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I am an unabashed motorhead. I love tearing old cars apart, the smell of diesel and gasoline mixed with stale cigarette smoke, and doing “Italian tune-ups” up and down the stretch of freeway by my house. In fact, one of my favorite jobs was at a salvage yard running parts and building cars. The gender roles in this job were stereotypical: female secretary, male mechanics, and a male owner who referenced our wives as the “War Department.” I honestly do not remember interacting with one female customer in the two years I spent at this job. While I love cars, the level of gender-bias, not to mention explicit misogyny, has always been troubling. What is it with dudes and their cars?

Throughout automotive history, women made contributions and actively engaged in mechanical work and auto sports. Yet, the names we remember are all men: Ferdinand Porsche, Karl Benz, Henry Ford. No one seems to remember Karl’s wife who made the first long-distance trip in an automobile and invented the first brake pads and gearing system. Or that Queen Elizabeth was a mechanic in World War 2 [except when Trump claimed it in a speech and was bizarrely correct]. When women are mentioned in the motoring world, the “first woman to” novelty tends to be emphasized over their actual contributions. Or, even worse when it comes to auto racing, results of a Google search of “female racecar drivers” brings up the “hottest” or “most gorgeous” at the top of the list. While Digital Humanities don’t relegate women to cheesecake photos with computers, Sharon M. Leon points out a glaring male-bias perpetuated in the historical narrative of digital history.¹

The history of digital history is dominated by the names of men. Why? Leon blames a gender-biased academic structure, an emphasis on project directors, and a lack of inclusion of public history. Indeed, history departments have long histories of underrepresenting women. Furthermore, salary inequalities make grant funding more difficult for women to be principal investigators. What struck me about Leon’s argument the most was the lack of female citations in academic work. I never noticed this, but it does not take a quantitative assessment to realize it. What was also interesting was how men tended to be the founders of early programs (because of the reasons above) and are the ones remembered for the work, while women did much of the heavy lifting. This is not new in the world of archival technology but there are some bright spots.

My niece, Lindsey Smith Zrull, is the Curator at the Astronomical Photographic Plate Collection, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics which is producing the Digital Access to the Sky Project (DASCH). This project digitizes a century’s-worth of glass slides produced by the Harvard Observatory. These slides were originally taken and categorized by a team of female “computers” working for paltry wages and without much credit [like T.C. Mendenhall’s “ladies”²]. A quick perusal of current scholarship using the DASCH slides shows that Lindsey and others are many times acknowledged for their work. Such acknowledgement of digital history is encouraging and reflects Leon’s call for more transparency of work for women’s contributions to emerge in the field. Another possible reason for men to have dominated the early digital history history could come from the state of computer science in the early 90s.

Recent work by historian of technology Thomas J. Misa claims, “The problem of gender bias in computing today is not to be located in the 1960s sexism but the more recent cultural and social dynamics of the mid-1980s.”³ His research shows the peak for women in the computer sciences happened in the 1980s, and declined since. This work disrupts the narrative that women dominated early software writing and were pushed out in the 1960s by men who were traditionally hardware developers. Misa’s work is interesting because the rise of Digital Humanities seems to coincide with a decrease in female computer scientists. Maybe Misa’s research begs the question: what is up with dudes and their computers?

Granted, digital humanities and computer science are not synonymous. Still, they are connected and early digital history relied heavily on people familiar with the coding side of things. This brings up a criticism I had when reading Susan Hockey’s The History of Humanities Computing . I would argue that much of the acceleration of digital humanities over the last decade or so can be attributed to user accessibility. For example, I did not have to write any code to create this webpage. As more software moved toward plug-and-play, the democracy of the internet opened (for better or for worse.)

1. Leon, Sharon M. (2018). “Complicating a “Great Man” Narrative of Digital History in the United States” In Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities. Eds. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont.
2. Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Professional, 2004. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/.
3. Misa T.J. (2019) Gender Bias in Computing. In: Aspray W. (eds) Historical Studies in Computing, Information, and Society. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/10.1007/978-3-030-18955-6_6

I am taking Digital Humanities in the second semester of the first year of my graduate work in the history department at Michigan State University. Creating an online presence is a component of the course and each week we are to put our thoughts down in a blog post. Although blogging is unchartered territory for me, I always meant to start one. What better incentive than a requirement in a course? Some of us need that little nudge.

So, here is my first blog….Not sure what to say.

Hmmm…I guess I will start with a bit about myself and the digital world.

I am quite selective when it comes to new technology. Some would even call me a bit of a Luddite. I don’t carry a phone and have never owned a smart one. Yet, I sit in front of a computer nearly all the time. I never really liked to talk on the old-school telephone, either. It’s not the tech, but the social interaction. I like talking to people. In person.

I like the feel of old technologies, the click of a typewriter and the  heat of a vacuum tube, the elegance of crank windows in cars and manual transmissions, physically browsing the stacks at the library.  As recently as 2001 I handed in some papers from a typewriter. However, this was because I did not have a computer and could not make it to the computer lab. One of the best professors I ever had, Dr. Redwine at Grand Rapids Community College, wrote “How Quaint” in the margins. I wonder how that would be received now? “How extra”?

Still, I am not opposed to any technologies that would make my life better, and digital humanities is not just about inviting your “tweeps” to the MLA penthouse. What excites me the most about digital humanities (or whatever you want to call it) is , as Rachel Sagner and Anna Tione Levine point to, the “sympathetic research imagination” they foster. I like learning new things and the best way to learn them is from people doing them. The critical mass promoting democratic historical methods is creating a great space for graduate students where we can test out perspectives and others’ subjectivities while streamlining the data behind our own arguments.

I look forward to learning new methods, tools, and perspectives. Mostly, I want to learn how to better organize and retrieve the data I collect for my research. Once it is organized. I also want to make it freely shared. If there is one thing I hate about being a local historian, it is the protective nature many people have when it comes to their sources. Imagine how many interesting primary sources are sitting in people’s homes waiting for that book they are (maybe) going to write.