Just for the records Heroines

Addressing gender issues around the theme of heroines and the unavoidable subjectivity of how events are recorded, we dedicate this workshop to presentations, discussions and Wikipedia editing. The guest speakers are writer Catherine Lenoble and visual artist Clara Thomine.

Despite Wikipedia's efforts to come up with solutions to live up to their motto “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, not only do the contributors predominantly identify as men, but the contents published also show partial gender representations. With platforms as Wikipedia becoming more important in our society these issues require attention. As a symbolic example, the article ‘heroine’ is automatically redirected to the article ‘hero’, and its emblematic figures are mostly male. Next to the issues of authorship and subject matter, the writing style and article structure that have become idiomatic on Wikipedia cause their own issues. A classic example of this is the amount of articles about women that starts with “this woman was the sister/wife of this famous man” in their first or second sentence. During Heroines, we will take these observations as the point of departure for lectures and discussions, and intervention—the day includes a crash course in Wikipedia editing.

Friday 15.01.2015 From 10am to 6pm Pianofabriek

Visit us online at http://justfortherecord.space

Just For The Record: Gender Redirect (February 2016)