BIO

I am from Sarasota, Florida and will be graduating from Florida State University with a major in Political Science and a minor in Women's Studies. This project has allowed me to utilize women's studies topics while also learning more about the research process. This fall, I will be attending law school, where I wish to pursue a legal career in estate planning and real estate.

Tracing Women Pedagogues: Applying “Data Feminism” to a Data Discovery Project

Abstract

Linked Women Pedagogues (LWP) is a data discovery tool that traces the intellectual influence of underrepresented women who taught in rhetorical studies (including its related fields of composition, business writing, oral communication, and community literacy) from the late nineteenth to the middle twentieth centuries, along with their other affiliations and activities, at home and abroad. This project highlights the difficulties of tracing, reflecting many aspects of what D’Ignazio and Klein (2019) call “data feminism,” which is a framework for combatting the hegemonic forces that get repeated and amplified in certain branches of information sciences that privilege certain ways of storing data. These forces can, in turn, diminish the validity and quality of stored data overall.

The search through source texts (e.g., English Journal, course catalogues, etc.) and databases (e.g., WorldCat, VIAF, HathiTrust, SNAC, DBpedia, etc.) for primary, secondary, and tertiary evidence about women who may have written, taught, or administrated in one or more areas of the field reveals clues to these women’s careers. However, much information is either difficult to find or nonexistent – even when broad- reaching databases are utilized. When a pedagogue has a partial record in one or more sources, her comprehensive professional identity, or her connections to other identities or texts, is undiscoverable due to data obstruction. This poster illustrates one workflow for overcoming the limitations, applying data feminist principles to information retrieval so as to inform a research process that makes the relationships between women, their institutions, their texts, and their roles, more visible.

Keywords: Data Feminism, Rhetoric, Linked Women Pedagogues