Feminist digital humanities
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Feminist Digital Humanities is a more recent development in the field of
Digital Humanities Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...
, 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 is aimed to identify and explore women's sense of writing as well as to prove widespread of women's work in most of the digital archive. Feminist Digital Humanities highlights not only the role of women, but also
feminism Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
, and
cyberfeminism Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, methodology or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the w ...
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 The Northeastern University Women Writers Project (formerly the Brown University Women Writers Project) or WWP, founded in 1986 at Brown University, is a long-term research and publication project which focuses on making texts from early modern wom ...
(WWO) and the
Orlando Project Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures rel ...
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. 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". 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. 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 Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of adva ...
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. Therefore, intersectionality is commonly regarded to perceive
race Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to: * Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species * Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...
,
class Class or The Class may refer to: Common uses not otherwise categorized * Class (biology), a taxonomic rank * Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects * Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used differentl ...
, and
gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures ...
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 An individual is that which exists as a distinct entity. Individuality (or self-hood) is the state or quality of being an individual; particularly (in the case of humans) of being a person unique from other people and possessing one's own need ...
. 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 The gender binary (also known as gender binarism) is the classification of gender into two distinct, opposite forms of masculine and feminine, whether by social system, cultural belief, or both simultaneously. Most cultures use a gender binary ...
society for the benefit of all people. 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 Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill th ...
, and
racism Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonis ...
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 Roopika Risam is an associate professor of film and media studies and of comparative literature and faculty in the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement cluster at Dartmouth College. She is a scholar of digital and postcolonial humanities. E ...
, offers "a viable approach to cultural criticism in the digital humanities." 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.


Objectives

Media Theorist
Lisa Nakamura Lisa Nakamura is an American professor of media and cinema studies, Asian American studies, and gender and women’s studies.University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Asian American Studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, ...
notes that " swomen 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." Likewise,
Science and Technology Studies Science and technology studies (STS) is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. History Like most interdisciplinary fie ...
professor
Donna Haraway Donna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. Sh ...
has also pioneered specifically feminist approaches to the study of digital humanities. This intervention is notably crystallized in the work of
FemTechNet FemTechNet (FTN) is a feminist network of scholars, artists, and activists known for its feminist, decentralized pedagogy experiments. FemTechNet became the focus of various media outlets when it broadcast its efforts to "storm" Wikipedia under its ...
, "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 Bethany ( grc-gre, Βηθανία,Murphy-O'Connor, 2008, p152/ref> Syriac: ܒܝܬ ܥܢܝܐ ''Bēṯ ʿAnyā'') or what is locally known as Al-Eizariya or al-Azariya ( ar, العيزرية, " laceof Lazarus"), is a Palestinian town in the West ...
and
Miriam Posner Miriam ( he, מִרְיָם ''Mīryām'', lit. 'Rebellion') is described in the Hebrew Bible as the daughter of Amram and Jochebed, and the older sister of Moses and Aaron. She was a prophetess and first appears in the Book of Exodus. The Tora ...
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 Critical code studies (CCS) is an emerging academic subfield, related to software studies, digital humanities, cultural studies, computer science, human–computer interface, and the do-it-yourself maker culture. Its primary focus is on the cult ...
, and
Crunk Feminist Collective The ''Crunk Feminist Collection'' is a collection of essays that take on intersectionality, African-American culture, patriarchy, misogyny, anti-blackness and hip hop feminism. The essays were originally published on the blog ''Crunk Feminist Coll ...
. 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.


Contributions and Impacts of Feminist Digital Humanities in The United States (U.S.)

