Linked Women Pedagogues (LWP) has its roots in the MetaData Mapping Project (MDMP), first conceptualized in 2010. During the 2011–2012 academic year, MDMP evolved into a theoretical model at Indiana University’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, where Graban surveyed the field of feminist rhetorical studies for like digital tools, participated in symposia on ontology construction and data delivery, queried scholars working in or near institutional archives to assess the project’s need, and mocked up the first wireframe.
In 2012 and 2013, data designer Alli Crandell helped to construct 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 rhetorical studies through the Progressive Era. An initial development phase occurred during Summer 2013, when a fellowship enabled Graban to gather institutional metadata from eight universities in two different regions, study methods for merging data and design, articulate network ecologies, and form an advisory board.
In 2014 and 2015, Graban partnered with Dr. Richard Urban, earning a multidisciplinary support grant from Florida State University’s Council on Research & Creativity that enabled them to conduct empirical research on metadata mindsets and expectations of metadata discovery tools. In January 2016, Dr. Stephen McElroy joined the team, helping to archive MDMP and designing the public-facing site for what is now LWP: The Linked Women Pedagogues Project.
In 2017, the LWP project team began involving volunteers to construct information sets that would inform the project’s architecture, from data discovery to data visualization. In 2020, Marcelina Nagales joined the development team, bringing her much-needed expertise in data visualization and data workflows to the project.
