The following is the script for the ASECS exhibition that Lady’s Museum Project Co-editor Karenza Sutton-Bennett presented on at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) 2022 annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Co-editor Kelly Plante’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
Introduction
In the past ten years, eighteenth-century scholars began focusing on women-penned periodicals after years of favouring male writers and fiction and poetry. Susan Carlile’s biography of Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind (2018) has inspired scholars to dig deeper into the literary works of the author who penned The Female Quixote (1752). However, until recently Lennox’s periodical remained behind the paywalls of libraries, universities, and digital databases. There was no modern edition of Lennox’s The Lady’s Museum (1760-61), despite the significance of the publication in the history of women’s writing and periodicals. For that reason, Kelly and I decided to create an open-access edition to maintain Lennox’s textual authority and supply a basis for adding Lennox’s periodical to the canon of English literature. Our goal is to provide scholars, students, and instructors access to Lennox’s periodical and provide pedagogical tools in a way that is more cost-efficient and more conducive to online, interactive modes of learning than the traditional, printed book.
We thank the Canadian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies for awarding us the 2021 D.W. Smith Eighteenth-Century Research Fellowship, which has funded 15 years for site domain and hosting fees, ensuring the longevity of the site for scholars, professors and non-specialists’ use.
Intersectional theory governing our design
Ladysmuseum.com creates not only the very first critical edition of, but also a learning community around, Charlotte Lennox’s historically and critically important yet long neglected periodical, complete with easy-to-use lesson-plans highlighting the imperialism within the periodical’s pages, especially in the “Lady’s Geography” and “Original Inhabitants of Great Britain” series, and the dominant social structure in which it operated.
In framing our project within intersectionality theory, which, rooted in civic justice, transcends multiple academic disciplines, we strive to: (1) mindful of the feminized labor of digital recovery, use ethical means by which to represent multiply marginalized persons, (2) provide a tool to assist with digital pedagogy that captures the historical, oppressive structures in which these articles and series appeared in the context of British imperialism of the eighteenth century, and (3) through consensus decision making processes and soliciting feedback from our users, create sortable categories and keywords to spotlight system-centered complexities.
Process and practise
This edition builds on Oxford University’s Text Creation Partnership (TCP) transposing of the periodical’s text from the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) editions to contextualize the periodical by categorizing and tagging articles for increased navigability, adding images from this visually stunning publication, and adding footnotes and introductory, contextual and scholarly essays. The site will include sample syllabi for professors with suggested assignments. The Lady’s Museum Project invites students to contribute by annotating articles and publishing critical essays.
The Lady’s Museum Project is being developed and tested in undergraduate classrooms in Canada and the United States. In fall 2021, we gave a site overview and taught a glossing activity using the “Lady’s Geography” articles to upper-year undergraduate classes at Brandeis University and Wayne State University. In March 2022, we taught the site and glossing the Trifler letters at University of Ottawa in Vicki Burke’s undergraduate class on book history. We also taught and glossed the eleven instalments of “The History of Harriot and Sophia” in my first-year fiction and prose course. Through our presentations, we have gained volunteer contributors who will provide support in data mining and site maintenance. It is important for us to have the site inclusive for students to have publishing, editing, and professionalization opportunities – and we think Lennox would agree!
Functionality
We have built the website to be user friendly, giving users several entry points into the periodical. From the homepage users can view the articles by either series or sections. This allows users to zero in on their specific research and pedagogical interests. Alternatively, users can read the periodical in order of printing through the “Enter the Lady’s Museum” tab. The site has a “Teach with this Edition” that lays out 1 to 4 day curriculum options, a suggested course reader, and a listing of suggestive assignments and activities. Under this section, there is also a site bibliography that offers users a list of suggested articles, chapters and books on The Lady’s Museum, Charlotte Lennox, Eighteenth-Century Women’s periodicals, and a list of affiliated DH sites.
Future plans
Our 2022 aim is to increase the usability of the site. In the Teach with this Edition section we want to post 10-minute mini-lectures that can be used to offer historical context to the Lady’s Museum. We also want to offer teachers to build their own course packs and for students to build their own article selection. In the “About this Magazine” section we have a list of critical introductions we would like our growing community to contribute. We are in the process of creating an audio version of the periodical through Librivox, which Brandeis University is generously funding a summer intern for, Phd Candidate and poet Jenny Factor. Our long-term goals are to provide readers side-by-side comparisons of the original text and the modernized edition for undergraduates and nonspecialists alongside an unmodernized edition for specialists before having the site peer-reviewed through Aphra Behn Online then aggregated into Eighteenth-Connect.org by 2024.
Key takeaways
We see this as a highly sustainable, global educational resource. We’re always looking for graduate and undergraduate students from around the globe who are interested in using the site as a professionalization experience by publishing contextual, introductory, or scholarly essays, or teaching through the site, especially through assisting with editorial glossing. We will be looking for fellowship and funding opportunities to enhance the site.
Works Cited
Burnard, Lou. “Project | Process | Product: Feminist Digital Subjectivity in a Shifting Scholarly Field,” in Bodies of Information, University of Minnesota Press, 2018. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/bodies-of-information
Choo, Hae Yeon and Myra Marx Ferree. “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities.” Sociological Theory, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 129-149. https://www.asanet.org/practicing-intersectionality-sociological-research-critical-analysis-inclusions-interactions-and
D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren Klein. “The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves. Principle #6 of Data Feminism is to Consider Context. Data feminism asserts that data are not neutral or objective. They are the products of unequal social relations, and this context is essential for conducting accurate, ethical analysis,” in Data Feminism, MIT Press, 16 March 2020. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/czq9dfs5/release/1
—–. “The Power Chapter. Principle #1 of Data Feminism is to Examine Power. Data feminism begins by analyzing how power operates in the world,” in Data Feminism, MIT Press, 16 March 2020. https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/vi8obxh7/release/4?readingCollection=0cd867ef
Howe, Tonya. “WWABD? Intersectional Futures in Digital History.” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, vol. 7, no. 2, 2017, scholarcommons.usf.edu/abo/vol7/iss2/4. Accessed 10 September 2019.
Losh, Elizabeth, and Jacqueline Wernimont, editors. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities (Debates in the Digital Humanities). University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Kindle file.
Robert, Sarah, and Min Yu. “Intersectionality in Transnational Education Policy Research.” Review of Research in Education, vol. 42, 2018, pp. 93-121. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0091732X18759305?journalCode=rrea