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Twenty Years On: feminist histories and digital media

Paula Hamilton & Mary Spongberg

To cite this article: Paula Hamilton & Mary Spongberg (2017) Twenty Years On: feminist histories and digital media, Women's History
Review, 26:5, 671-677, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2016.1167399

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 WOMEN'S HISTORY REVIEW, 2017
VOL. 26, NO. 5, 671-677
Routledge
Taylor & F rands Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2016.1167399

Twenty Years On: feminist histories and digital media

Paula Hamilton and Mary Spongberg
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, 2007, Australia

As many scholars have remarked, the ‘conditions of the historian’s craft’ have changed
dramatically over the last thirty years and continue to do so ‘in front of our very eyes’. 1 In
2015 we reached the twentieth anniversary of the original feminist digitised archival projects
conceived in the flush of a new digital ‘turn’ in scholarship in 1995: Orlando: women’s
writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present; The Corvey Project on
women’s writing of the romantic era; and the American based Victorian Women Writers
Project, were all set up in the same year. They were followed in 1997 by the Perdita Project
on early modern women’s manuscripts. Since then many other projects of differing scales
have brought historical works written by women into the light of day for the first time and
were characteristic of feminist scholars’ initial engagement with digital technologies. 2
Do Feminist historians and literary scholars have built on the traditional paper-based tenet of the
wn women’s movement to make women ‘visible’, to ‘recover women’s lives’ through the
loa
de engagement with these new digital archives, although the methodological implications of this
d massive digitisation of print culture will take some time to be fully explored.
by
[1
87. Why then has the digital ‘revolution’ often been characterised as a ‘turn’, as though it
65.
23 were a fashion that will pass? There is no doubt that trends in feminist historical theory and
9.1 practice do seem to be dynamic and changing rapidly; beyond the ‘digital turn’, the
04 ‘transnational turn’, the ‘archival turn’ we are now experiencing the ‘participatory turn’,
] at
12: which has emerged partly as a consequence of the previous ones. Feminism, though, has not
55 been called a ‘turn’ but rather has adapted since the 1970s to new ‘waves’. Limiting as these
22 descriptive monikers are (and Kate Eichhorn amongst others has been critical of segregating
Au feminism into generations and the reifying of feminist historiography through the wave
gu
st metaphor),3 they nevertheless speak literally and symbolically about the fluidity of ideas in
20 historical scholarship during these years, moving across geographical spaces and expressed in
17 increasingly different forms.
While some historians have treated the advent of digital technologies as though it were a
pragmatic event—‘just new tools’—making research easier and more convenient, 4 feminists
in this volume are exploring both conceptual and methodological issues about what it means
to extend the boundaries of the previously unknowable about the past. From theorists
Foucault and Derrida to anthropologists and historians Ann Laura Stoler, Antoinette Burton
and beyond, the confluence of digital technologies with theoretical reflexivity about the
‘archive’ has encouraged historians to explore the politics of the archiving and later the
digitising process, analysing both its gendered and racially determined nature
 WOMEN'S HISTORY REVIEW @ 1

