People

Project Creators

Tarez Samra Graban is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University, where she teaches global rhetorics, rhetorical theory, historical methodologies, archival practices, and public discourse. From 2013–2020 she led an interdisciplinary Digital Humanities reading and discussion group for students, faculty, and professionals across campus. Her research interests include redrawing disciplinary boundaries in the face of new and/or emergent digital historical practices. In 2010, Graban began investigating metadata ecologies for feminist recovery work. During 2011-2012, Graban was a faculty fellow at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University, where she consulted with the Digital Libraries Program to develop the  concept for what is now the archived MetaData Mapping Project (MDMP) prototype. She is MDMP's original project creator and author. Contact her at: tgraban@fsu.edu.

Richard J. Urban is a Sr. Program and Engagement Officer for the OCLC Research Library Partnership, with interests in evolving ecologies of data science and metadata, and a background in cultural heritage informatics. He is formerly the Digital Asset Manager and Strategist for the Corning Museum of Glass, and prior to that, an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Studies at The Florida State University. Urban has a range of experience with metadata aggregation projects (Digital Public Library of America, IMLS Digital Collections and Content, and Colorado Digitization Program) with similar technical goals as the MDMP. Urban has participated in digital humanities activities at the University of Illinois, Florida State University, and as instructor at the 2013 Digital Humanities Winter Institute at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). From 2013 to 2014, Urban contributed to MDMP as a Project Advisor, helping to articulate connections between MDMP and emerging Linked Open Data practices. From 2015 to 2017, he partnered with Tarez Graban to create LWP.

Marcelina Nagales is Scientific Applications Specialist with FSU's Research Computing Center. She is also a specialist in Digital Humanities methods and methodologies. Her research interests include digital reconstruction, digital preservation through 3D models of cultural heritage objects, and teaching programming in the context of Digital Humanities. From 2018–2020, Nagales was a Lab Manager for the Morphometrics Lab at FSU and provided technical support for The Demos Center. She joined the LWP Project team in 2020 and is developing workflow protocols and data visualizations. Contact her at mln13@fsu.edu.

Jose Hernandez is the Digital Humanities Specialist at FSU's Research Computing Center since 2022, after finishing a BA in History and a MA in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History from the University of Chicago. He specializes in implementing digital tools, such as machine learning, statistical analyses, and database structuring, and using those tools to answer traditionally humanistic questions. He joined the LWP Project team in 2023. Contact him at jah22q@fsu.edu.

Stephen J. McElroy is currently Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and Director of First-Year Writing at Babson College. His research interests include digital rhetoric, writing centers and multiliteracy centers theory and practice, and assemblage theory in composition. McElroy is a co-founder of the FSU Card Archive, and former Director of the Reading-Writing Center and Digital Studio at The Florida State University, where he taught in the College Composition Program and the Editing, Writing, and Media track. He joined the LWP project from 2015 to 2019 and designed this public-facing website.


Project Advisors

Patricia Sullivan is Professor of English and former Director of the Rhetoric and Composition graduate program at Purdue University, whose research interests involve archival and historical methodologies, and digital historiography. Sullivan has gathered extensive metadata consisting of citational references to women’s pedagogical activities through the Progressive Era and was influential in the earliest conception of this project.

Victor Raskin is Distinguished Professor of English and Linguistics Emeritus at Purdue University with special interests in ontological semantics and computing, as well as Professor of Computer Science, founding chair of the interdepartmental graduate program in Linguistics, and a charter advisory board member on the CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security) project at Purdue University. Raskin specializes in the construction of topic-specific ontologies and was influential in the earliest conception of this project.

Alli Crandell is the Digital Content Coordinator at Coastal Carolina University and part-time independent digital designer. She was one of MDMP’s Project Creators from 2013 to 2014 and achieved the vital task of designing an interface that would accommodate several back-end functions, resulting in the original MDMP site. She has worked with various NSF and IMLS-funded projects, including The Hollins Community Project, PlaceMark and The Lowcountry Foodways Project. Her design and consulting work focuses on creating theoretically-informed and reflexive work plans and digital solutions for academics, artists and para-academics, such as punctum books, smudge studio, Trident Technical College, and the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. In 2014, Crandell stepped away from project development to become a Project Advisor.

