On March 28, 2025, the University of Turku in Finland hosted the inaugural DIGHT-Net twin lecture dedicated to Gender, Intersectionality, and Inclusion in Digital Cultural Heritage. The first event focused on digital cultural heritage data and its relationships with representation—specifically, who is represented, how, and in what terms. The “Gender, Intersectionality, and Cultural Heritage Data” twin lecture addressed the distorted and imbalanced views—such as misrepresentation or lack of representation across gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and language—often embedded in cultural heritage data. It also sought successful examples of addressing these issues in ways that are sensitive to both diversity and historical context. A total of 29 participants from various institutions in Europe and the US attended the meeting. Petri Paju, Docent of Cultural History at the University of Turku, chaired the event, while Mila Oiva, also Docent of Cultural History at the University of Turku, acted as the online host. You can watch the video recording of the event here.

Marek Tamm, Professor of Cultural History at Tallinn University and the Principal Investigator of the DIGHT-Net project, opened the twin lecture by outlining the main ideas and goals behind the project.

The first speaker, Professor Julia Flanders (Northeastern University) gave a lecture titled Gender as Capta: Representation and Construction of Gender in the Women Writers Project. In her talk, she outlined the long development process of the Women Writers Project and how its understanding of female authorship evolved from the relatively naïve approach of the 1980s to a more nuanced understanding through subsequent steps of the digitising project. The initial project operated under the assumption that ‘woman writers’ constituted a distinct category of their own. However, over time, the project broadened the selection of texts included in the database to consider other marginalised groups, such as women of color. The understanding of what ‘authorship’ entails developed further as the project began to include texts dictated by (often illiterate) women, translated by women (and men, when the original author was a women), and non-English language authors translated into English. The lecture illustrated how working with data can reveal the ‘resistance’ of the data to simplification into neat categories, and how ‘listening’ to the data can indicate ways to circumvent these simplifications. Similar to Johanna Drucker’s well-known work “Data as Capta,” along the project its main categories “woman” and “gender” needed to be explored, analysed, and nuanced further.

The second speaker, Dr. Lani Hanna (University of Amsterdam) laid out a critical view to digitality in her lecture titled Ambivalent data: Critical reflections on digital archives for thinking gender and cultural heritage. In her talk, Hanna addressed the false assumption of the longevity of digital data by referring to the losses of data due to removals by the US government. She argued that relying too much on the preservation of data and being blind to the tools and surrounding assumptions makes digital archives vulnerable to misuse. Hanna pointed out how funding and the political ideology of ‘innovation hubris’ are related to assumptions of tech masculinity, which marginalise all other identities. She argued that when digitising cultural heritage materials, we actually use controversial tools related to problematic contemporaneity and advocated for stopping the use of tools that contribute to constructing a highly troublesome reality.

The conversation following the lectures was vivid and touched upon the ideas of ‘minimal computing’ as a way to counteract the financial and ecological costs of techno-progressivist approaches. The means of digital resistance and the overall need to rethink the economic models surrounding digital culture were also discussed. One important point made during the conversation was that when creating digital interfaces, it is crucial to preserve the users’ awareness that they are using a device constructed with certain assumptions in mind, rather than ‘naturalising’ the user experience to the extent that it masks its constructed nature.

Here are some reading tips given in the zoom event:

DHQ special issue on Project Resiliency (https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/1/index.html)

DHQ special issue on Minimal Computing (https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/index.html)

Reading recommended by the speakers:

Earhart, Amy. “Feminist Digital Humanities”, in James O’Sullivan, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities

Flanders, Julia and Fotis Jannidis, eds. The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-based Resources (Routledge, 2018).

Lewis, Becca. “Rabbit Hole: Creating the Concept of Algorithmic Radicalization.” In Digital Media Metaphors, pp. 90-102. Routledge, 2024.

McElroy, Erin. Silicon Valley Imperialism: techno fantasies and frictions in postsocialist times. Duke University Press, 2024.

Risam, Roopika. “Intersectionality and Digital Humanities, DHQ 9.2 (2015), https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000208/000208.html