CONTACT Paula Hamilton @ paula.hamilton@uts.edu.au @ Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of
Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, 2007, Australia © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group particularly
in
post-colonial countries.5 They have approached archives not just as documentary evidence but
as a subject of inquiry in its own right.6
Criticism about the creation of large-scale feminist archives is often focused on an
absence of the traditional feminist role of ‘critique’ or ‘unmasking’. These so called ‘recovery
projects’, they argue, are similar to cataloguing and they herald a ‘post-theoretical age that is
non-interpretive’.7 Feminist commentators themselves, such as Jacqueline Werni- mont on the
literary archives, have cautioned against an uncritical approach to amassing digitised material
on a monumental scale. Most agree that the radical possibilities, or the ‘revolutionary’
potential, of digitisation is through its epistemological implications, the generation of new
feminist knowledges and methodologies and, says Deborah Withers, ‘to examine the
historical grounds on which feminist knowledge claims are (re)produced and secured’.8 In her
new book, Withers (one of the contributors to this Women’s History Review special issue),
argues even more strongly in relation to histories of the women’s movement:
Do
wn Early on in my engagement with feminist archives I learnt a key lesson: that the existence and
loa organisation of materials is one (of course a crucial) part of the political struggle. If the vast ness
de of feminism’s already-there is to be accessed and mobilised, they have to be actively and
d deliberately transmitted ... the technological changes fashioned by digitisation have normatively
by changed societal attitudes towards transmission. 9
[1
87.
65.
23 If one of the primary tasks of feminist history is to create and keep the record of women’s
9.1 movements, then which records should be selected and how do we assess their significance?
04 As feminist law scholars Katherine Biber and Trish Luker note: ‘what counts as a “record”
] at
12: has been subject to interdisciplinary wrangling’ reflecting ‘distinctive disciplinary and
55 intellectual paradigms’.10 Alison Bartlett, Maryanne Dever and Margaret Henderson also
22 make this point as part of their detailed study of the widely dispersed and haphazardly
Au preserved sources for a history of the second wave Australian women’s movement. They chart
gu
st the inherently political process of what is preserved and by whom, particularly in relation to
20 countries where there is a disappointingly dispersed ‘national collection’ such as Australia. 11
17

Just an initial survey of the ‘feminist archive’ in Australia underlines Bartlett, Dever and
Henderson’s concerns. The Jessie Street National Women’s Library set up in 1989 in Sydney
seems to be the only stand-alone collection on women but this is as yet a compara tively small
archive.12 In the respective state libraries there are partial collections on Women’s liberation
activities from 1950 to 1996, and the National Library also features a collection that is
Australia-wide. Most of the Australian work to digitise and collect women’s history comes
from the south of Australia, especially Melbourne and Adelaide, where university-based
feminist historians are very active. The Australian Women’s Archive Project, for example,
was set up in 2000 by the National Foundation for Australian Women and is a joint project
with the School of Historical Studies at University of Melbourne, which makes it available to
researchers via The Australian Women’s Regis- ter. 13 Melbourne University has recently
bought the Germaine Greer papers for three million dollars and there is also a new Women’s
Heritage Centre in Victoria.14
2 P. HAMILTON AND M.SPONGBERG
From the users’ point of view it is now almost a truism that digitising historical sources
provides wider access although, traditionally, most research in women’s history has focused
on Britain, North America and Europe where all forms of grassroots and
 WOMEN'S HISTORY REVIEW @ 3

institutional infrastructure is well developed. As well, the collaborative nature of feminist

