POST: De-Silencing History: From Private Papers to Public Data in the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran Project

Zhaleh Nayebossadrian (Sapienza University of Rome) has published “De-Silencing History: From Private Papers to Public Data in the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran Project” on The Digital Orientalist. Nayebossadrian describes the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran (WWQI) and the digital turn in Persian studies, noting that WWQI

represents a landmark project in documenting women’s lives during Iran’s Qajar era (1796-1925). Born from a convergence of “intellectual frustration” with the perceived lack of sources and new “technological possibility” (Najmabadi 2016). It aims to challenge the focus on political history in this field. Nevertheless, it is essential to go beyond mere celebration of digitization. James Dobson (2019) advocates for a “Critical Digital Humanities” approach that questions the methods and assumptions embedded in our tools. We must view WWQI not as a neutral reflection of the past, but as a project that actively shapes the future of the discipline (Ward and Wisnicki 2023). This paper provides a critical introduction to WWQI, assessing its resources, recognizing its technical limitations, and exploring its potential for future research.

Nayebossadrian notes that WWQI not only aggregates materials held in repositories, but also makes items from private family collections available to the broader public. WWQI moved from a private vendor to the Harvard Library’s Digital Repository Service (DRS) in 2012 in order to provide more sustainability to the project, but Nayebossadrian explains that “the platform faces usability and structural challenges.” Another challenge WWQI needs to wrestle with is one of archival silences:

The WWQI is a feminist intervention aimed at addressing the absence of women in traditional historiography. As Jacqueline Wernimont (2013) warns, we must ensure computational tools do not perpetuate patriarchal privileges of authority.

A critical examination reveals inherent biases. The “private family holdings” that form the backbone of the archive belonged primarily literate, urban elites. This risks reinforcing “digital archival silences” (Risam 2019), effectively “de-silences” gender, while amplifying the silence of rural and non-elite women.

Looking to WWQI’s future, Nayebossadrian says that “the archive’s next chapter should shift from passive preservation to active computational engagement” and focus on improving its platform and technical capabilities to convert “the archive’s rich metadata and manuscript contents into machine-readable formats.”