Project Evolution
Critical Locations
Migration Paradigm
Outcomes
Women’s archival representation in rhetorical studies has been flattened by the incremental circulation of their texts, projecting significant gaps in both academic and public canons from this era. Sometimes these gaps are caused by digitized university collections that represent too closely the interests of their donors. At other times, women faculty held contingent, untenured, or extra-institutional positions, making it harder to locate them in traditional venues such as conference programs, published textbooks, or faculty course lists. In response, Linked Women Pedagogues moves feminist historical inquiry towards a model of locatability: a flexible ecology that describes how histories get written as a result of historians’ interventions with them.
LWP was first conceptualized in 2010 when Tarez Graban started investigating metadata ecologies for feminist recovery work. Ideally, these metadata ecologies would both revive the intellectual influence of underrepresented women and women of color and illuminate how historians’ queries affected their ability to locate that influence. Graban’s interest was in moving digital historiography beyond exhibits and recovery models that favored static locations, figures, and texts—even complex associations among them.
Static network visualization and temporal modeling alone aren’t sufficient for capturing the complex, often contradictory, evidence of pedagogues’ careers. Once visualized, these ecologies will demonstrate pedagogues’ careers as multi-linear projections, highlight intricate relationships between perceived importance and projected time, and demonstrate how certain events in a pedagogue’s career can gain or lose weight according to how they are called up through LOD sources or how much attention they are assigned as social and intellectual constructs in the activities of researchers who seek them out.
The question of how we chart feminist historiography seems fundamentally a question of how we chart the migration of intellectual capital, and in turn how we believe or assume this capital can shift or be moved. As a data-discovery tool, LWP joins several other digital projects that emphasize movement as a key historical methodology, although its movement paradigms are not guided exclusively by the circulation patterns of objects, but by references or ephemera. Specifically, LWP strives to present a migration paradigm that is guided by unprocessed, partially processed, or digitally obscure sources, rather than by the systematic circulation of published texts.
LWP’s development has already yielded several outcomes, but in its final form it will preserve, analyze, visualize, and make historiographic data accessible, leaving greater possibilities up to the interpretation of its users.