projects, has fostered widespread creating and sharing of research, encouraged a focus on
social connection and blurred the distinction between professional (often institutional)
expertise and the vernacular. Nonetheless, ‘access’ is largely dependent on speaking a first-
world language and use of computers and the Internet which many in those countries now
take for granted. Feminist scholars in those locations have also asked whether digital
knowledge reinforces the inequities between the various class and race divides that exist
globally and whether the standard ‘progress narrative’ of feminism histories is still a viable
metanarrative, though open digitised women’s archives have been common from the 1990s. 15
Others claim that the digital realm increases access for those traditionally excluded from more
conventional means of history-making. Megan Fitzmaurice has argued, for example, in the
United States it is a more equitable option to create a National Women’s History
Cybermuseum as an online interactive museum to encourage greater participation from
previously marginalised groups, than it is to build a physical building jostling for space
amongst all the other national buildings representing minorities on the Washington Mall. In
Do this case, not only is the cost of the latter option prohibitive, but many do not have either the
wn
loa means or desire to visit a traditional museum.16
de
d
by Feminism has always been characterised by activism and politics as well as scholarly and
[1 intellectual engagement. Women are harnessing the Internet and blogs, apps and social media
87.
65. campaigns in growing numbers to encourage feminist action and advocacy, as well as inform
23 and educate others. Some have considered these online spaces as ways of representing history
9.1 or engaging with the past in addition to the largely institutionally based archival and other
04
] at projects which feature in this issue. We now see the emergence of participatory archives
12: where—alongside archives professionals and historians—people contribute knowledge or
55 resources, usually in an online environment in an ongoing way, remixing archival material in
22 new contexts and creating possibilities for greater diversity. 17 This is particularly the case with
Au
gu gay, lesbian and transgender histories because these are still marginal to the main cultural
st institutions. There are now many institutional projects that set up archives in the United
20 Kingdom, such as the British Library’s Sisterhood and After Project, which consists of life
17
history interviews with sixty female activists from the 1960s to 1980s, as well as the Hall-
Carpenter archives and Women’s Library (both at the London School of Economics). The
majority of archives, however, still operate as grassroots organisations, such as the Lesbian
Herstory Archives (1972)—which Ann Cvetko- vich argues ‘has an important place in the
Lesbian popular imaginary’18—and Outhistory (2008),19 both in New York.20 A local case in
Sydney, Australia, illustrates this difference: the Gay Pride Group collects oral histories of
activists and is a community not-for-profit organisation which runs alongside and interacts
with the substantial Australian Research Council funded academic oral history project on a
history of lesbians and gay men in Australia which is based at Macquarie University and the
National Library.21

There are certainly inherent tensions between the aims of feminist historians to make
women historically visible and the financial exigencies which enable this to be possible over a
4 P. HAMILTON AND M.SPONGBERG
number of years. The not-for-profit archival projects are usually set up in large institutions
using forms of government resources. In turn, scholars speak of the increasing conflicts
between corporate control of the digital world and these forms of intellectual collaboration,
especially in a climate where cultural and educational institutions are also facing increased
corporatisation.22 In a recent article Anna Reading also writes forcefully
 WOMEN'S HISTORY REVIEW @ 5

about taking account of the political economy of this new cultural form, of how the digital
field produces effects in term of its materiality, consumption and production chains.23

Several scholars have pointed to the paradox of a continued fascination with the mate -
riality of the archive at a time when digitisation massively increases its immateriality and the
mediation process. As Bob Nicholson states in relation to newspapers, the digitised source is
not the same as the material one as ‘we are able to access, read, organise and analyse it in
radical new ways’.24 Much of this now seems like nostalgia, mourning the loss of the intimate
engagement with the actual sources, seeing them in context as objects, such as newspapers,
manuscripts or sets of state generated documents. They often use the sensory nature of that
effect—smelling the sources, feeling the letters, seeing the spots of blood or the tears—to
highlight what has been lost, particularly in relation to small-scale studies of women as our
subjects of research with whom one becomes well acquainted over time, such as biographies.
The sensory response to the ‘real thing’ is regarded as a measure of authenticity. While some
Do have underlined that this is a privileged western response from those who can afford the time
wn and money to travel to and spend time in archives, nonetheless it is one of the important
loa
de consequences of digitisation.25 Engaging with digital archives, on the other hand, says Janine
d Solberg, can produce what she calls a ‘virtual proximity’. Through the use of digital tools like
by finding aids, metadata and search technologies, Solberg was able to find even minute traces of
[1 her subject, Frances Maule and build a ‘critical mass of references’ that gave a much richer
87.
65. picture of her life that would not have been possible in a physical archive. 26 In just such a way
23 Catherine Bishop (in this volume) used similar methods to find businesswomen in colonial
9.1 Sydney for her doctoral thesis.
04
] at
12:
55 As we are living in a time of media transition between paper and digital (and may con-
22 tinue to do so indefinitely), there are currently a multitude of hybrid arrangements to research
Au and write feminist histories. These differing hybrid analogue and digital contexts encourage
gu
st scholars to articulate research methodologies more explicitly in the writing of history and to
20 historicise the different modes of communication. We see from the essays in this volume, for
17 instance, that historians and literary scholars use digital sources to imagine different and
ground breaking histories of women’s experience, even though they present them in
traditional forms such as doctoral theses, book chapters and journal articles. In fact, for most
historical studies of women, the range of sources available and constituted as ‘evidence’ has
vastly expanded as they have been digitised. These might now include court records, trade
directories, insurance records, interviews, probate inventories, household budgets, historical
censuses, population registers, marriage, birth and death registers and migration records. 27
Most of these sources were not available to researchers twenty or thirty years ago in physical
archives or, if they were, it was an impossibly time-consuming task to go through them.

