As a data-discovery tool, LWP identifies critical locations by considering ongoing interactions between where pedagogical activities have been performed or experienced, and where historians’ ideas of women’s pedagogical activities are documented or formed—in other words, where archival evidence intersects with historical motive and memory. This tool is unique in that it understands women’s critical locations to include historians’ own mobile affiliations and motives for seeking them out. It also reflects the ways in which their metadata movements reveal or conceal topical shifts over time. Finally, it reflects how systemic or built-in bias can influence broad-scale information searching.
In these things, LWP responds to a call re-examine the historian’s role in writing history, combining historical approaches that are textual, ambient, pan-historical, and cross-cultural, ultimately enabling historians to construct new topographies that reflect their beliefs about what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is made, and how it circulates. Thus, LWP hopes to develop a participatory data-modeling process that enables reflection on how disciplinary histories can be written at Internet-scale, and how multidisciplinary alliances can be formed between faculty in the humanities and faculty in information studies.
