Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Voices from the Gap: Women Writers and Artists of Color

One of my favorite early projects is the Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers and Artists of Color, originally Voices From the Gaps: Women Writers of Color.

Here is what the website looked like when it launched in 1999:


If you click on the image you will be sent to the internet archive where you can browse the project. Without the internet archive, we would have almost no record of the history of digital humanities. Honestly. Hardly any of the originating projects kept versions or records of their projects, but that's an issue for another post. (in the mean time--keep records and versions of your project. Please!)

Toni McNaron and Carol Miller, both at the University of Minnesota, launched the site as a "collaborative effort between faculty and students" for use in the classroom.  In other words, digital pedagogy and collaborative research is not a new approach in digital humanities, but has been part of our originating story. Laurie Dickinson and Kim Surkan, graduate students in English in 1999, as well as numerous undergraduates including Christina Soderstrom, Manisha Nordine, Peter Clark, Lisa LaRonge, Neda Atanasoski, and Julie Hua worked on the project.

If anyone has any information about these contributors (institutional affiliation, perhaps?) I would like to record this information in the post. Many of the early dh contributors have disappeared from the historical record. I hope that this blog will allow us to create a record of individuals who contributed to this innovative work.

Addendum (the power of twitter!!):

Additional participants in the Voices project.

Mary Rizzo, Rutgers-Newark: Graduate Student outreach coordinator
Sharon Leon: Supported classes that contributed to the project
Sonjia Hyon
Pam Butler

2 comments:

  1. While I was a PhD student in American Studies at the U of MN, I was the Outreach Coordinator for a year for Voices from the Gap, helping to spread the word about the project. There were a few other grad students involved, too. Happy to help if I can!

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