "greater intellectual diversity in the field" through an examination of its history, learning that intersectional feminist praxis in digital humanities provides a way forward for the field to engage a diversity of people.DeSpain, J. (2016). A Feminist Digital Humanities Pedagogy beyond the Classroom. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 26(1), 64-73. doi:10.5325/trajincschped.26.1.0065
Objectives Media Theorist Lisa Nakamura notes that "[as] women of color acquire an increasing presence online, their particular interests which spring directly from gender and racial identifications, that is to say, those identities associated with a physical body off-line, are being addressed."Nakamura, Lisa. "Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction." New Media, Old Media. Eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan. Routledge: New York, 2006.p321 Likewise, Science and Technology Studies professor Donna Haraway has also pioneered specifically feminist approaches to the study of digital humanities.Wajcman, Judy. "Addressing Technological Change: The Challenge to Social Theory." Society, Ethics and Technology. Eds. Morton E. Winston and Ralph D. Edelbach. Cengage Learning: 2011. Page 112.
This intervention is notably crystallized in the work of FemTechNet, "an activated network of scholars, artists, and students who work on, with, and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields including STS, Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women’s, Queer, and Ethnic Studies". FemTechNet has collaborated on a number of projects that reflect the aims of Feminist Digital Humanities, including Wikistorming, DOCC: Distributed Open Collaborative Course, and video dialogues. Their methods emphasize distribution through networks to connect diverse institutions, nations, and fields.
Professors of Digital Humanities, Bethany Nowviskie and Miriam Posner have blogged about the structures in place that have kept women from engaging in digital humanities. There have been efforts to increase the racial representations within the field as well. These feminist digital humanities projects include #transformDH, That Camp Theory, Critical Code Studies, and Crunk Feminist Collective. Black Girls Code is a project that has recently garnered attention, with founder Kimberly Bryant receiving a Standing O-vation presented by Toyota and Oprah Winfrey.