Spaces such as the liberal news sites '' Huffington Post'', blogs such as ''
Jezebel Jezebel (;"Jezebel"
(US) and
) was the daughte ...
'' and '' Feministing'' to social networking media such as
Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
,
Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
and Instagram have been utilized adequately contributing to the proliferation of the use of digital media and devices in raising awareness regarding feminism. Some writers have suggested that the feminism digital movement and its impact may indicate the fourth wave of feminism in America additionally proven by the propagation of the
Me Too movement #MeToo is a social movement against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture, in which people publicize their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment. The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in ...
.Clark, Cassie. "#TrendingFeminism: The Impact of Digital Feminist Activism." PhD diss., The George Washington University, 2015. This movement is entailed with many projects under the work of feminism activists through social media in the United States ever since 2012. One of the significant contributions was a live document on Twitter initiated by a UK-based activist,
Laura Bates Laura Bates (born 27 August 1986, Oxford) is an English feminist writer. She founded the Everyday Sexism Project website in April 2012. Her first book, ''Everyday Sexism'', was published in 2014. Biography Bates' parents are Diane Elizabet ...
that recorded the everyday experiences of sexism under the project called
Everyday Sexism Project The Everyday Sexism Project is a website founded on 16 April 2012 by Laura Bates, a British feminist writer. The aim of the site is to document examples of sexism from around the world. Entries may be submitted directly to the site, or by email or ...
. She received over 25,000 responses from 15 countries that included reports on sexist jokes, workplace sexism, sexual assault and
victim-blaming Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them. There is historical and current prejudice against the victims of domestic violence and sex crimes, such as ...
. This was due to the sense of injustice ascribed to the victims and those who wanted to work on
gender inequality Gender inequality is the social phenomenon in which men and women are not treated equally. The treatment may arise from distinctions regarding biology, psychology, or cultural norms prevalent in the society. Some of these distinctions are empi ...
. The project was one of the efforts to bridge the gap between genders through heightening the awareness regarding the oppression caused which is one of the primary purposes of the feminism movement. The Me Too movement was another major social transformation done to the human rights and gender equality progression where it was in protest against assault and sexual harassment against women.Lee, Bun-Hee. "#Me Too Movement; It Is Time That We All Act and Participate in Transformation." Psychiatry Investigation 15, no. 5 (2018): 433-433. The hashtag #MeToo started circulating on the Internet in October 2017 introduced by an American activist, Tarana Burke in 2006 in MySpace where social media users have been utilising it to draw attention to the problems related to
sexual misconduct Sexual misconduct is misconduct of a sexual nature which exists on a spectrum that may include a broad range of sexual behaviors considered unwelcome. This includes conduct considered inappropriate on an individual or societal basis of morality, se ...
including
victim-blaming Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them. There is historical and current prejudice against the victims of domestic violence and sex crimes, such as ...
, rape enabling and putting responsibility on sexual predators. As time went by and the campaign became more impactful, it managed to shift the focus not only on gender-based harassment but also the discrimination against race, gender orientation, color, age and disability. Another driving factor for the movement was the consensus in regards to lacking reporting systems of sexual misconduct in the workplace. The allegations regarding violence and sexual harassment against women were meant to be publicized on social media such as Twitter as part of the social movement to hold the powerful men accountable for their crime with the amount of audience accumulated. One of the aims of this project was also to raise awareness regarding female survivors for other victims to be inspired by. Many prominent public figures were in favor of the movement such as
Alyssa Milano Alyssa Jayne Milano (born December 19, 1972) is an American actress. She has played Samantha Micelli in '' Who's the Boss?'', Jennifer Mancini in '' Melrose Place'', Phoebe Halliwell in ''Charmed'', Billie Cunningham in '' My Name Is Earl'', Sa ...
,
Ashley Judd Ashley Judd (born Ashley Tyler Ciminella; April 19, 1968) is an American actress. She grew up in a family of performing artists: she is the daughter of the late country music singer Naomi Judd and the half-sister of country music singer Wynonna ...
