Categorically Provisional

Feminist Literary History Balances Commitment to a Different Future, One Better Than the Present with Respect to Gender, with an orientation toward the past, whose ways of knowing it seeks to supersede even as it engages with them. The revision of our cultural past through the lens of gender has, by drawing on past categorizations of authors as female, necessarily invoked problematic paradigms in the service of critique and epistemological change. The relation of the digital humanities (DH) to category work is similarly fraught. I offer here my take on the power and peril of classification based on category making in the pursuit of digital feminist literary history through the Orlando Project, an ongoing experiment in using semantic markup for online scholarship. Orlando is known for its online textbase, published with Cambridge University Press, but the team has produced a number of exploratory interfaces and translations of the material into other forms. Over the course of a quarter century of grappling with “the digital as difference” (Wernimont and Flanders 430) alongside other feminist projects, I have changed my understanding of classification as my collaborators and I have tried to represent the difference that gender analysis makes when undertaken in a computational environment. I here argue that category work, always vexed, always provisional, is crucial to realizing the potential of DH for representing, analyzing, and fostering difference.

女性主义文学史在对一个不同于当下且在性别方面更美好的未来的承诺，与对过去的一种取向之间取得平衡，它在与过去的认知方式接触的同时，也试图超越它们。通过性别视角对我们的文化过去进行修订，借助过去对女性作者的分类，必然会在批判和认识论变革的过程中援引一些有问题的范式。数字人文（DH）与分类工作的关系同样充满问题。在此，我将通过奥兰多项目阐述我对基于分类的分类法在追求数字女性主义文学史过程中的力量和危险的看法，奥兰多项目是一个正在进行的利用语义标记进行在线学术研究的实验。奥兰多因其与剑桥大学出版社合作出版的在线文本库而闻名，但该团队还制作了许多探索性的界面，并将相关材料转化为其他形式。在与其他女性主义项目一起应对“作为差异的数字”（韦尔尼蒙特和弗兰德斯，第430页）的二十五年过程中，随着我和我的合作者试图呈现性别分析在计算环境中所产生的差异，我对分类的理解发生了改变。我在此认为，分类工作虽然总是令人困扰且具有临时性，但对于实现数字人文在呈现、分析和促进差异方面的潜力至关重要。