Pioneers and Feminisms

Feminist historiography is rife with debates about the nature and boundaries of women’s movements. Arguments over who to call an activist or a feminist sit at the heart of these definitional debates, which provide the groundwork for how scholars understand contemporary feminisms. Given the heated nature of ongoing disputes over the complicated identity politics of feminism and its archives, it is surprising that scholars have afforded so little attention to the technical infrastructure that defines and provides access to digitized primary source material, which is increasingly the foundation for contemporary historical research. Metadata plays an outsized role in these definitions, especially for photographic material that cannot be made word-searchable but is favored by digitizers because of its popularity. This article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how two digital archives define the Swedish suffrage movement - a historically contested concept, here understood through the theory of Susan Leigh Star as a “boundary object” subject to “interpretive flexibility”. The study uses keywords attached to photographic material from the the National Resource Library for Gender Studies (KvinnSam) and metadata within the related Swedish Women’s Biographical Lexicon platform for women’s biographies. The findings indicate that the hierarchies of archival organization do not disappear with individual document digitization and description. Instead, the silences built into physical archives are redefined in digital collections, obscuring the tensions between individual and movement feminisms, as well as the contested nature of movement boundaries.

Paradata in Documentation Standards and Recommendations for Digital Archaeological Visualisations

Digitalisation of research data and massive efforts to make it findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable has revealed that in addition to an eventual lack of description of the data itself (metadata), data reuse is often obstructed by the lack of information about the datamaking and interpretation (i.e. paradata). In search of the extent and composition of categories for describing processes, this article reviews a selection of standards and recommendations frequently referred to as useful for documenting archaeological visualisations. It provides insight into 1) how current standards can be employed to document provenance and processing history (i.e. paradata), and 2) what aspects of the processing history can be made transparent using current standards and which aspects are pushed back or hidden. The findings show that processes are often either completely absent or only partially addressed in the standards. However, instead of criticising standards for bias and omissions as if a perfect description of everything would be attainable, the findings point to the need for a comprehensive consideration of the space a standard is operating in (e.g. national heritage administration or international harmonisation of data). When a standard is used in a specific space it makes particular processes, methods, or tools transparent. Given these premises, if the standard helps to document what needs to be documented (e.g. paradata), and if it provides a type of transparency required in a certain space, it is reasonable to deem the standard good enough for that purpose.

Histories of Technology Culture Manifestos

Taking impetus from a collaborative conversation about writing a feminist repair manifesto, this article is focused on examining radical feminist manifestos, new technology manifestos, and their intersecting themes and influence upon cyberfeminist manifestos. Its theoretical underpinnings include histories of repair and maintenance and the manifesto as technological form. As a practice, repair and theorisations of repair regarding technology take into account invisible labour and create a relationship of care not only within communities, but in relation to everyday technologies. Since this work to write a feminist fixers’ manifesto was inspired by the iFixit Repair Manifesto, the NYC Fixers Collective manifesto, as well as manifestos from radical feminist technology movements, it seemed appropriate to consider and critically engage the function of manifestos in these various maker and digital technology communities, as well as the history of radical feminist manifestos in response to cultural oppression. By looking more deeply at specific historical instances and their function, I aim to uncover the importance of such artefacts to give voice to alternative narratives and practices, to subvert systemic oppressions while at other times reproducing them in their form. I argue that there is power in iterating and proliferating manifestos with a critical stance and work to establish the knowledge-producing and world-making potentials of manifesto writing.

Craft and Artisan Initiatives of the Salvadoran Civil War (1980–1992)

This article describes the testimonies of two arts and crafts collectives during the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s. These collectives, open to victims and refugees of the war, emerged as creative spaces during a time of significant social unrest. As participants learned to make and produce arts and crafts, these activities encouraged individual expression and allowed them to heal traumatic experiences. By describing the aspects that motivated and discouraged the involvement of participants over time, we show how the individual and collective aspects of making are important for the sustained participation of the people who engage in maker culture. We draw comparisons between the struggles of these historical movements and of current embodiments of the maker culture, in order to draw conclusions regarding how making can be a personal catalyst in the face of social hardship, the importance of economic sustainability in maker initiatives and how unjust gender dynamics take place in these spaces. The ability to compare and learn from these historical initiatives serves to unpack maker culture as a social asset that can be described beyond the mere use of digital tools and to repurpose it as a more inclusive concept that takes into account narratives from a broader range of expressions of making.

“What You Can Invent over the Weekend” and the Recurring History of Corporate DIY

At the emergence of the contemporary American maker movement, O’Reilly’s Make: magazine positioned making as a method of innovation beyond the system of industrial research and development. These narratives emphasised the value of hands-on, material engagement for inspiring novel ideas and building inventive minds. This Do-It- Yourself (DIY) spirit was positioned as inherently oppositional to the corporate groupthink of “do as you’re told”. Today, dominant public discourses tend to emphasise the power of digital fabrication tools - collapsing much of the innovative potential of the maker movement into a single set of material practices and thus limiting the analytic field of making research. In this “Entering the Field” format article, I explore two maker texts: early issues of Make: magazine (published between 2005 and 2007) and a collection of pamphlets produced by the General Motors Information Rack Service throughout the 1950s. These pamphlets were distributed for free in order to inspire and advance General Motors (GM) employees. Through connecting these collections, I both extend and complicate an industrial history of making as a source of innovation. I argue that, more than any particular set of tools, it is DIY practice that defines the core of Make: magazine’s vision of making. However, as the pamphlets at GM illuminate, these practices are never fully outside of industries that benefit from the betterment of makers. Taken together, these stories reveal DIY as alternately challenging and contributing to corporate logics - a cyclical process that yields a current cultural moment in which makerspaces are installed in the ground floor of offices at Google, Facebook and, unsurprisingly, GM.