Linked Women Pedagogues Project
Tarez Samra Graban
A data-discovery tool for tracing the intellectual influence of historically itinerant scholars and practitioners in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
Overview
Linked Women Pedagogues is a data discovery tool that seeks to recover invisible or less visible networks of intellectual influence by underrepresented women in one particular field in higher education—rhetorical studies—over a century of activity. It contends with the inherent bias in existing data tools by moving feminist historical inquiry towards a model of locatability: a flexible ecology that describes how histories of underrepresented women pedagogues in America get written as a result of historians’ interventions with them.
Context
The formal teaching and administration of written and oral literacies in the modern-day university (established between the 1870s and 1890s) have historically been central to the racial and social formation of American culture (and beyond), and much of this teaching was conducted by women and women of color around the turn of the twentieth century, some of whom were the first female recipients of doctoral degrees in fledgling rhetoric programs, and some of whom spread the discipline abroad. Yet many of these scholars and practitioners of written and oral communication were historically itinerant, occupying more than one place in the university, and thus not comprehensively associated with any single place. As well, much bibliographic and archival data still is marked for gender, and in normative ways or by following normative assumptions. This combination of factors makes it increasingly difficult to trace their influence using any single data tool. I conceptualized LWP in response to this problem by investigating more flexible metadata ecologies for doing 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. My interest was in moving digital historiography beyond exhibits and recovery models that favored static locations, figures, texts, and archives. Since then, I have partnered with Alli Crandell (2012–2013), Dr. Richard Urban (2014–2016), Dr. Stephen McElroy (2016), and most recently, Marcelina Nagales (2020). Beginning in 2020, the LWP project team has benefited from the contributions of student volunteers to construct information sets that will inform the project’s architecture, from data discovery to data visualization.