Sarah Burkhardt | Socio-technical and feminist strategies of visibility: Rethinking and programming representation through mapping Dutch #MeToo formations

Sarah Burkhardt | Socio-technical and feminist strategies of visibility: Rethinking and programming representation through mapping Dutch #MeToo formations | Overarching NWO-funded project: TwiXL: An infrastructure for cross-media research on public debates | University of Amsterdam, Media Studies  | Supervisors:  Prof. dr. J.J. (Julia) Noordegraaf, Prof. T. (Thomas) Poell, Dr. B. (Bernhard) Rieder, Dr. A.C. (Anne) Kroon | October 2022 – October 2026 | s.burkhardt[at]uva.nl

The project critically engages with the Dutch #MeToo debate by situating it within a longer history of attempts to render visible‚ the struggle to end sexist oppression‘ (hooks, 1984) across different online media. It maps involved actors and researches the role of different spaces, such as educational or governmental institutions, social media platforms, legacy news outlets.  As part thereof, the project creates access and knowledge about #MeToo-related debates through leveraging, building and critically reflecting TwiXL as a cross-media research infrastructure. By designing Python-based Jupyter Notebooks for cross-media research within a humanities research agenda, the projects aims at facilitating access to existing Dutch data collections and archives, making them interoperable in critically reflected ways. Overall, the project seeks to understand the role and responsibilities of different online media outlets and their technical affordances in shaping not only the public discourse but also the power of (feminist) digital activist movements, in particular personal testimony campaigns. This further entails a critical investigation into the epistemological repercussions of encountered archival practices and the (future) “tool-making“ for their analysis, which connects to contemporary discourses on using state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence for archives. The challenges, limitations and potentials will be tackled from a critical feminist perspective and flow into the methodological design of the cross-media infrastructure TwiXL, which is used as part of the Dutch #MeToo case study.