Recovery Hub for American Women Writers

The Recovery Hub for American Women Writers supports projects recovering the work of women writers by providing digital access to forgotten or neglected texts and/or extending them with network mapping, spatial analysis, multimedia storytelling, innovative contextualization, and the distant reading of massive datasets. The Recovery Hub explores the intersecting relationships between feminist practice, content, and technical specifications with an awareness of the ways that the design and implementation of technology can exclude and objectify people. The Hub fosters collaboration, mentorship, and community-building among women working in the digital humanities while seeking feminist and decolonial approaches to the creation, curation, design, sharing, and archiving of digital content.

As director of peer review, I designed and manage the workflow for our peer review and showcase. Adapted from the Reviews in Digital Humanities model, our peer review process consists of two components: the private peer review and the public-facing project showcase. This model blends the genres of peer review and published review, allowing project team members to receive private, actionable feedback while also documenting the labor and intellectual achievements of their projects publicly in a format that is legible across institutional contexts. 

The Hub’s peer review model is grounded in feminist practice. As such, reviews are open in that neither the reviewers nor the project team are anonymous. Open peer review promotes accountability, respectful dialogue, and one-on-one mentorship, in contrast to single-blind or double-blind models that can help to sustain and reinforce exclusionary practices within academia. Open peer review also recognizes the review itself as a form of academic labor and ensures attribution for the reviewers as well as members of the project team.