Abstract for the Roundtable

Utilizing Feminist Text Analysis in Historical Imagination and Cultural Narrative

Is history a factual account of the past? How to understand interpretive and narrative frameworks constructed by historians? This presentation explores the potential of a feminist approach of historical imagination, re-enactment, and cultural narratives, challenging the notion of objectivity in history. Drawing from R.G. Collingwood’s seminal book The Idea of History and Joan Wallach Scott’s landmark work Gender and the Politics of History, I examine how feminist perspectives enrich our understanding of the past.

Moving to the realm of text analysis and computational studies, I aim to examine how we reconstruct the past through the discovery and presentation of patterns, trends, themes, and topics, particularly when faced with scanty documentary evidence. Reflecting on the works by scholars like Catherine D’Ignazio, Judith Fetterley, Lauren Klein, and Laura Mandell, I discuss the definition of “evidence” when implementing computational methods for inquiries into women’s history. I consider questions like, what counts as evidence from textual or other forms of historical data? Could distorted understanding occur in constructing the past and how computational methods intensify or mitigate this issue? Should we apply our projection of modern values onto the past when designing computational approaches, or should we avoid doing so?  

  • Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946.
  • D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020.
  • Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
  • Mandell, Laura. “Gender and Cultural Analytics: Finding or Making Stereotypes?” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein. Minnesota: U of Minn Press, 2019.
  • Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
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