Research Description:

Revising Our Culture’s Memory of Feminist History through the Creation of Digital Collections and Educational Multimedia Exhibit Sites: Radical Women in Gainesville as an Example

Since the late 1990s, digitization has become a new way for preserving old histories. The advent of digital collections allows us to revisit history for the sake of converting historical documents into electronic files and storing them on servers. Online repositories not only preserve archives, however, they also provide us with a new opportunity for revising cultural memory. Cultural memory is the way in which we identify, understand, and remember ourselves, our culture, and our communities; this memory is vulnerable to change with new generations and with new forms of media, such as the Internet. By recovering and recasting feminist history through digital collections and complimentary educational multimedia exhibit sites, we may finally rectify the history of the 1970s women’s movement, which has been sorely misrepresented by mass media. In this spirit, I have created the Radical Women in Gainesville digital collection and the Radical Women in Gainesville Historical Exhibit site.