and
Ellen DeGeneres Ellen Lee DeGeneres ( ; born January 26, 1958) is an American comedian, television host, actress, writer, and producer. She starred in the sitcom ''Ellen'' from 1994 to 1998, which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award for " The Puppy Episode". Sh ...
where they gathered in solidarity on social media to give support for Christina Blasey Ford who had admitted to being sexually assaulted during her high school years in a court hearing. Without a doubt, the ''#MeToo'' movement has brought a huge impact in the U.S. It truly opened the eyes of the Americans to how severe and common sexual harassment, abuse, as well as injustice towards women are. They finally realized that this kind of injustice or harassment can happen to any woman, even their mothers, daughters, female co-workers or female friends. This has brought a massive awareness in them which results in them creating more effort to prevent sexual harassment as well as assault happening in the country. This movement has also become a platform for victims of abuse and harassment to speak up their frustration and anger. It has created a ‘safe space’ or an environment where they can voice out their emotions without fear of being invalidated. This also results in more and more women realizing that they are not in this fight alone because there is a huge community of women who are right beside them walking through the same journey too. This kind of impact is highly significant and groundbreaking because the women in the USA are finally not afraid of speaking up. In 2014, ''#NotBuyingIt'' campaign was part of the digital feminist movement as well in encountering the problem and stereotype of women
sexual objectification Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person solely as an object of sexual desire. Objectification more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality or dignity. Objectification is mo ...
. This hashtag was used in social media such as Twitter in which Twitter users mentioned the responsible product company’s Twitter account containing critique regarding the stereotype of using women as prizes/objects in commercials and refusing to buy the product. The hashtag became an opportunity for people to expand their conversations on sexist commercials, women objectification and acknowledging the power of female consumers. It was sparked by the anger of feminists and highly-aware people towards sexism in regards to Super Bowl ads which used women as accessories that had a pattern of collective viewing ritual by Americans. One of the aims of this campaign was to politicise the personal experiences of the feminists’ and make it into a bigger issue that would lead to changing the society through the change of policies, laws and many more. The hashtag was used more than 15,000 times and their postings extended to over two million social media users. The '' #HimToo'', being an extraction from the Me Too movement, was one of the hashtags that was heavily circulated on social media by the feminism digital activists in October 2018. The tagline, initially created in 2015 gained momentum when a mother professed her concern towards her son regarding being falsely accused of sexual misconduct when going on a date using the hashtag. The hashtag was not that political until further reactions on social media pioneered because of the sexual allegations that were raised during
Brett Kavanaugh Brett Michael Kavanaugh ( ; born February 12, 1965) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Donald Trump on July 9, 2018, and has served since ...
’s nomination in a United States court hearing. The hashtag was formerly handful for political allegiances during the 2016 United States presidential election to team up against
Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States sen ...
in support of
Tim Kaine Timothy Michael Kaine (; born February 26, 1958) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Virginia since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 38th lieutenant governor of Virgi ...
and used by
Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021. Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of P ...
’s supporters against Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...
with the hashtags of #LockHerUp followed by #HimToo. The campaign of #HimToo was repopularised with the emergence of more sexual allegations towards men. This in result has successfully increased the awareness and the relevance of sexual harassment towards men despite the criticism and backlash to it including men who fought for men’s rights confiscating the hashtag to circulate rape misconceptions regarding false accusations. The hashtag is used until this very day in an effort to amplify validation and support from the public and other female survivors towards male victims. It also brought attention to the false rape and sexual allegations made by women who wanted to frame men that they disliked.


