Keynote Address: Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital Humanities
Speaker Bio
Laura Mandell is Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), a Longman Cultural Edition of The Castle of Otranto and Man of Feeling, and numerous articles primarily about eighteenth-century women writers, and Breaking the Book (forthcoming). She is Editor of the Poetess Archive, on online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750-1900, Director of 18thConnect, and Director of ARC, the Advanced Research Consortium overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA. Her current research involves developing new methods for visualizing poetry, developing software that will allow all scholars to deep-code documents for data-mining, and improving OCR software for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing.
Abstract
A common charge against Digital Humanities, iterated most persuasively by Alan Liu in the recently published essay collection Debates in Digital Humanities is that it is not theoretical enough, and especially not critical enough about its own grounds for production. In this talk, I examine and affirm that criticism, asking, how do we get from digitizing in the name of identity politics (women writers) to the awareness of structural problems and how our own productivity might contribute to them? However, it is important to notice, I argue, that Feminist Critique itself, no matter its content, is no better at counteracting its own immersion in sexist social structures. The problem is hidden in the case of Feminist Critique because book production has been naturalized; it comes to the fore in digital production but is a problem both must confront. I then show how Digital Humanities can help us figure out how to intervene in the conditions of production of academic feminism.
Keynote Address: Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital Humanities
A common charge against Digital Humanities, iterated most persuasively by Alan Liu in the recently published essay collection Debates in Digital Humanities is that it is not theoretical enough, and especially not critical enough about its own grounds for production. In this talk, I examine and affirm that criticism, asking, how do we get from digitizing in the name of identity politics (women writers) to the awareness of structural problems and how our own productivity might contribute to them? However, it is important to notice, I argue, that Feminist Critique itself, no matter its content, is no better at counteracting its own immersion in sexist social structures. The problem is hidden in the case of Feminist Critique because book production has been naturalized; it comes to the fore in digital production but is a problem both must confront. I then show how Digital Humanities can help us figure out how to intervene in the conditions of production of academic feminism.