The Women\u27s Wood Engraving Revival and its Global Impact (1912-1960): Gwen Raverat, Clare Leighton, and Joan Hassall

Using a feminist media historical lens, this dissertation examines three women artist-illustrators who participated in the early twentieth century wood engraving revival in the United Kingdom: Gwen Raverat (1885-1957), Clare Leighton (1898-1989), and Joan Hassall (1906-1988). Little scholarship exists on the wood engraving revival from a feminist media or book history perspective. To fill this gap, I examine the biographies of these women and the books and magazines they illustrated in their historical context, with attention to how their gender impacted their experience. This dissertation finds that women\u27s participation in the wood engraving revival is significant because it afforded opportunities for women to become professional artists through a medium that had previously been controlled by men. They influenced print culture domestically and globally by illustrating political and literary magazines to broaden their visual appeal and by illustrating a variety of fiction that reflected how commercial publishing was being impacted by the Book Beautiful movement. This research further reveals how social networks and institutions played a complex role in the careers of women artist-illustrators in this period, and, as a result, in the development of the book in the twentieth century

Digital Humanities and/as Media Studies

This chapter of The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities addresses how frameworks from intersectional feminist media studies scholarship can be productively applied to address limitations of digital humanities. We argue here that the interconnection between media studies and digital humanities has often existed only on a rhetorical level, and that a deeper engagement with critiques of platforms common to media studies is necessary to continue to expand the scope of scholarship that falls under the term "digital humanities.

Stand with the Banned: Credibility bias and the Fetishization of the "Classic" Banned Books on Etsy

Recent efforts at book banning in the United States’ schools and libraries have produced a number of material iterations of anti-banning sentiment in online retail spaces like Etsy. Most scholarship on banned books comes from an education or library science perspective, with little book or media studies scholarship focused on how banned books are represented in online spaces. In this paper, we examine the top 50 results from searching “banned books” on Etsy to understand how merchandise that engages with the topic visually represents banned books. We find that banned book imagery often ignores more recent banned books, especially those featuring LGBTQ+ characters, in favor of older or more “classic” banned books. We also find that the banned book merchandise under examination here, like other social media reading spaces such as Instagram and BookTube, participates in glorifying the physical book as an object of credibility, despite the role digital reading devices play as both objects of banning and as a means of resistance. The results of our examination show ongoing disconnect between the perceived threat and the realities of book banning, as well as a desire to maintain an aesthetic of the “classic” as under attack

Credibility Bookcases and “Bookiness”: The Gendering of Embodied Texts

Credibility Bookcases and “Bookiness”: The Gendering of Embodied Texts In 2020, the “credibility bookcase” became a “Zoom accessory”: screenshots were judged, and titles scrutinized, with Twitter accounts dedicated to the act of “ranking” said rooms (Hess 2020). This emphasis on the physicality of one’s ownership (and the performance of correct readership) already exists in social media traditions such as the Instagram shelfie but was amplified by the sense of shared physical presence during the pandemic. Such moments are a reminder that the anticipated demise of the physical book (popular in the early decades of the twenty-first century) was overstated, and certainly reading trends show that ebooks and physical books can productively co-exist (Zhang and Kudva 2013). However, the gendering of the physical book has been amplified by the pressures of material performativity: Ian Bogost’s recent Atlantic article on how ebooks lack “bookiness” represents the latest iteration of this debate (Bogost 2021). The gendering of the book, and the associated shame of consumption, reserves “credibility” for books not associated with genres marketed to, and frequently written by, women. We argue that book “embodiment”--the representation of its physicality, or credibility, on social media--is directly tied to embedded cultural affiliations between certain genres and the gender that is traditionally assumed to write and consume those genres. The implications of the relationship between gender, genre, and consumption show that the concept of “bookiness” is inherently tied to hegemonic ideas of masculinity and privilege. Works Cited Bogost, Ian. 2021. “Ebooks Are an Abomination.” The Atlantic. September 14, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/09/why-are-ebooks-so-terrible/620068/. Hess, Amanda. 2020. “The ‘Credibility Bookcase’ Is the Quarantine’s Hottest Accessory.” The New York Times, May 1, 2020, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/arts/quarantine-bookcase-coronavirus.html. Zhang, Yin, and Sonali Kudva. 2013. “Ebooks vs. Print Books: Readers’ Choices and Preferences across Contexts.” Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 50 (1): 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.14505001106

STITCHING THE CURVE: PANDEMIC CRAFT AND FEMINIST DATA VISUALIZATION

Feminist scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the ways “big data” and data representations reinscribe gender and racial inequality, an issue made even more pressing by the role data has taken in our daily lives since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. "Stitching the Curve," a knitted pandemic data visualization project by librarians at the University of Alberta, offers an intersection between digital activism and craftivism, enabling a material, feminist response to an erasure and minimization of collective loss. We examine the media coverage around the project, which includes the online blogs of the project’s participants. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) as a guiding methodology, we consider simultaneously the feminist, activist framing and the influence of material and digital platforms on the cultural influence of the work (Brock 2018). Blogging and knitting are frequently associated with craft and writing as an expression of the domestic and personal, relegated to a feminine and, consequently, minimized space of care and labor. Through a critical technocultural discourse analysis of Stitching the Curve, we understand how the project makes a powerful statement in representing not only the oft-dismissed human cost of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also uses mediums of representation that challenge patriarchal “big data” collection and representational practices. Stitching the Curve makes data visualization a rhetoric of care