Issues Discussed in Feminist Digital Humanities

Institutional Bias One of the issues commonly discussed in the field of feminist digital humanities is the existence of institutional bias which includes race and gender-based injustices. In an article written in the Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print/digital book discussing debates emerging in the field, Wikipedia’s stand in having a "neutral point of view"’ as one of its core content policies can be problematic especially to those who wish to take their stand and voice out their opinions on its bias against women and feminism. It has also been reported in the New York Times regarding Wikipedia undermining the centrality of women authors among novelists and literature by moving notable names from the "American Novelists" category to the "American Women Novelists" category. This action does not only undercut the significance of their works but will also disregard their contribution in the world of literature as a whole. Jennifer Redmond wrote in a WordPress post concerning the potential of an open-source software platform called Omeka as a tool to be utilized in telling the history of women’s education that emerges in various perspectives. Gender imbalance has always been a problem especially in an institutional or field that is greatly conquered by men. The late Adrianne Wadewitz, a feminist scholar and former senior Wikipedia editor worked hard to improve the quality and diversify the coverage of Wikipedia, and aspired to improve the gender gap in participation on a site in which over 90 per cent of the editors identified as male. Redmond stated in her post that it is important for women to get a seat at the table "while it’s still being set, not after the main course has been served" as equal partners and discovered that the word "table" has also been used to explain the necessity to collaborate, critique and engage in new developments. In intersectional feminism, a more diverse and inclusive approach is applied in order to make sure that people of all colors, nationalities, abilities, genders, and social status is involved. The Feminist Digital Humanities also advocates for the minorities whose history have been erased due to the institutional bias. Issues concerning racism are also often discussed in this field like the Digital Black Feminism and indigenous women. One digital humanities project called the Warrior Women Project focuses on highlighting the women as history makers of the indigenous community. Discrimination against the Mexican Americans in 1940s Texas is also recorded in a mapping project called "Are We Good Neighbours?" with the goal to "reveal the embodiment of
racism in the United States Racism in the United States comprises negative attitudes and views on race or ethnicity which are related to each other, are held by various people and groups in the United States, and have been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices and ...
". Online Harassment Another issue that is discussed in feminist digital humanities is
online harassment Cyberbullying or cyberharassment is a form of bullying or harassment using Electronic communication network, electronic means. Cyberbullying and cyberharassment are also known as online bullying. It has become increasingly common, especially ...
. Most women are negatively affected by being harassed online, which seeks to silence women’s voices and adversely manipulate women’s personal and professional lives. Feminist scholars regard online harassment as part of a wide range of harassing behaviors that women experience, consistent with a misogynist ideology that considers women as inferior.Vitak, J., Chadha, K., Steiner, L., & Ashktorab, Z. (2017, February). Identifying women's experiences with and strategies for mitigating negative effects of online harassment. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 1231-1245) Online harassment happens collectively in social media platforms, where people take their rights to speak grantedly by harassing women.
