After developing a survey research on the digital humanities topic of feminism, gender and literary and cultural criticism, I would like to present in this lighting talk the idea of a potential project that has been around my mind since my recent incursion in the field of DH on whose thematic and aim scope, to my surprise, no digital platform or network has been generated yet.

As an opening account on the state of the matter I would like to highlight that gender in digital humanities is trending topic since, as feminist blogger Jacqueline Vernimont has recently denounced, women are still considered a minority in big digital humanities events and scientific committees. The technological gender breach in digital times has been sociologically and culturally researched, and webs such as www.railsgirls.com and other feminist tech-educative platforms are welcome and necessary. Research on women and DH has also been encouraged in the Digital Humanities Quarterly special number devoted to Feminisms and DH (2015. 9.2)

My view is that digital affirmative action seems still necessary and the creation of spaces generated by women on women’s cultural production would be the way to make women visible in digital humanities and the internet. Browsing the feminist digital humanities cyberspace we find interesting and well stablished collectives such as the US based www.fembotcollective.com or www.crunkfeministcollective.com or www.feministonlinespaces.com. My training in literary criticism and cultural and gender studies make me focus on the women’s literary digital projects, which are many. The pioneering Women Writers Project on early modern women’s writing archive, The Orlando Project on women’s writing on the British Isles, Perdita Archive on women’s writing in English from the 1500 to 1700, The Victorian Women Writers Project or the Emory Women Writers (17^th c. to 1920), and Bieses, in Spain. Most of these projects are “cybergynocritical” in scope, developing text-encoded archives of early and modern women’s literary production in English before the twentieth-century—a work of research already accomplished in the early phases of feminist literary criticism during the 1980s that is now being transferred to digital language.

My specialization on modernist and contemporary poetry written by women in English and my interview with the author of the classic Feminist and Poetry, Jan Montefiore—which will be shortly published in the European Journal of Women’s Studies—have made turn my attention recently towards the contradiction revealed in the fact that the early twenty-first century is one of the periods when more poetry by women is being written and published and when less critical and digital attention is being given to this cultural production. A synoptic and syncretic work on the field is needed, and as I am convinced that DH are the appropriate framework for the development of future feminist literary and cultural criticism I think a digital project on contemporary women’s poetry as a European network could be useful.  A collaborative platform with country or language sections that could join interest in recent women’s poetry and poetics in different European scenarios and that could pay attention to the production of digital and offline poetry by women in the last decades. The nature of the project would not only be archival and collective but will be also involved in generating cultural spaces for debate on theory and poetics from a feminist perspective. Literary, as well as digital, spatial and motional poetics could be taken into consideration as framework to analyze current European women’s cultural production. The network could also work as digital repository of information on recent feminist thought, theories and theoreticians that could be related to gender and creativity from an artistic and literary point of view, in order to bring poetry written by women and current women’s poetics out of the literary paper closet into the world and digital cultural arena.