Sorting things in: Feminist knowledge representation and changing modes of scholarly production

Abstract

Synopsis A feminist web-based research initiative must make electronic publication an integral part of the research design. We are at a critical juncture in the production of scholarly tools in electronic form, as we move from the production of archives that seek to reproduce existing collections of primary material towards more mediated contextual materials, such as the newly published Orlando: Writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present or the proposal for fusing primary and secondary materials in the projected Feminisms and Print Culture, 1830–1930 project. This discussion takes the Orlando Project as an example of what can be gained by the customized application of semantic markup language to originally digital materials in order to address some crucial issues raised by large-scale humanities computing work. Feminist scholars must participate in the highly politicized processes of knowledge organization to have a shaping impact on humanities research and dissemination, and this shift in our mode of production has major impacts on what scholarly work involves, how it is resourced, how it is conducted and by whom, and how it is credited.