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Digital Feminists - Who We Are, Our Ambitions, Our Goals RSS
A public discussion featuring members of Digital Feminists, aka Digital Coven. Only members may comment.

Posted by Martha Nell Smith on Mar 16, 2010 07:55PM

"What does it matter who is speaking?"   Not only Beckett, not only Foucault, not only Barthes, but many feminists have shown that it in fact makes quite a bit of difference who is speaking, and it makes quite a difference who listeners, readers, audiences think is is speaking.  Yet in our wonderful new world of agile digital tools, too often they are deployed as if it makes not difference who is using them, that their relations are objectively neutral with their users.  This group is committed to producing scholarship that embraces the feminist, queer, critical race, and class theories that advanced humanities scholarly inquiry in the last few decades of the 20th century and that have made a humanities scholarly 21st century landscape as diverse as the worlds by which we are surrounded.

This collective publication by the Digital Coven, which would be a collection of book essays in another publishing era,  asks such questions as what a digital humanities constructed through feminist epistemology might look like—what can those working in digital humanities learn from those who are exploring situated knowledges? what is gained when digital humanities asks more questions about how the knowledges created from the staggering amounts of data we gather (and for which we provide excavation and extraction tools) is situated and how is that reflected in the impact of those knowledges. As feminist scholars, we share the conviction that feminist critical paradigms must participate in the highly politicized processes of knowledge organization that have such a powerful shaping impact on humanities research and dissemination. The profound digital shift in our mode of production has major impacts on what scholarly work involves, how it is resourced, how it is conducted and by whom, and how it is credited. As work throughout the humanities, social science, and hard science disciplines has benefited from feminist framings, so digital humanities has benefited, as ours (and others’) ongoing work, conference presentations, and articles have made clear. This collection of scholarly reflections muses on that fact, and also begins to propose a trajectory for future developments in knowledge production and dissemination, developments that include audience development for our robust digital tools that are not being used as widely as we have hoped and imagined.

I trust that other members of the Coven will expand on this brief paragraph! 
This comment was modified on Mar 16, 2010 10:15PM
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