Misogyny Misogyny () is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women. It is a form of sexism that is used to keep women at a lower social status than men, thus maintaining the societal roles of patriarchy. Misogyny has been widely practice ...
and
sexism Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers pri ...
are examples of online harassment that frequently happened to younger women in social media platforms especially Twitter and Instagram. These platforms increase the visibility of making harassment available to a much wider audience and enabling wide-reaching calls for others to engage in negative behaviors. Living in the era of technology, misogyny's agenda is alive and widely spread over the internet with brutal remarks towards women. On Twitter specifically, most of the time tweets tormenting women are misogynistic and related to pornography by using tags such as rape, slut and whore. In order to dismiss this misogyny, gender-related hashtags are created and trended worldwide by the victims and relatively voice out their hardships to disclose gendered violence as well as create a space for solidarity. Other than that, millions of women and feminists march across countries to demand for equal rights. The women’s march was organized in reaction to the hyper-masculinity of Trump’s election campaignEverything you wanted to know about fourth wave feminism but were afraid to ask https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/everything-wanted-know-fourth-wave-feminism with his inappropriate attitude towards women that are against his perspectives reproductive rights. Furthermore, the Women’s Media Center (WMC) is built to serve as a platform for women to share their dissatisfaction towards the harassment that they face every day. A sub-project, a WMC Speech Project enables women to access their free speech rights and write anonymously for any categories offered in the project. Some heavy issues are discussed closely by feminists. In relation to online harassment,
sexism Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers pri ...
is certainly one of the most constant issues that is debated over the internet. Studies have shown that outstanding percentages of women and younger girls faced abuse online that is motivated by sex and gender discrimination. In 2012, Laura Bates established a website and set up a social media channel worldwide where victims can submit individual occurrences of sexism they had experienced, with her
Everyday Sexism Project The Everyday Sexism Project is a website founded on 16 April 2012 by Laura Bates, a British feminist writer. The aim of the site is to document examples of sexism from around the world. Entries may be submitted directly to the site, or by email or ...
. The project received thousands of entries from all over the world, mainly the States, "A schoolgirl and a widow reported being pressured and pestered for sex. A reverend in the Church of England was repeatedly asked if there was a man available to perform the wedding or funeral service," and later collated in a book, Everyday Sexism (2014). Although the project succeeded with the power of the internet, it also has enabled a backlash. Bates received violent threats, revealing the remaining force of opposition to it. Adding to that, there is an advertisement that portrays negative influences on young girls, which may dominate their way of thinking in the future. A cereal brand,
Weetabix Weetabix is a breakfast cereal produced by Weetabix Limited in the United Kingdom. It comes in the form of palm-sized (approx. 9.5 cm × 5.0 cm or 4" × 2") wheat biscuits. Variants include organic and Weetabix Crispy Minis (bite-sized ...
illustrates an advertisement that implies only a boy can be a superhero but not a girl. This kind of apparent sexism is widely debated by feminists to legally improve the minds of people that have the potential to corrupt young kids.


