2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Digital history methods have revolutionized the way in which historians are able to analyze and display the results of years of historical research. The papers in this panel use a variety digital tools to analyze women’s engagement with books and printed materials, drawing on both gender histories and the field of the history of the book. Karen Nipps’ work on women in the printing trades had resulted in a website displaying nearly 400 years of women’s work in an accessible format. Stephanie Richmond’s project mines the texts of antislavery women’s reports, novels and short stories for connections between antislavery, antiracism and women’s rights in the 1830s. Rachel Snell’s paper uses GIS tools to map the networks of women’s recipe sharing in the mid-nineteenth century. Each of these papers juxtaposes the comfortable form of the print book with the power of digital humanities tools to tease out, display and connect words, people and places held within the texts created and used by women.