It seems unbelievable to me that just two weeks ago, many of us were sitting together in Bryn Mawr’s Thomas Library for the second Women’s History in the Digital World conference. As the conference organizer, I watched May 21 and 22 rush by in a blur of nametags, registration lists, sign-making (did anyone not get lost in Thomas?), and friends and colleagues, old and new.
With close to 4,000 #WHDigWrld15 tweets to look back on — we’re a prolific bunch, we women’s historians — I’ve since been able to catch up on your conversations from nearly every one of the nineteen concurrent sessions, the keynote address, and the digital showcase. The ideas presented here were in a word, extraordinary.
Photograph by Kate McCann for Bryn Mawr College Communications.
For those of you who attended the 2015 conference, Greenfield Assistant Director Evan McGonagill and I are hoping to use some momentum to look ahead at how we might continue to serve as a venue for supporting research, and we’d be grateful for any feedback you’d like to share. Our conference survey is open for another week–thanks again to those of you who have already shared your thoughts:
- Women’s History in the Digital World 2015 conference survey (open until 6/12/15)
Unable to attend the conference? The video from Claire Bond Potter’s keynote is now available to stream online, and we thank Claire for agreeing to share her talk with a wider audience:
- Women’s History in the Digital World 2015 conference keynote: Claire Bond Potter (The New School), Putting the Humanities in Action: Why We Are All Digital Humanists, and Why That Needs to Be a Feminist Project
Keynote address (May 21, 2015). Photograph by Kate McCann for Bryn Mawr College Communications.
As Claire noted during her talk, we need to discuss our failures just as much as we promote our successes, and here’s one of mine: just last night, with all those wonderful #WHDigWrld15 live-tweets, I managed to crash the Greenfield Center’s Storify account!
Hungry for more? Back in 2013 Michelle Moravec created a Storify for the first conference–still worth a read, along with selected tweets from this year:
- Storify: Women’s History in the Digital World 2015 — check back for updates
- Storify: Every Tweet Under #WHDigWrld 2013
Additionally, as you will see if you click on the keynote video link, we are beginning to update Bryn Mawr’s open access repository with materials from the 2015 conference. We are uploading the abstracts you proposed to us, as promised; if you would like to upload your conference presentation (text and/or slides), and any other materials related to the work you discussed, please send them to us at greenfieldhwe@brynmawr.edu. By sending us your files, the conference archive then becomes fully searchable by keywords and names, giving us another way of preserving some of our conversations. Every month since the 2013 Women’s History in the Digital World conference, we receive data that shows, on average, between 30-60 downloads of presenter resources from this site — the benefit of making your research open.
Other participants and presenters have blogged about the conference:
- Megan Miller, Locating Labor (May 25, 2015)
- Kristin Allukian and Ana Stevenson, The Suffrage Postcard Project (May 26, 2015)
- Stephanie Richmond, Mapping Antislavery Women’s Correspondence (May 26, 2015)
- Ken Wachsberger, Feminist and Lesbian Periodicals in the Digital Age (May 26, 2015)
Do you have thoughts to share on your #WHDigWrld15 experience? Leave a comment below!