We\u27re Here to Raise the Stakes: Engaging Women\u27s History Through Collaborative Archival Digital Projects

This paper considers the potential of archivist-faculty collaboration to open and build engagement with women’s history-related collections. Collaborative digital scholarship projects built around institutional primary source collections advance course and discipline-specific goals and impart critical lessons about research and knowledge production to students. We share and reflect upon a dynamic digital project carried out in a Fall 2016 Feminist Theory course at Connecticut College, highlighting an accessible approach to archival research and digital methods to produce work that emphasizes academic challenge and values multiple forms of knowledge. Our collaborative approach to developing digital archival projects showcases the type of community of shared interests and values that is fundamental to the digital humanities (Scheinfeldt, “Defining Digital Humanities by its Values,” 2010). This project built upon a three-year collaboration between faculty and archivists to develop project-based learning opportunities in institutional collections. The archivist-faculty team reviewed course learning goals and developed a list of relevant material in the College’s special collections and archives which connected to themes in feminist theory such as women’s leadership, ecofeminism, and racial and disability justice. Students conducted original research in these collections, working to generate new or modify existing Wikipedia content and summarizing their experience in public presentation sat the end of the semester. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of entry points, we propose that digital engagement with archives offers a unique set of openings into women’s history for undergraduate students. The platform of Wikipedia is an accessible point of entry for students to consider questions of evidence, representation, and knowledge creation. While many use Wikipedia as a popular first-stop for information, few understand how this information is created. Through in-class discussions and trainings in the WikiEd Dashboard (a platform for class-based Wikipedia projects), students engaged Wikipedia’s inner workings, tenets, and editing process. As metaliteracy becomes increasingly important, this approach ensures that students understand the historical and political context of Wikipedia and its community. Most importantly for the Feminist Theory course, students participated in a mix of critical feminist theory and practice as they brought their archival research to bear upon Wikipedia’s content. They productively struggled with and considered questions of evidence, knowledge, and representation. Wikipedia’s own problematic overlapping gender and racial imbalance -the lack of women contributors and inattention to women’s history -was presented as a problem that students had the power to address as part of a broader scholar-activist community. Student feedback suggests that alongside the challenge of the assignment and its importance for developing critical research skills, the project’s value was perceived as unusually meaningful because of the real-world implication of students’ work and its accessibility to a broad audience. Their responses align closely with scholars’ arguments that structured opportunities for student interaction with institutional special collections and archives generates deeper engagement and investment in research and its meaning (Tally and Goldenberg 2005). Ultimately, this paper provides an example of dynamically engaging women’s history collections through the Wikipedia platform, from developing questions and executing research to building collaborative relationships between faculty and staff