Today is Ada Lovelace day. For more about the event, check out the post Liss wrote over at Shakesville. Otherwise: Ada Lovelace helped program the first computer-ancestors, and today is “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.” Bloggers around the world are posting about a woman of their choice in technology.
After thinking about it, I decided not to just pick a random woman I didn’t know much about and post about it here, since it seemed sort of irrelevant to the Red Pen Brigade mission. So instead I’ve decided to point whatever readers I have over to one of the coolest websites to which I’ve ever been priveledged to contribute: The Women’s Genre Fiction Project at Emory University.
The WGFP has preserved hundreds of “women’s literature” publications by women written between the mid-1800s and the 1920s. The books vary in quality and significance, but they’re all fascinating and fun. Plus, as a double-whammy for today, the project was heavily driven by several very strong, imaginative, determined women in Emory’s digital technology stable.
I really enjoyed serving as a copy editor (hey RPB tie!) for the project for a few years — especially the time my text featured a hero named Denis and the capturing process had digitized it every single time as a reference to the male sexual organ. 🙂
So anyway: check the site out. Also check out Emory’s Women Writers Resource Project and the other collections, including the WWI postcards and poetry(I did a lot of the WWI stuff and the poems are really a remarkable read). Celebrate the persistence of women in technology and in writing. And happy Ada Lovelace day!