Thinking about the issues of access and presence of a “feminist” archive as proposed by Jacqueline Wernimont led me to thinking about, obviously, what actually counts as feminist scholarship in the digital humanities. The idea of content, though important, is too “murky” to be a primary criterion when looking at feminism within DH. So projects like WWO, though of course laden with content by women, is generative of new ways “to probe women’s literary history”. With this concept in mind, I found New York Public Library’s archive of African American Women Writers of the 19th century (http://digital.nypl.org/schombu/writers_aa19/toc.html). The homepage pictured below advertises a selection of published works; but works by black authors were widely unrecognized and invisible before the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960’s, and even then these works were largely “by and about black men”. This archive seeks to simultaneously acknowledge this history of silence and to put forth materials that can generate new understandings of the lives and thoughts and perspectives of black women in America prior to 1920.