Dina M. Kellams is current Director of the Office of Archives and Records Management at Indiana University, with a specialization in archival informatics. Kellams has consulted with Graban on archival management and archival data processing and has opened up various administrative and pedagogical collections housed at IU to help seed the prototype, including the Cecilia Hennel Hendricks Family Papers and the presidents’ correspondence files

Philip C. Bantin is former Director of the Office of University Archives and Records Management at Indiana University, as well as Director of the Archives Specialization and Associate Professor of Information and Library Science at Indiana University. Bantin specializes in archives and museum informatics. Bantin has consulted with Graban on archival management and archival data processing and has opened up various administrative and pedagogical collections housed at IU to help seed the prototype, including the Cecilia Hennel Hendricks Family Papers and the presidents’ correspondence files


About LWP

The high mobility, programmatic shifts, and ethnocentric, raced, institutional or extra-institutional status experienced by women pedagogues over a century of activity (roughly 1890 to 1990) make it challenging to trace the influence they exerted over their institutions and their publics. Whether they taught on campuses or through the Peace Corps, in the United States or abroad, in normal schools or Black literacy programs, evidence of their contributions is often tied to a privileged publication cycle, lies between or outside the bounds of traditional information spaces, or presents too nuanced a combination of factors to be captured in static network visualizations. In the absence of their published or publicly circulating texts, how else can rhetorical historians recover the reach of their pedagogical activity in the interstices of usual spaces? Moreover, what can interstitial recovery teach us about trans/national disciplinary histories and evolving assumptions of what topics and themes are central to their field? The Linked Women Pedagogues Project (LWP) answers both questions by tracing women’s intellectual influence through the migration of people, motives, texts, curriculum, and ephemera—all as reflected in institutional and archival metadata and in the ways that researchers take up or historicize that metadata.

MDMP

The Linked Women Pedagogues project is a continuation of (and departure from) the MetaData Mapping Project, or MDMP ([mid-map]). MDMP began in 2011 as a concept for moving feminist historiography in rhetoric and writing studies beyond digital exhibits and recovery models that favored static locations, figures, and texts—even complex associations among them. From 2012 through 2014, it became the non-working prototype for a digital historical tool that would use crowd-sourcing and data integration in order to trace trans-historically the critical locations of women’s intellectual work in rhetoric and writing studies through the Progressive Era. The archived website for that project can be accessed by clicking here.


News

LWP Featured in RCC Spotlight
During AY 2023-2024, the Linked Women Pedagogues Project is partnering with FSU’s Research Computing Center on its Stage 2 development: designing the project architecture, migrating data sets, and experimenting with visualizations.

 

LWP Works with UROP and Graduate Students
From AY 2020 through AY 2023, the LWP Project has benefited from the excellent contributions of Arin Ahmad, Megan Bettley, Lauryn Klostreich, Emma Valderrama, Morgan Waltimyer, and Ella Windlan, five FSU undergraduates who were selected for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Additionally, in AY 2021–2022, the LWP Project welcomed Ashley Pendleton, a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition, whose research interests include the digital humanities, archival methodologies, and literacy sponsorship.

 

LWP Works with Demos Graduate Fellows
During Summer 2020, the LWP Project welcomes graduate fellows Micheal Healy and Ellie Marvin! During AY 2020-2021, the LWP project team seeks volunteer researchers to gather information sources and compile data sets following simple to use protocols. Contact tgraban@fsu.edu.

 

LWP Joins Demos
In 2018, the Linked Women Pedagogues project officially joins with the Demos Project for Studies in the Data Humanities at FSU. The Demos Project has been awarded a grant from FSU’s Office of Research to help pilot its first year of webinars and faculty fellowship programs.

 

Julia Flanders at FSU
The LWP project team will sponsor Julia Flanders, co-founder of the Women Writers Project, to facilitate a faculty workshop on “Invigorating the Digital Humanities through Metadata Mindsets” at FSU in September 2017.

 

LWP Awarded CRC Support
The Linked Women Pedagogues Project has been awarded a Multidisciplinary Support Program grant from the Council on Research and Creativity at FSU in 2015.