Intersections: Feminism, Technology and Digital Humanities

The Digital Humanities are important. They are a mechanism for interrogating and contributing to digital transformation. But just as that transformation has often reproduced or intensified inequalities, so has DH. Through a series of workshops, this project will develop an approach that confronts and challenges these limitations to DH's positive impact on society and culture. Drawing on intersectional feminism, its goal is to build an inclusive and responsive DH able to grapple with complex social needs.

DH responds to digitally driven transformations of society, culture, and knowledge production. It can allow us to research differently, identify what is at stake as we change ourselves and our world. We can respond to contemporary concerns that digital technologies are toxic by exploring new forms the digital could take and by building new understandings of digital possibilities. But to do this successfully, inclusively, and to its full potential, we have to change technological cultures. That means we have to change DH.

In response to these concerns, our network explores feminist thinking as a necessary resource for DH; not an add on but something that needs to be intrinsic. Feminist approaches are needed to shape DH so it can respond to structural inequality beyond its boundaries. DH needs intersectional feminism to develop practices with these inequalities in mind.

Much has already been achieved within DH, but not enough. By building a network of concerned practitioners, we seek to create a DH sensitive to gender issues in the academy and beyond; one that can intervene in the cultural industries, work with communities, respond to new media forms and share new practices.

This matters now and for the future. A sustained engagement with the politics of technology means feminist thinking is well placed to explore questions raised by artificial intelligence, increasingly lively algorithms, and machine learning as they develop. An intersectional feminist framework offers a set of lenses and new models to critique the practices, policies and objects produced by existing and future DH projects.

Our network gathers a diverse range of theorists, practitioners, scholars at all career stages, digital librarians, technicians, artists and archivists to explore how to build a different - and better - technology-gender relation. Our activities cross the following challenge areas:

Coding and Programming Praxis: Data injustice is part of a larger formation including the devaluing of women's labour in tech industries and in the academy. These injustices shape the nature of coded objects and the practices of coding. We will explore these inequalities in Ireland and the UK through critical coding workshops, performance and collaborative writing work.

Intersectional Feminist Theory: Intersectional feminism can conceptualize emerging forms of digital scholarship as new technologies challenge traditional assumptions (of authorship, ownership, mastery, explainability, memory, the archive). We ask what feminist theory is needed today and how we can build it.

Feminist Digital Methods: How do feminist and critical interventions into the digital disrupt hegemonic practices (e.g. community archives, decolonizing projects, coding initiatives)? How do we generate these disruptions and what and how can DH learn from these?

These questions will be explored in a series of 3 workshops, a collaborative writing project and a public talk. We will produce a manifesto to guide DH to more inclusive and critical futures, develop new research projects, and build a community of critical practitioners and scholars.

The network will work to change the culture of DH, to make it more inclusive, and more able to contribute and intervene in societal questions, including those of inclusion and diversity which challenge algorithmic bias, data injustice and ethics. In this way it will impact on the the culture of technology beyond the academy as it works to expose current toxic gendering practices to a wider public audience.

The network will develop interdisciplinary teams including library and collections specialists, artists, and practitioners who will become better equipped to respond to the digital challenges raised in their own milieu around issues including de-colonization, open access, ethics, bias.

The network will have substantial impacts for the local cultures of the partner universities, building the capacity to develop partnerships with cultural and heritage institutions, organisations and practitioners: in Dublin via the relationship with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Digital Repository of Ireland and the Cork LGBT archive; in Sussex via the engagement with multiple creative companies and artists, including Women who Code, The Messy Edge; in Cambridge via the inclusion of collections, digital library, and material culture specialists working on open access and standards issues relevant to the GLAM sector more broadly.

Impacts will also be delivered to via knowledge exchange with the international side of the network. This includes independent artists and cultural social digital organisations; (Olivia Jack, founder of Hydra, creative coding platform (Argentina), Alissa deRubeis (co-founder of the S1 Synth Library and Synth Library Prague, performer, Portland, USA), Sophie Toupin (PhD student, Art History and Communication Studies, McGill, Canada), Dr Frederic Bevilacqua (Head of the Sound Music Movement Interaction research team, IRCAM - Centre Pompidou, Paris, France), Anna Xambó Sedó (founder of the WoNoMute network, Norway).

A crucial objective of the network is to develop a reflective capacity in all members - including practitioners (e.g. artists, archivists, technicians, developers), who will gain new insights in thinking through the ethics of their interactions in working with, and designing, digital tools and technologies.

The network will intervene in public debates around the benefits and toxicity of contemporary digital media cultures and practices. Mainstream discussions on 'feminism' demonstrate an appetite for critical discussions on the impact of technology to the lives of citizens. The network expertise expressed through the manifesto will contribute in informed ways to this important public debate - which also has policy implications.

The long-term societal impact of this network will come through the creation of a DH community which, taking more seriously the challenge and opportunities afforded by engaging with intersectional feminist approaches, is itself transformed and can intervene more effectively around infra-structural issues (collections policies, preservation models, inclusive standards).