In the last twenty years there has been considerable work stressing the importance of
feminist historians being there in relation to a number of important elements of the digital
revolution and utilising the digital to develop historical sources, manage and publish digital
research. These include: feminist critiques of the architecture of information available on the
6 P. HAMILTON AND M.SPONGBERG
net (particularly in relation to algorithms because they reproduce the traditional problems of
race and gender blindness);28 ensuring general archives have sufficient metadata to facilitate
use in writing feminist histories; pointing to the consequences of institutional decisions about
the politics of digitisation and questions of
 WOMEN'S HISTORY REVIEW @ 7

historical significance; and finally, historians are bringing feminist approaches to cultural
production in these now quite interdisciplinary histories while grasping the possibilities for
creative and critical control over historical research and production whether it is insti-
tutionally based or community initiated.

The essays in this volume address three different strands of feminist history. Firstly there
are those projects that aim to document and interpret the history of women’s political
activism. So Andrea Hajek explores the documentation of the Italian women’s feminist
movement and its digital possibilities, particularly for oral histories. Deborah Withers looks at
issues relating to ephemeral digitised sound archives, such as the Women’s liberation music
collection. Secondly, there are essays by those involved in digitally archiving primary
documents by women. In this section Mary Spongberg, Gina Luria Walker and Koren Whipp
reflect on their project about Mary Hays and female Biography; Stephanie Green explores the
possibilities of a more coherent approach to the Stopes family archives; Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Do and Elizabeth Raisanen examine the digitised Mitford family collection; and Anne Jamison
wn addresses the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. The third and final strand is represented
loa
de by Catherine Bishop, who examines the impact of digitisation on the historical research
d process with women as the subject of research.
by The field of feminist history and its relationship to the digital world is in at a dynamic and
[1 unsettled stage, full of restless questions but nevertheless rich with possibilities. The essays in
87.
65. this volume can be read as signposts for the future. Indeed, just a few of the international
23 conferences held in 2015 in various countries suggest that usual forums for discussion and
9.1 debate are still reflecting on central thorny questions: Can digital humanities sustain a radical
04
] at edge? Does it support feminist research methodologies? Does it engender different
12: epistemologies?29 Watch this space.
55
22
Au Notes
gu
st 1. Francois Hartog (2014) The Present of the Historian, History of the Present, 4(2), pp. 203219,
20 p. 203. See also the Editorial by Sally Alexander & Alun Howkins (201l) Digital Sources, Access
17 and ‘History of a Nation’, History Workshop Journal, 71(1), pp. 1-4, p. 3.
2. See, for example, aggregate sites such as: Women’s Studies: digital archives and collections,
University of Michigan Library: (http://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=282777&p=1884212);
Orlando: women’s writing in the British Isles, from the beginnings to the present (http://
orlando.cambridge.org) had been running for twenty years in 2015. Other pioneering projects
including the Corvey Project at Sheffield Hallam University, founded in 1995 with a grant from
the British Academy, as a group project investigating women’s writing of the romantic era
(http://extra.shu.ac.uk/corvey/ndataset.htm). Its defining aim is to ‘map’ women’s writing using
the unique recourse of the CME (Corvey Microfiche Edition), and to disseminate the findings by
means of digital technology.
3. There has been much discussion and debate about feminist generations. See, e.g., Roxanne