Challenges and Limitations

Feminist Digital Humanities also functions as a reiteration of feminist contributions and ideologies which extend the approaches and instruments that help to compile the work of feminists and propagate information among the members of society. Due to the increase in the dependency of the Internet through many online platforms, modern feminists are rampantly embracing the Internet as a primary medium of information gathering on issues pertaining to feminism. In the digital humanity sphere, there is undoubtedly gender imbalance. Between 2010 and 2013, the number of women authors accepted for the
Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is a digital humanities umbrella organization formed in 2005 to coordinate the activities of several regional DH organizations, referred to as constituent organizations. ADHO's constituent o ...
(ADHO) conferences was only around 30 per cent as compared to men (70%).Bordalejo, Barbara. "Minority Report: The Myth of Equality in Digital Humanities." (2017): 320-343 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330231403_Minority_Report_Intersectional_Feminism_and_the_Digital_Humanities Consequently, less recognition among female writers shows that women are underrepresented at the most crucial gatherings in the field. In this conference, there is also a visible bias against non-English authors during Digital Humanities conference presentations. Not only that, according to Weingart’s review, "feminisms and digital humanities" face a range of methodological and cultural prejudices that tend to plague the area of digital humanities.Wernimont, Jacqueline. "Introduction to Feminisms and DH special issue." Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no.2 (2015) http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000217/000217.html The major professional conference is known to be topically skewed towards masculinized methods, concerning "stylometric, programming and software, image processing and many more male-dominated fields." Women and feminists who have been a part of digital humanities since it was first called " humanities computing" have been experiencing all sorts of structural misogyny through many intellectual engagements. The systematic discrimination, sexual harassment and most importantly, the minimization of feminist contributions towards many fields are uncommon and continue to obstruct the expansion of feminist digital humanities. In 2016, a Digital Humanities conference was held as an effort to discuss on issues concerning many fields in Digital Humanities, however, in the quest of expanding the diversity; the panels of feminist infrastructure were located in a separate building from the main building that most conference sessions were held. The panels include the director of the Australian Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) project, the head of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, the director of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) in the United States, and the principal investigator of the Institute for High-Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS). Despite the spectacular profile of the panels, there was a clear indication that feminist point of views on infrastructure was not well valued compared to other panels from different fields. Women of color and the
Trans Trans- is a Latin prefix meaning "across", "beyond", or "on the other side of". Used alone, trans may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Trans (festival), a former festival in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom * ''Trans'' (fil ...
people through the 2016 Digital Humanities conference experience far worse treatment where they were subjected to the full force of exclusion. Therefore, Jamie Skye Bianco applies a performative mode in her work, "Man and His Tool, Again?: Queer and Feminist Notes on Practices in the Digital Humanities and Object Orientations Everywhere" in order to criticize the heteropatriarchal prejudices in textual studies dominated by digital humanities. The "socially engaged critical creativity" promoted by feminist theorists such as Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska is exemplified in Bianco’s work; thinking with and through the methods/tools that we criticize. Her piece and Nicole Starosielski’s subsequent reflection on teaching widen the scope of the conventional theoretical argument by stressing that "creative criticism" is fundamental to how we engage and connect between us (scholars) and students. In order for future digital humanities to succeed, intersectional feminism should be central to digital humanities practices. Among major limitations in the proliferation of Feminist Digital Humanities to the public is the issue of underfunding and inadequate institutional or external support. The survey made by Christina Boyles on several recent works by female scholars such as Amanda Philips, Alexis Lothian, and
Amy Earhart Amy is a female given name, sometimes short for Amanda, Amelia, Amélie, or Amita. In French, the name is spelled ''" Aimée"''. People A–E * Amy Acker (born 1976), American actress * Amy Vera Ackman, also known as Mother Giovanni (1886 ...
shows that while intersectional and critical digital humanities work has always been part of a community, the type of sustained funding familiar with projects that have canonical works or dominant theoretical frameworks has not yet been seen. It is not easy for digital humanities projects to acquire funding. Even a feminist project that has acquired grant funding, like Woman Writers Online (WWO) has not received any funding from the
National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...
(NEH). Wernimont added that "NEH will not fund any projects that promote a certain political, religious, or ideological point of view… or projects that support a specific program of social action." Hence, with no funding from other agencies or organizations, their abilities to expand their project to a larger scale will be restricted.


