Feminist Search Tools

Feminist Search Tools is an ongoing artistic research project that explores different ways of engaging with the items of digital library catalogues and their systems of categorization. The project attempts to stir conversations around the inclusion and exclusion mechanisms that are inherent to current Western knowledge economies. The project is part of a long-term collaboration between the two collectives Read-in and Hackers & Designers. The Feminist Search Tools work group consists of: Read-in (Annette Krauss, Svenja Engels, Laura Pardo), Hackers & Designers, (Anja Groten, André Fincato, Heerko van der Kooij, and and previous member James Bryan Graves), Ola Hassanain, Angeliki Diakrousi and Alice Strete.
[text from the website]

A feminist perspective on data science: The Feminist Search Tool

This essay is a reflection on the development of a feminist search tool and my involvement in its technical and conceptual aspects. It refers to the notion of feminist critical computing in public infrastructures and specifically digital libraries. It brings to light the frictions between the technical aspects of a digital infrastructure and the societal issues it comes to address(...)

Intersectional Search in Queer and Trans Archives

Repository of Feminist Search Strategies

H&D and Read-in host a workshop together with Alice Strete and Angeliki Diakrousi – recent graduates of XPUB about feminist strategies to searching in library catalogs and digital archives. Join us in this work session if you want to learn and exchange about the possibilities and challenges of feminist approaches to search, and how they could be applied to a concrete contexts such as a digital library catalogs.
The workshop will start with a collective mapping exercise, drawing together different experiences and possibly imaging feminist strategies to search, followed by a more focussed hands-on session in which we will work in smaller groups, further developing some of the strategies and applying them to concrete contexts and datasets. From paper-prototyping to technical examinations, the goal of the day is to imagine and test out feminist approaches to search and create a collective tool box – a repository for feminist search strategies.

[Credits: H&D]