Samer (2014) Revising ‘Re-vision’: documenting 1970s feminisms and the queer potentiality of
digital feminist archives, Ada: a journal of gender, new media and technology, 5, http://
adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-samer/; Kate Eichhorn (2013) The Archival Turn in Feminism:
outrage in order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).
8 P. HAMILTON AND M.SPONGBERG
4. Mussell comprehensively refutes the ‘just tools’ assumptions about these technologies: James
Mussell (2013) Doing and Making History in Digital Practice, in Tony Weller (Ed.) History in
the Digital Age (London: Routledge), pp. 79-94.
5. See, e.g., Ann Laura Stoler (2009) Along the Archival Grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial
common sense (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press); Antoinette Burton (Ed.) (2005)
 WOMEN'S HISTORY REVIEW @ 9
6.
Archive Stories: facts, fictions and the writing of history (Durham NC: Duke University Press);
Nupur Chandhuri, Sherry J. Katz & Marty Elizabeth Perry (Eds) (2010) Contesting Archives:
finding women in the sources (Illinois: University of Illinois Press).
7. See the recent work of literary scholars Maryanne Dever & Linda Morra (2014) Editorial: Lit -
erary Archives, Materiality and the Digital, Archives and Manuscripts, 42(3), pp. 223-226.
8. Jacqueline Wernimont (2013) Whence Feminism? assessing feminist interventions in digital
literary archives, DHQ: digital humanites quarterly, 7(1), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/
dhq/vol/7/1/000156/000156.html
9. Deborah Withers (2015) Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: theory,
practice and cultural heritage (London: Rowan & Littlefield), p 8, original emphasis.
10. Ibid. pp. 6-7.
11. Katherine Biber & Trish Luker (2014) Evidence and the Archive: ethics, aesthetics and
emotion, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 40(1), pp. 1-14.
12. Alison Bartlett, Maryanne Dever & Margaret Henderson (2007) Notes Towards an Archive of
Australian Feminist Activism, Outskirts Online Journal, 16, http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.
edu.au/volumes/volume-16/bartlett. See also Kate Wells (2013) Women’s Digital History Primary
Do Source Collections, Reference Reviews, 27(2), pp. 4-7.
wn
loa 13. See the description of the Jessie Street collection: http://www.nationalwomenslibrary.org/
de archives/
d
by 14. Australian Women’s Archives Project: http://www.nfaw.org/women-s-history/; Australian
[1 Women’s Register: http://www.womenaustralia.info
87. 15. See Clare Wright’s post on the Australian Historical Association site 22 July 2015, https://
65. www.theaha.org.au/; ‘A New Project to Celebrate and Support Victorian Women’s History and
23
9.1 Heritage!, Australia Women’s Register, 23 April 2015, http://www.womenaustralia.
04 info/blog/2015/04/23/a-new-project-to-celebrate-and-support-victorian-womens-history-and-
] at heritage/; ‘Germaine Greer Papers bought by University ofMelbourne for $3m’, The Australian,
12: October 28 2013, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/germaine-greer-papers-
55 bought-by-university-of-melbourne-for-3m/story-e6frgcjx-1226748125383
22
Au 16. See Clare Hemmings (2011) Why Stories Matter: the political grammar of feminist theory
gu (Durham NC: Duke University Press). Deborah Withers, amongst others, also asks if digital
st technologies are creating another kind of western cultural hegemony.
20 17. Megan Irene Fitzmaurice (2014) Re(place)ing Space: privilege and public memory in the
17 National Women’s History Cybermuseum, Feminist Media Studies, 14(3), pp. 520-523.
18. Alexandra Eveleigh (2014) Crowding out the Archivist? locating crowdsourcing within the
broader landscape of participatory archives, in Mia Ridge (Ed.) Crowdsourcing our Cultural
Heritage (Farnham UK: Ashgate), pp. 211-230.
19. Ann Cvetkovich (2003) An Archive ofFeelings: trauma sexuality and lesbian public cultures
(Durham NC: Duke University Press), p. 240.
20. Sisterhood and After: http://www.bl.uk/sisterhood; Lesbian Herstory Archives: http://www.