The Archival of Feminist Digital Humanities Projects

One goal of feminist literary scholars has been to increase the scope of women's literary works in visible archives
The Orlando Project
and The Women Writers Project are two early projects that undertook the task of filling in the gaps that existed in literary history in the 1980s. Both efforts sought to use the electronic format "to overcome the problems of inaccessibility and scarcity which had rendered women’s writing invisible for so long." One critique of a content-oriented approach to combating the marginalization of women's literary works is that it's simply not enough to add content to a system that is built upon a patriarchal methodology. "Literary scholars who depend on archival or rare book materials still confront, whether they acknowledge it or not, the legacy of an institutional form through which patriarchal power exercised the authority to determine value, classification, and access." There is a need for all fine works to be digitalized for the next generation by scholars in order to remain intact. With the innovation of the internet, feminist scholars also follow the trend of digital humanities projects to make many contributions from the past were archived and let other feminists’ voices stay relevant for the future generation, such as; *The Orlando Project/Orlando 2.0 The Orlando Project was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s "Orlando: A Biography" and used an oak tree as a logo in remembrance of Orlando’s poem "The Oak Tree". The project team focused on the development of "Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isle from the Beginnings to the Present" and publicly published by Cambridge University Press as an interactive textbase for scholars and students. It was founded by Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy and Susan Brown. Later, the project team expanded into more than 140 members of scholars, students, and technical personals contributed to the development of the interactive textbase. The Orlando Project focuses on recovering feminist-related literature works, written by British women, men and other women. There are about 1413 writers identified together with their respective works and more than 30,000 events were chronicled. In addition, 25,000 sources were included in the events within the literary works. Other than producing the textbase, the project contributes to publishing books and articles about feminist writer’s history and computing-related content for many institutions, lecturers and conference. They are also collaborating with other project and institutions such as the Canadian Writing and Research Collaboratory (CWRC), Cambridge University Press, and The Women’s Writers Project. *Women's Writers Project The Brown University English Department founded the Women’s Writers Project (WWP) in the late 1980s. The project received its first funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1988. It has transcribed about 200 texts in the first five years and made a draft printout for academic purpose. The project also collaborates with
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
to experiment with publishing editors of their respected works in traditional print form.Women Writers Project History. Women Writers Project, https://wwp.northeastern.edu/about/history/. Accessed on 20 November 2020 Women’s Writers Online (WWO) was published in 1999, enabling WWP collection available online. The project has been subscribed by over 200 institutions including universities, libraries and individuals. The subscription fee was offered as the main source to maintain the project continuity. WWP also held a series of conferences on "Women in the Archives", granting them a collaboration with The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant. Women’s Writers Project has moved to Northeastern University together with team as part of the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. *CSOV or Center for Solutions to Online Violence First known as the " Addressing Anti-Feminist Violence Online" project, CSOV was funded as part of the Digital Media and Learning Competition. It was a set of online discussions between 2013 until 2014. CSOV was founded by a team of seven; Danielle Cole, Izetta Autumn Mobley, Bianca Laureno, Sydette Harry, I’Nasah Crockett, Maegan Ortiz, and Jessica Marie Johnson. They named themselves "The Alchemists". In July 2015, they won a grant and were able to gain support from the collaborators of the competition. The Digital Media and Learning Competition is a challenge with a collaboration between HASTAC or Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, Duke University, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and the
MacArthur Foundation The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private foundation that makes grants and impact investments to support non-profit organizations in approximately 50 countries around the world. It has an endowment of $7.0 billion and p ...
. The purpose of CSOV is to address digital violence experienced by women and other issues related to gender, race, sexuality and ability. This project aims to improve the latency of internet access without physical and psychological harm which makes access to digital resources and communities easier. Now, CSOV is managed by
FemTechNet FemTechNet (FTN) is a feminist network of scholars, artists, and activists known for its feminist, decentralized pedagogy experiments. FemTechNet became the focus of various media outlets when it broadcast its efforts to "storm" Wikipedia under its ...
, a network with members of talented scholars, students and artists who work or expertise in technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields. Founded in 2012, FemTechNet is actively collaborating with many institutions or like-minded groups to address the needs of students interested in feminist science-and-technology studies which CSOV is part of the network.About. FemTechNet, femtechnet.org/about/. Accessed on 26 November 2020 *Crash Override Network Crash Override Network was founded in 2015 by Zoë Quinn and Alex Lifschitz. Both of them are game developers. The network was founded when the
GamerGate Gamergate may refer to: * Gamergate (ant), a worker ant that can store sperm and reproduce sexually * Gamergate (harassment campaign), targeting women in the video game industry * Lt. Gamergate, a character in the ''Adventure Time'' episode " Den ...
controversy emerged and included both of them. They have been targeted with online abuse, which later became their goal to make this network as a platform for security and mental health therapy for the gaming community. It has partnered with
Feminist Frequency Anita Sarkeesian ( ; born 1983) is a Canadian-American feminist media critic and public speaker. She is the founder of '' Feminist Frequency'', a website that hosts videos and commentary analyzing portrayals of women in popular culture. She h ...
and the
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) is a non-profit organization founded by Holly Jacobs in 2012. The organization offers services to victims of cybercrimes through its crisis helpline. They have compiled resources to help victims of cybercrim ...
(CCRI).About The Network: This is Who We Are and What We Can Do. Crash Override Network, http://www.crashoverridenetwork.com/about.html. Accessed on 27 November 2020 In December 2016, Crash Override Network’s hotline was temporarily closed. They are focusing on expanding resources and efforts to support the increases of calls and requests in the future.


See also

*
Cyberfeminism Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, methodology or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the w ...
*
Feminist Technoscience Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technosc ...


References

{{Feminist theory Digital humanities Feminism