Lightning Talk
Jeri Wieringa
George Mason University
Biography
Jeri Wieringa is a PhD student in history at George Mason University, studying the construction of gender, race, and class in religious movements of the nineteenth-century through the use of digital methodologies.
Abstract
As a possible model for encouraging and enabling women to engage more fully with the code side of the digital humanities, I would like to draw attention to the model of Rails Girls. Rails Girls is a collection of independent workshops for women that aim to introduce those with little or no coding experience to the programming language Ruby and the web framework, Ruby on Rails. Rails Girls began in Helsinki in 2010 as an effort to address the gender imbalance among programmers there and has since spread around the world. This program, which involves both teaching basic programming and creating a community of women interested in learning to code, offers a possible model of how the imbalance in technical ability within the digital humanities community can begin to be addressed for future digital humanities work. While the need for more systematic approaches to questions of coding knowledge has been well identified, positive solutions to the problem are less prevalent.1 I propose that the approach taken by Rails Girls offers a positive example of how people within the digital humanities community can move forward to create both the tools and the community necessary to enable a more balanced segment of the population to work directly with the code.