lesbianherstoryarchives.org/; Outhistory: http://outhistory.org/. The latter is a LGBT archive
founded by Jonathan Ned Katz which is a born digital combined professional histor-
ian/community organisation.
21. There are of course important issues relating to ‘access’ and digital archives, particularly in
relation to oral histories: see Elise Chenier (2015) Privacy Anxieties: ethics versus activism in
archiving lesbian oral history online, Radical History Review, 122, pp. 129-141.
22. Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories: http://www.australianlesbianandgaylifestories.com.
10 P. HAMILTON AND M.SPONGBERG
au/index.php/shareyourstory; Sydney’s Pride History Group: camp.org.au/100-voices
23. Mia Ridge (2013) New Challenges in Digital History: sharing women’s history on Wikipedia,
paper presented at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference, 22-23 March 2013, Albert
M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, Bryn Mawr College, USA:
http://www.miaridge.com/conference-paper-new-challenges-in-digital-
history-sharing-womens-history-on-wikipedia/
24. Anna Reading (2014) Seeing Red: a political economy of digital memory, Media, Culture &
Society, 36(6), pp. 748-760.
 WOMEN'S HISTORY REVIEW @ 11
25.
26. Bob Nicholson (2013) Exploring the Methodological Possibilities of Digital
Newspaper Archives, Media History, 19(1), pp. 59-73, p. 64.
27. The most well known of these is: Carolyn Steedman (2001) Dust: the archive and
cultural history (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Equally poignant is Arlette Farge
(2013 [1989]) The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven: YaleUni-
versity Press).
28. Janine Solbereg (2012) Googling the Archives: digital tools and the practice of
history, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 15(1), pp. 53-76. Kate Eichhorn also uses the term
‘archival proximity’ to refer to the way sources can be juxtaposed for comparison, though this is
not dependent on digitisation but facilitated by it: Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism.
29. Another example is Louise Blake (2015) Chasing Eliza Miles: an archive story,
Lilith: a feminist history journal, 21, pp. 75-89.
30. See Mia Ridge, ‘New Challenges in Digital History’.
31. American Historical Association (2015) Can DH answer our questions? Using
digital humanities to address the concerns of feminist historians?, Session no. 159, 129 th meeting,
4 January 2015, New York; the second annual Women’s History Education conference, 2122
Do May 201, Bryn Mawr College, USA; the Feminism in London conference at the Institute of
wn Education, 25 October 2014, which combined the archival with activism; and the Canadian
loa Digital Diversity conference Writing/Feminism/Culture, 7-9 May 2015, Edmonton, com-
de memorating the Orlando Project’s twentieth anniversary.
d
by
[1 Notes on contributors
87.
65. Paula Hamilton is adjunct Professor of History at the University of Technology where she taught for
23 over twenty years. A cultural historian who has published widely in oral history and memory studies,
9.1 exploring the intersection between personal and public memories, she has also collaborated in a range of
04 historical projects with community groups, museums, heritage agencies and trade unions. Her current
] at research focuses on sensory memories of working in the home as a tool for understanding intimate class
12: and gender relations. Her most recent work (edited with Joy Damousi) is A Cultural History of Sound,
55 Memory and the Senses to be published by Routledge in 2016.
22
Au Mary Spongberg is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology
gu Sydney. She is author of Writing Women’s History Since the Renaissance (Palgrave, 2002), principal
st editor of the Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (Palgrave, 2005) and former editor-in-chief of
20 Australian Women’s Studies. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Empathetic Histories:
17 English women writers and the nation’s past.