An Archive of Unnamed Women

This feminist remix workshop recovers photographs of unidentified women in digital collections to facilitate a critical discussion about how and why these images have been shifted to the background of the archive through algorithms and gendered power relations writ large.

This feminist remix workshop recovers photographs of unidentified women in digital collections to facilitate a critical discussion about archival practices.

Visitors who search An Archive of Unnamed Women are presented with their photographs and, upon clicking for more information, a juxtaposed description drawn from a parallel collection of women’s writing about women.

 

The digital portion of the project is an online archive juxtaposing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature about women with photographs of unnamed or unidentified American women found...

 

...in the collections of the New York Public Library, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

 

As its physical centerpiece, the workshop includes a handmade quilt, fit with a pocket for a digital screen.

 

As guests sign our guest book...

 

...their hand-written names appear in the center of our quilt.


The quilt becomes an archive of named participants.

 

On the website, visitors who recognize an unnamed women can submit information that we forward to the collection holding the photograph.


The photographs that comprise An Archive of Unnamed Women will be deleted as a result of the recovery work enacted by named participants.

 

Launch Project

link Explore An Archive of Unnamed Women

 

Credits

This project was conceived by xtine burrough and Sabrina Starnaman. UT Dallas Arts & Humanities student Alyssa Yates led archival studies and quilt-making.


Full stack web developer Al Madireddy, a UT Dallas Computer Science and Engineering student, developed the back-end programming.


xtine and Sabrina have presented this workshop in classrooms and at conferences such as Digital Humanities and the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.


Contact us for more information: xtineburrough [at] gmail [dot] com and sabrinastarnaman [at] gmail [dot] com.