CONNECTING WOMEN WRITERS WITH DIGITAL TOOLS

The NEWW DARIAH Working Group (Network of European Women Writers) focuses on how connections between women writers as mediators and transmitters can be made visible to a wider audience through digital tools.

We focus on the circulation of women’s writing (1) to understand how and what ideas and books by women writers became embedded in the cultural field, (2) to demonstrate, measure and analyze the contribution of women writers to European social discourses, Western epistemology, and Western thought.

We are interested in how women, as cultural agents, have built connections between European cultures that can be represented in innovative ways thanks to the possibilities offered by digital tools. This work contributes to the re-thinking of literary canons, from feminist and transnational perspectives.

At a time when the term "digital humanities" is becoming redundant, it is time to reflect on the achievements and promises of digitized materials and digital methods/tools.

Great efforts have been made in recent decades to make the achievements of thousands of women writers across Europe visible and accessible online. Therefore, our starting points are digital collections, databases and digital repositories, such as NEWW-VRE, MEDIATE, RECIRC, KNJIŽENSTVO, PISMA, TEXTS ON THE MOVE.

The study of these tools has raised new questions:

- how can digital approaches generate new knowledge and new research questions related to the history of women writers?

- how can the epistemological status of digital models and visualizations be defined in terms of scholarly evidence and argumentation?

- is it possible to use these tools and methods to confirm known trends in historiography, to reveal what our common sense expected, or to uncover a trend that scholars may have missed?

- how can we reuse digital materials in research, education, and social change processes?

- how are digitized materials altered when used by researchers, teachers, students, translators, artists, and feminist activists?

We invite graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and scholars to present their reflections on the above questions. We welcome contributions that address work in progress or recent research outcomes. The format of the sessions will be a monthly webinar in 2023, encouraging the use of different languages and different modes of translation into English.

Presenters will be invited to propose papers on their projects to the Board of the Working Group in the first half of 2024. The publication of a collection of peer-reviewed papers is planned for the Brill series ‘Women Writers in History’ in 2025. Brill's e- books and e-journals are fully indexed by third-party discovery products and services, including: ProQuest's Summon & Primo, EBSCO Discovery Service, OCLC WorldCat Local, Yewno, Scopus, ATLA.

The webinars will be co-organised with the CEEPUS (Central European Exchange Program for University Studies) network Women Writers in History.

Please, submit your proposal to Amelia Sanz, at Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), amsanz@ucm.es and/ to Katja Mihurko, at University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia) , katja.mihurko.poniz@ung.si.