Categorically Provisional

Abstract

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.