FRAmes on GENder: A Critical Review

Review By: Brian Millen

Review Conducted: Feb 17, 2022 - Feb 23 2022

Link: https://institute-genderequality.org/frames-on-gender/

Data and Sources

• The original sources of the collection are various physical European materials from the late 1960s to the present considered important to feminism. Each contributor to the collection had to consult 3-5 experts on the feminist movement (academics, activists, feminist collectives, and feminist assemblies), who would each then nominate 5-10 materials they considered to be important, choosing from books, articles, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, or pictures. The retrieval of almost all the texts in the collection required a non-commercial no-derivatives Creative Commons license, allowing them to be downloaded and shared as long as they are linked back to the FRAGEN site and no changes to the texts are made. A maximum of 10 items from this longlist were then chosen to be made available on FRAmes on GENder. The criteria by which the experts were asked to make their decisions about what texts to include were based on the following points:
  • Nature of the texts must be manifestos or texts that function as and/or are considered manifestos.
  • Location: “the first focus should be on texts that originate in each country, but ‘imported’ and translated texts are not completely excluded”. The goal here was to include texts from each country in the European Union
  • The text must be understood as having been impactful on the feminist movement in that country and gender relations more generally.
  • There must be a diversity of perspectives, including popular and marginal strands of feminism.

Processing

The covers of the original texts (when available) were scanned as JPEG files. The content of the original texts was scanned and saved in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). The ‘Paper Capture’ plug-in for Adobe Acrobat was then used to turn the images of the text into searchable text in PDF format. Next, each text was then given a unique name/code for storage in the database. Next, some information was added to each text. Each was surveyed according to the following points, which, along with bibliographic information, provide context for researchers using the collection (especially researchers who cannot read the original language of the text):

• the nature of the text
• the topic(s) of the text, according to Beijing’s 12 critical areas of concern
• the use of gender in the text
• the intersection of gender with other inequalities, such as ethnicity, religion, class
• the causes of gender inequalities
• the type of feminism occurring in the text
• if the text contains a call for action, the content of this call, and who is addressed by this call
• the civil society/state interface

Decisions surrounding digitization were made according to quality criteria determining scan resolutions as well as what file formats were to be used. The digitized texts were then tagged with information such as time and place, author, reception of the text, and content, to assist researchers who do not read the original language of the text. The digitization standards can be found at: https://prod-cdn.atria.nl/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/10/08135221/ManualDigitisation.pdf

Presentation

There are three ways one can view the contents of the collection, ordering or filtering them in different ways:

• Country - From the ‘About’ page, researchers can click the ‘Countries’ link. From there, links from each country involved in the collection will bring the researcher to the materials from the country, along with the experts and selection process involved for that particular country.
• Fragen content - From the drop page, researchers can click the ‘Fagen content’ link, which will bring them to a view of every material in the collection. It is unclear how these are ordered. It seems intuitive that they might be ordered by when they were introduced into the collection, but there is no way to verify this.
• Tags - From each material’s page, you can click through on tags for that material, bringing you to a view of all the materials bearing that tag. Tags include various topics such as ‘LGBT’, ‘discrimination’, and ‘gender-based violence’.
• There is also, on each material’s page, a selection of related articles, but it is unclear on what basis these are considered related. From my inspection, they do not seem to be based on tagging.

Digital Tools Used

• Scanners
• Adobe Acrobat

Language(s)

• The website is primarily in English. The texts come from 29 different countries and are thus in many different languages. None of them are translated but are surveyed to provide relevant information for researchers. These surveys are all in English, regardless of the original language of a given text.

Review

FRAmes on GENder was coordinated by Atria, an institute that deals with collections about women’s heritage in order to promote the equal treatment of men and women. It was part of a larger project called Quality of Gender and Equality Policies in Europe, also known as QUING. This was a project undergone by Central European University’s Center for Policy Studies from October 2006 to March 2011 whose aims were to assess gender equality policies in the European Union as well as to “actively bring together and construct the knowledge” required to construct new gender equality policies. It was funded by the European Commission Sixth Framework Programme, a research-funding program conducted by the European Union “to contribute to the creation of a true "European Research Area" (ERA). ERA is a vision for the future of research in Europe, an internal market for science and technology. It fosters scientific excellence, competitiveness, and innovation through the promotion of better cooperation and coordination between relevant actors at all levels.”

FRAmes on GENder specifically was created to provide researchers access to feminist resources to use for research purposes. The project achieves its goal insofar as it is a centralized open-access source that researchers can use if they want to include feminist perspectives in their scholarship, whether the work’s main focus be feminism or not. They are successful in providing funds for research in that sense. What might make this project even more productive, though, is to include on-the-site scholarship conducted using the research provided by FRAmes on GENder along with the resources themselves. Researchers (and perhaps even the public, even though they are not the main intended audience) could, in addition to the resources themselves, could be provided with some of the conversations happening in fields related to feminist thought that give context to the texts included in the collection. This would foster a dynamism that does not treat the texts as static lifeless objects, but rather fosters collective individuation around and through these texts, which also provided the possibility for new thoughts and ideas. Even a comment section in which users could spark conversation might be interesting. As Foucault writes, “These archives and their practices as exercises (as disciplines) form a logos bioethikos, and it is important that they are not simply stored as though they were a trunkful of memories, but profoundly implanted in the soul, "filed in it," says Seneca, and that they thus become a part of ourselves: in short, that the soul made them not only one's own, but oneself” (419).

Furthermore, I also think more effort could be made to connect FRAmes on GENder more broadly to the aims of QUING. There could, at the very least, be links to the other work undergone by researchers involved in the larger project, which could give more insight into how these texts could be utilized to think about gender equality policy, which is the aim of QUING. As it stands, the project seems disconnected from the other ones in the research initiative and it seems like a lost opportunity to use digital technology to connect scholars with political actors and activists. Overall, though, I believe the work of making academic work available to people in a way that makes them useable, especially with the aim of being used as political tools, is very important, and this project is a crucial step toward that end.