Project Website: Recovery Hub for American Women Writers

Project Director: Jessica DeSpain

Collaborators: Erin Chambers, Karin Dalziel, Melissa Homestead, Kristen Lillvis, Alice Martin, Emily Rau, Tracy Fernandez Rysavy, Margaret Smith

The Recovery Hub for American Women Writers supports projects recovering the work of women writers by providing digital access to forgotten or neglected texts and/or extending them with network mapping, spatial analysis, multimedia storytelling, innovative contextualization, and the distant reading of massive datasets. The Recovery Hub explores the intersecting relationships between feminist practice, content, and technical specifications with an awareness of the ways that the design and implementation of technology can exclude and objectify people. Though there are notable exceptions, the digital humanities is not often geared in content or design toward addressing, attracting, or educating women or people of color. The Hub is a mechanism for pooled funding bids and offers hands-on consultation to navigate project management, quality control, sustainability, and peer review in order to increase the quantity and quality of recovery projects focused on American women writers. The Hub fosters collaboration, mentorship, and community-building among women working in the digital humanities while seeking feminist and decolonial approaches to the creation, curation, design, sharing, and archiving of digital content.

Funding

  • National Endowment for the Humanities, Digital Humanities Advancement Grant Level II (2023-2024)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities, Digital Humanities Advancement Grant Level I (2020-2022)

Publications

  • Karin Dalziel, Jessica DeSpain, Jina DuVernay, Melissa Homestead, Kristen Lillvis, Kezia Miller, Emily Rau, and Margaret Smith, “The Recovery Hub for American Women Writers: Supporting Feminist Recovery Projects in the Digital Age,” Legacy (forthcoming).
  • Etta Madden & Alyssah Morrison, “Cultivation and Sustainability with Student Collaborators: Anne Hampton Brewster’s Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Letters from Rome, 1869-1870,” Legacy (forthcoming).
  • Joey Takeda & Sydney Lines, “Recovering a Future Artifact: The Winnifred Eaton Archive and a Genealogy of Care,” Legacy(forthcoming).
  • Katrin Horn & Selena Foltinek, “ArchivalGossip.com. A Scholarly Take on Nineteenth-Century Tattle Tales,” Legacy (forthcoming).
  • Margaret K. Smith, “Creating Ethical and Sustainable Collaborations in Digital Recovery,” Legacy (forthcoming).