New Collection in DRI – Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is pleased to announce that a new collection – Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities – has been published in the Repository through the Irish Qualitative Data Archive.

Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities was a two year project jointly funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) and the Irish Research Council and is part of their UK-Ireland Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research Grants Call. The project was born out of the IFTe network and continues the work and research of that network.

Full Stack Feminism seeks to apply and rethink a feminist praxis throughout the ‘full stack’ (to include a feminist ethics of care, FAIR CARE principles, feminist epistemologies, decoding existing epistemologies) – leading to an overall intervention in the creation of more inclusive digital cultural heritage in digital humanities.

About the project

In 2022-23 Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities carried out a series of semi-structured community engagement interviews. Nineteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with intersectional feminist digital scholars, community archivists, artists, game designers, creative coders, fem-tech practitioners and performers.

Sixteen of these interviews have been ingested into the Repository with fifteen non-anonymised and one anonymised. The study was concerned with working with communities to identify the ways that digital tools and platforms can be exclusionary on the basis of intersecting identities. The goal was to embed intersectional feminist thinking and practices within and across the broad discipline of digital humanities. Across the two-year project Full Stack Feminism collaborated with artists, communities, coders, archivists and scholars, to develop digital objects, interfaces, archives and tools to amplify marginalised voices and to help navigate the biases and stereotypes that those working in digital spaces encounter.

Examples of interviews

Full Stack Feminism interviewed Winnie Soon, an academic, programmer and artist interested in the cultural implications of digital infrastructure that addresses wider power asymmetries, and Mara Karagianni, artist, programmer, independent researcher and system administrator.

Topics in the interview included the motivations behind their work and the importance of decentralised digital infrastructure and open source software for minoritised communities, thinking about what it means to queer programming languages and adopt a critical approach to coding.

Further discussions included breaking down barriers between academia, programming/hacking and digital art/media through the Queering Bash initiative – and some of the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration in this area, as well as the role of art as critical intervention in software development and as a tool for engagement with technology.

Of this collection, Dr. Jeneen Naji (Maynooth) said:

“It is exciting see the interviews conducted as part of the collaborative UK/Ireland funded Full Stack Feminism project now available on the DRI for other stakeholders and researchers to access so that we may all work towards making our digital landscapes fairer.”

DRI Director Dr. Lisa Griffith said:

“We are delighted to see the ingest of collections from Full Stack Feminism in the Repository. The value of this project in developing an intersectional feminist framework for digital arts and humanities practice and research will long have impact for the sector.

We look forward to stewarding more additions from Full Stack Feminism in the future – ensuring this research will be safely digitally preserved for the long-term.”

The Full Stack Feminism collection can now be viewed in full in the Repository.

DRI are delighted to include this valuable collection from IQDA in the Repository. Other collections in the Repository include: Reconstituting the Irish Family (RIFNET) collection of objects and associated interviews on the LGBTQ+ family experience in Ireland, Artistic Doctorate Resources, and Voices of the Irish Women’s Movement: Second wave feminism in Ireland collections.

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