Agora.Techno.Phobia.Philia: Gender (and other messy matters), Knowledge Building, and Digital Media

“The degree to which American society has embraced and absorbed computer technologies is astonishing. The degree to which the changes provoked by computers leave prevailing inequalities is troubling.” —Special Issue, “From Hard Drive to Software: Gender, Computers, and Difference, “Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (August 1990—yes, you read the date correctly). In the wake of the sixties, the humanities in general and their standings in particular had suffered, according to some, from being feminized by the messy considerations of gender, race, sexuality, class. For some, humanities computing and digital humanities seemed to offer a space free from all this messiness and a return to “objective” questions of representation. In 2007, asking some obvious, basic questions seems more than in order: Are digital humanities and new media important for feminist cultural, social, and intellectual work? Concomitantly, can feminism enhance and improve the world and work of computer science, of humanities computing, of digital humanities? Questions basic to feminist critical inquiry are certainly worth asking of our digital work: How do items of knowledge, organizations, working groups come into being? Who made them? For what purposes? Whose work is visible, what is happening when only certain actors and associated achievements come into public view? What happens when social order is assumed to be an objective feature of social life (i.e., uninformed by ethnomethodology)? What counts as innovation: why are tools valorized and whose work in their development and in their application is recognized? These and other questions posed by the group will be examined in this collaborative exchange.