Mission

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.

Editorial Framework

Many recovery practitioners are new to digital editing and need a simple solution to publish editions and curate data for the long-term. This site is an example of the editorial framework, a customized Jekyll template for GitHub Pages. The framework includes documentation that guides practitioners through selecting an encoding methodand creating well-formed, minimalist editions. When fully operational, the framework will use Datura, a ruby gem created by the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, to transform markdown into other encoding languages when necessary, like TEI.

We are committed to developing projects that will be accessible to a wide audience by following web accessibility standards. All affiliated content will be usable through assistive technology and should be tested with the Web Accessibility Evaluation tool.