A new article from Tanya Clement (UT Austin) is included in a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (Vol 9, No 2 – now available as a preview) “Feminisms in Digital Humanities,” edited by Jacqueline Wernimont (Arizona State University).
“An Information Science Question in DH Feminism” considers how “feminist inquiry can help us articulate and better understand the epistemologies in digital humanities and information science that are shaping the infrastructures we are building and using in the humanities.”
The full abstract is reproduced below:
In 1986, Susan Harding published The Science Question in Feminism in which she suggests that feminism had moved past questioning “‘What is to be done about the situation of women in science?'” – or first-wave feminist initiatives — to include more women in the work of science. Aspects of the “science question” that consider the politics underlying epistemologies of “purportedly value-neutral claims and practices” [Harding 1986, 23] resonate for the work (the research, theory, and practices) being done to build information infrastructure in the humanities today — the work that I am defining here as digital humanities work. Reconsidering this work by using the lens of feminist inquiry to understand the concerns common to information science and digital humanities is the perspective I describe here. Specifically, as my title suggests, I am proposing that feminist inquiry can help us articulate and better understand the epistemologies in digital humanities and information science that are shaping the infrastructures we are building and using in the humanities.
