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The Suffrage Postcard Project (SPP), a feminist digital humanities (DH) project, is a team initiative between faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. The SPP utilizes a range of digital tools to explore how transatlantic suffrage postcards and feminist DH practices engender new historical narratives about the suffrage movement, especially in the United States and Britain.

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The Suffrage Postcard Project revolves around three central DH initiatives: feminist data visualization; feminist digital archiving; and feminist digital pedagogy.

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1. Feminist Data Visualization
How can feminist data visualization approaches to our data set of postcards offer new perspectives the early-twentieth-century suffrage movement? To answer this question, The Suffrage Postcard Project is building a feminist data visualization tool in collaboration with University of South Florida faculty and graduate students from the Department of English and the Department of Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics to build a DH tool for feminist data visualization. The digital tool uses intersectional feminist critical code studies theory to write machine-learning algorithms for data visualization of data sets (archived postcards). 

One critical concern of feminist data visualization, as Catherine D’Ignazio explains, is the representation of absence; what is not represented is as significant as what is represented. A feminist data visualization tool, for our purposes, may take account of the absence of women of color, immigrant women, working-class women, non-cisgender women, and women without children in visual representations of women in pro- and anti-suffrage postcards.

2. Feminist Digital Archiving
The Suffrage Postcard Project engages in the scholarship of digital archiving and encoding. The SPP's researchers collectively theorize feminist archiving and encoding methodologies and then, in a team setting, apply such methodologies to the practice of archiving and encoding suffrage postcards. The SPP team operates by the principle that we do not archive and encode what we know, but we archive and encode in order to know. The recursive process of archiving and encoding facilitates the production of new knowledge pertaining to visual imagery, gender, and suffrage, as our researchers must confront the limitations and affordances of the digital when creating the archive. 

The SPP is committed to creating an open-access, searchable, and easy-to-use digital archive of suffrage postcards for research and teaching purposes. We hope that you will find our site useful for such purposes and ask that the site is credited by citation or hyperlink in any research or teaching.

3. Feminist Digital Pedagogy
The Suffrage Postcard Project team works together in the theorization and practice of feminist digital pedagogy. The SPP operates, in part, as a digital sandbox for DH researchers at all career stages who are interested in learning more about digital humanities practices and methodologies. This learning takes place in a feminist DH lab setting, undergirded by a non-hierarchical infrastructure meant to facilitate a heightened sense of critical research consciousness and individual agency for all team members. 

Well aware of the institutional titles bestowed upon academics and educators, as well as our inability to fully divorce ourselves from them, team members for the SPP nonetheless aim to conduct research, through vigilant collaboration, so as to operate outside of these limitations. For the sake of our readership, we use universally-recognizable institutional titles within the SPP. 

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The Suffrage Postcard Project can be followed on Twitter (@Suff_Postcards).