BIO

Ella Windlan is a first-year Presidential Scholar from Hudson, Florida, pursuing a dual degree in Editing, Writing, and Media and International Affairs. After working on the Linked Women Pedagogues Project through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and authoring an additional research project centering around predictive policing that she presented at the Florida Undergraduate Research Conference, she hopes to continue pursuing undergraduate research. Some of her research interests include criminology, women's representation, sociology, artificial intelligence, and international relations. Her career goal is to work for the U.S. government as a Foreign Service Officer or for an international human rights organization.

Data Feminism in the Numbers: A Qualitative Analysis of Where Women Pedagogues Are Documented

Abstract

The Linked Women Pedagogues (LWP) Project aims to trace the intellectual influence of underrepresented women in the broad field of rhetorical studies from roughly 1870-1970. The LWP Project works to promote data feminism, a term feminist scholars Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein (2019) define as “a way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought” (D’Ignazio & Klein 8). The LWP project, created by Dr. Graban, documents underrepresented women whose “...intellectual influence is tracked through the migration of people, motives, texts, curriculum, and ephemera—all as reflected in institutional and archival metadata and in the ways that researchers take up or historicize that metadata” (“Linked Women Pedagogues”). Researchers working on the LWP Project keep track of women’s names, roles, affiliations, publications, and archival locations in a “master dataset” that also records which online databases do or do not store information about their careers. To support the LWP Project in this goal, this project conducted a macro-level examination of all the collected data in “master datasets” thus far, calculating the average percentages of LWP women represented in different online datasets such as WorldCat, VIAF, DBpedia, Wikipedia, etc. This project exemplifies why the principles of data feminism are essential for archival metadata research; women are grossly underrepresented. Furthermore, this project concludes that there is a significant need to combat the hegemonic forces that get repeated and amplified in certain branches of information sciences.

Keywords: Data feminism, Rhetoric, Representation, Archives, Metadata