The following is the script for the ASECS roundtable that Lady’s Museum Project Co-editor Kelly Plante presented on at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) 2022 annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Co-editor Karenza Sutton Bennett’s presentation on the other Digital Humanities Caucus session is accessible here. Mattie Burkert (University of Oregon) facilitated the discussion for this ASECS Digital Humanities Caucus Roundtable. For more information, please see the ASECS 2022 program. Only our project’s responses, and not those of the other roundtable respondents, are provided herein.
Blending Group-, Process-, and System-Centered Intersectional Approaches to Center Marginalized Voices in the Lady’s Museum Project
MB: To start out, please talk a bit about the content of your project. Which marginalized voices from the long eighteenth century are you working to center, and how?
KP: Charlotte Lennox’s voice, the editor/author of Scottish and Irish descent of the Lady’s Museum, has long been marginalized as a woman author, known primarily for The Female Quixote as an influencer of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and ignored as a periodical writer–who, other than Addison, Steele, and Johnson have long been marginalized in literary studies–so through Lennox’s expensively illustrated and engaging magazine, we are centering the voices of women writers of literary nonfiction incl people who wrote-in letters to the editor. By using an intersectional feminist framework to center pedagogy, contextual essays, and editorial glosses that spotlight British imperialism, we are centering marginalized subjects within the magazine, specifically those subjects in the “Lady’s Geography” series on (Amboyna) Ambon Island in Indonesia and (Ceylon) Sri Lanka and in India through the translated romance The History of the Princess Padmani. Through students’ editorial glossing, narrating for an audiobook edition on LibriVox, and writing about such articles–which we have done in classrooms at Wayne State, Brandeis, and University of Ottawa–students can conduct hands-on research and editorial work into imperialism and colonialism. In sum, we are uniting in one site a scholarly and social, teaching edition because it is important to encourage both teaching and scholarship to occur in an intersectional methodology.
MB: My sense is that there are two major schools of thought on this kind of work, each of which has its own ethics and commitments. On the one hand, there are recovery efforts that aim to restore historical actors’ voices and emphasize the forms of agency they claimed in systems that were not designed for them. On the other, there are those that seek to make visible the violence and inequity these actors faced, and to bear witness to the irreparable loss of their words and experiences from the archives. How would you position your own work with respect to these different approaches or on the spectrum that falls in between?
KP: It has long appeared that the journalism system was not designed for women editors due to the canon’s bias toward men. We recover Lennox not just as an Austen influencer and thus of so-called writing aka fiction. Intersectionality renders transparent multiple systems of domination in three ways: at the individual level through representation and also at the micro (process-) and macro (system-) level of the dominant social structure at that time. Spotlighting imperialism through the proto-feminist Lady’s Museum sparks scholarly and classroom conversations about how power circulated in this eighteenth-century context, this positionality.
MB: Why is it significant that this work is done in an electronic medium and format? What possibilities does the digital open up for your project in particular? More broadly, what do you see as the promise of DH for reparative work in eighteenth-century studies? What problems, pitfalls, or challenges come with doing this kind of scholarship in digital form?
KP: The Lady’s Museum is non-linear, enabling readers to navigate in the order initially published, or to read through, say, all the “Lady’s Geography” installments together, or to read by genre, or only the excerpted sections identified for the course reader designed by Karenza and Susan Carlile under the themes of women’s education and imperialism. We prioritize accessibility for visual and audio learners. We center the voices of students, teachers and volunteers who will participate in our “Lady’s LibriVox” project to record the entire Lady’s Museum contents. We have a volunteer graduate student intern funded by Brandeis, and an undergraduate student from Brazil has reached out to us to publish an article and from Victoria Burke’s book history class, which we guest-taught at this week. And we model this praxis by participating in this initiative as co-editors. This shows DH’s promise for meeting students where they are in an open access, social edition that does not privilege text over audio, and which centers multiple active teaching and learning modes.
MB: How do issues of equity come into the development process itself, especially on teams where members bring different knowledges, experiences, and identities to bear on the work? How do power differentials – i.e. between instructors and students, faculty and staff, or the university and community partners – impact this work? What measures have you and/or your collaborators taken to surface and address inequities and power imbalances?
KP: We divide our labor and share decision-making, ever-cognizant that the so-called scholarly part of digital scholarship is often ideas-generation and the technical execution tends to be less-valued labor. Individuals and teams who contribute receive recognition on the website for their CV. We privilege pedagogical materials that enable teachers and students to learn together, through teamwork. Collaborative assignments empower students through professionalization experiences. They work together as writers, editors, audiobook narrators, project managers, and ideally, we have fun.
MB: In your experience, how do infrastructural or institutional inequities around DH work complicate attempts to use digital methods to center marginalized voices? Are there resonances between the histories that your project surfaces and the present-day conditions in which you do this work?
KP: Karenza and I are both graduate students. In other DH projects I have participated in at my university, the university has its own WordPress sites that it made sense to use due to an established professor on our team, so funding and maintenance were non-issues. But for the Lady’s Museum Project, we won’t be at our institutions to maintain the site after we finish our PhDs. So for longevity and sustainability, we were able to attain the funding through CSECS for 15 years of domain and hosting fees. WordPress is an easy interface for non-DH specialists to understand and learn. The project is an inclusive learning community that destabilizes the power dynamics of student/teacher, editor/author–it’s an updated version of Lennox’s radical-at-that-time philosophy of a women-inclusive, global education system that shines through in the Lady’s Museum.