Gender and Para-Academic Labor: The Invisible Translators of Old English and their Legacy in Digital Humanities

“Gunning” and “Miss Wilkinson” are credited as translators on the Google Books page of Lives of the Saints and their names included as authors alongside “Ælfric (Abbot of Eynsham),” but the backlist of Early English Text Society (EETS) titles credits only Skeat with these editions (Eynsham; “Early E...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nineteenth-Century gender studies 2022-07, Vol.18 (2)
Main Author: Moreshead, Abigail
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
Aelfric (955?-1010?)
Anthologies
British & Irish literature
Digital humanities
Digitization
English literature
Feminism
Gender
History
Interpreters
Knowledge
Language history
Librarians
Medieval literature
Old English
Self concept
Titles
Translations
Translators
Women
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Summary:“Gunning” and “Miss Wilkinson” are credited as translators on the Google Books page of Lives of the Saints and their names included as authors alongside “Ælfric (Abbot of Eynsham),” but the backlist of Early English Text Society (EETS) titles credits only Skeat with these editions (Eynsham; “Early English Text Society"). [...]this lack of information—the invisibility of their identities as individuals whose labor contributed to the building of knowledge of medieval literature and language in the late nineteenth century—is significant in what it indicates about the valuing and recognition of such work, and how these values are carried into the present. Book History, Gendered Labor, and the Digital Humanities [ 4 ] My first goal in exploring the work of Gunning and Wilkinson is to add to the body of nineteenth-century book studies scholarship by enacting what Kate Ozment terms “feminist bibliography” as a corrective to the lack of gender-focused scholarship in the book history field. (2) Pilsch and Ross’s emphasis on avoiding a depersonalization of invisible labor is relevant to this analysis of Gunning and Wilkinson because sweeping all clerical, service-oriented labor under one umbrella term, such as “invisible labor,” risks maintaining the lack of personalization and specificity that render such individuals invisible in the first place. [...]my aim in contextualizing the specific work of Old English translation done by Gunning and Wilkinson is to add to a body of work that personalizes the invisible, impersonal, and easily generalized.
ISSN:1556-7524