In “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” published in 1984, Audre Lorde identified a schism in feminism that completely changed the movement to include missing voices, those voices that did not align themselves with patriarchal control, voices that refused to work within the system to gain power. We find ourselves at another crossroad today concerning, again, feminism and our digital selves. Big data, funding agencies, even institutions of higher education have ignored growing silences in our archives, those records of important cultural and historical moments. They’ve forgotten that there are voices being buried and unheard and that these are the voices of women, both past and present. In my work and as my pedagogical self, my students use digital technologies to unearth women’s voices in literary studies. Their sense of discovery, screwing around, adventure, detective work gives them some ownership over the materials and mediates their lives on a daily basis. But where are all of the feminists after doing this work? Why are we not translating this sense of discovery and power into the current instantiations of digital selves?
Katherine D. Harris, a tenured professor of English at San Jose State University, teaches courses in Romantic-Era and Nineteenth-Century British literature, women’s authorship, the literary annual, textuality and digital humanities. Many of these issues are addressed in journal articles and chapters in edited collections, including Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, The Poetess Archive Journal, and Journal of Victorian Culture. She edits an online resource for the study of literary annuals, The Forget Me Not: A Hypertextual Archive (http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/FMN/Index.htm ) which will also become part of a comprehensive literary history of British annuals currently in progress. Dr. Harris’ most current work involves the short story, the Gothic tradition and the literary annual. An edited collection of Gothic short stories from the annuals is forthcoming in 2012 with Zittaw Press. Of late, Harris has been engaged in bringing Digital Pedagogy to the larger field of Digital Humanities and engaging her students in this exciting new work.