Call for Participation:
Networking Early Modern Women

January 23^rd, 2016 - Livestream

Participate

The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (Six Degrees) project, in association with Carnegie Mellon University, the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Digital Humanities Research at Pitt (DHRX), the Digital Media Lab at Pitt, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, invite you to participate in Networking Early Modern Women, a day-long, multi-site event dedicated to incorporating women and their relationships into the social networks of early modern Britain. Taking place both online and in person on Saturday, January 23^rd, the event will begin at 10:30 AM EST with a livestreamed, keynote address from Professor Amanda Herbert, author of Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, a book recently named the best book of 2015 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Participants in this meetup and add-a-thon will learn how to contribute women and their relationships to SixDegreesofFrancisBacon.com before joining with like-minded participants to help enrich our collaborative picture of Britain’s early modern social network.

Goals

Networking Early Modern Women aims to equip participants with the time, training, and motivation to add women and their relationships to the collaborative reconstruction of early modern Britain at SixDegreesOfFrancisBacon.com. We will gather at Carnegie Mellon’s Hunt Library, at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and online (via the Twitter hashtag #NetworkingWomen and Slack) to weave as many women as we can into Six Degrees.

Rationale

Women in 1500-1700 were half the population, and were indispensable nodes in news networks, print networks, food networks, court networks, literary networks, epistolary networks, support networks, and religious networks—in short, all networks. However, women make up only 6% of the corresponding entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). As a result, there are far fewer women than men in Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (885 vs. 12,557). All but 5.5% of the relationships in Six Degrees are male-male. Though we at Six Degrees have been drawing attention to these biases for a while, the urgency is clear: reconstructing the full network of early modern Britain requires concerted action to repair the imbalance in representation of women’s lives and relationships.

Additional Notes:

• Anyone with a confirmed email address from @cmu.edu will be able to create an account on http://NetworkingWomen.slack.com. Others can email sixdegreesfrancisbacon@gmail.com to join.
  
• For those wishing to organize local satellite events or to bring whole classes to one of the Networking Early Modern Women meetups, send an internet domain (e.g. @georgetown.edu) to sixdegreesfrancisbacon@gmail.com and we’ll be sure anyone with a confirmed email address from that domain will be able to join the Slack group.
• Do you already have lists, spreadsheets, or network diagrams you’d like to see incorporated into Six Degrees? Feel free to bring them along.
  

Selected Online Resources (A Growing List): The following resources may be helpful for finding reliable information on early modern women and their relationships.

• Kate Emerson's Tudor Women: http://www.kateemersonhistoricals.com/TudorWomenIndex.htm
• Grove Music Dictionary [subscription required]: http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/browse?type=biography
• Map of Early Modern London https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [subscription required]: http://www.oxforddnb.com/
• Early English Books Online (EEBO) [subscription required]: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home
• Perdita Project: https://web.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/
• State Papers Online [subscription required]
• Using State Papers Online to Research Early Modern Women [pdf]: http://gale.cengage.co.uk/images/SPOWomen.pdf
• Women Writers Online [subscription required]
• Women Writers Online (Metadata): http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/wwo/texts/metadata.index.html

Detailed Schedule

Saturday, January 23rd, 2015
All times EST

Carnegie Mellon University
Hunt Library, Room 1A

• 10:00 Coffee and Pastries available at Maggie Murph's Café.
• 10:30 Welcome - Chris Warren.
• 10:45 Keynote Address - Amanda Herbert. Networking Women: Female Alliances in Early Modern Britain.
• 11:45 Tutorial on Contributing Women and their Relationships to Six Degrees of Francis Bacon - Jessica Otis.
• 12:00 Contribution Sprint & Working Lunch.
• 3:45 Wrap-Up.