2023 British Women Writers Conference: A Plenary, A Roundtable, and a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon

The 31st British Women Writers Conference was held at UVA from Thursday May 25 through Saturday May 27. It was my first in-person BWWC since the pandemic, so I went “all in”. It was also my last conference as the Web and Media Manager (WAMM), a position on the executive board I created and have devoted a lot of energy to since 2013, the year after I co-hosted the annual conference at CU-Boulder with Kelli Towers Jasper and Jill Heydt-Stevenson (faculty advisor). After 10 years of service as the WAMM (2 new websites and various social media accounts later), it was bittersweet, but I am thrilled to confidently hand the role off to Caitlin Anderson, who is going to do amazing work for the BWWA. I am transitioning to a role on the Association Board (you couldn’t keep me away from the BWWA if you beat me with a stick) and will be devoting a lot of professional service time and energy to Romantic Circles Pedagogies as the new co-editor, with Andrew Burkett.

On Thursday, I co-organized a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on women writers (with Alison Booth, Lane Rasberry, Laura Miller, and Sherri Brown). Lane, UVA’s official Wikipedian (School of Data Science), made a fantastic project page for us in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_University_of_Virginia/2023_British_Women_Writers_Conference. This sets us up, additionally, to have edit-a-thons in future years, as well. It was fantastic to see how packed the room was. At the event, we had 22 editors who, on their own laptops, worked on editing existing content or adding new content including new stub articles, references, and images. Here’s a page that tracks all the edits made in our group. To give participants a direction, we asked them to arrive with a person or source in mind they would like to edit or use as a reference, but we also provided lists of names and sources because we all know that when we arrive at a conference, we’re lucky if we remember the right charging cables. Additionally, we provided a handout with some helpful hints as well as a game of BING (instead of BINGO). If you would also like to play Wikipedia BING, here it is: https://bingobaker.com/#6474b6bdc09ac57d. (There is a menu in the lower right corner if you would like others to be able to generate a new card.)

On Saturday morning, I gave a talk on the conference plenary panel titled “Giving It Away: From Private Library to Public Digital Humanities, The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing.” It began: “I want to use my short speaking time to advocate for public digital humanities projects as opportunities to collaborate and share work with one another toward the common goal of recovering and centering writers on the margins, and in this case women writers, where the categories “women” and “writers” are as broad as they can be. The acts of freely and openly sharing research, data, and methods are fundamental feminist praxis that advance the field and bring us together as collaborators in a common project. My talk is my pitch to, as my title says, build it, but then, if you can, give it all away.” After describing The Stainforth project, I gave an example of how the Stainforth works in concert with a community of projects that create a critical conversation that, when in motion, creates recovery. The projects in my example are the Stainforth project, 18thConnect, and the Women’s Print History Project. I used a long poem by Esther Barnes called The Disengaged Fair, published in 1796, as my example of a literary text that wants recovering. My slides are below.

Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of speaking on a roundtable on pedagogy, where the session was titled “Not Very Liberated: Pedagogy and the ‘State of the Field'”. My talk shared my work with SCU colleague Amy Lueck to learn from one another how pedagogical recovery of women writers in theory and practice differs between rhetorical studies and literary history, as we attempt to bridge the divide between these two sub-disciplines within English Studies that are, in our case, right down the hall from one another.