"Are you sure you know what feminism really is?" Doing feminist digital history in a web exhibit [Berkshire Conference and Digital Humanities Workshop]

“Are you sure you know what feminism really is?” 

Doing feminist digital history in a web exhibit

 

Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution is a free-access, ad-free online historical exhibit that was launched by Clio Visualizing History in November 2015. The exhibit was developed by a team of historians and educators in collaboration with technical advisors, filmmakers, artists and website designers.  It features 46 film clips taken from 27 documentary films, extensive interactive timelines, in-depth essays supported by primary documents, photos, and other resources.

Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution highlights the collective action and individual achievements of women from the 1940s to the present.  In the spirit of 1970s consciousness-raising, the name refers to the “click” moment when women discovered the powerful ideas of contemporary feminism.   The name also refers to the computer keystroke that connects women (and men) to the Internet.  Click! is eminently suitable both for classroom use and browsing by a broad general audience, a dual focus especially well suited to the 2017 Berks theme of collaborative conversations inside and outside the academy.

Lola VanWagenen and Melanie Gustafson will introduce the web exhibit’s main features and share insights gained from the team’s experience creating born-digital feminist history.  Special attention will be given to the challenge of reaching a diverse, multi-generational audience; how to handle the expectations of web users that the exhibit will evolve and change; and the ways in which web exhibits like Click! contribute both to feminist scholarship and ongoing public debates about women, genders and sexualities.