At DirectHers, five Digital Humanities students embark on an ambitious XML encoding project that explores the incredibly diverse, worldwide voices of women film directors and focuses light on their work in a digitally encoded collection.

Movies are powerful. They are cultural artifacts that give voice to ideas and feelings from one person to another. Movies allow us to empathize with characters and their struggles up close. They encourage us to think about ourselves, our lives, and our society from a new perspective, showing us how to better understand one another through compassion and empathy. Movies are mirrors that encourage viewers to gain insights into all walks of life and, through their effect, can spur an individual to broaden their views to think in new ways about their life, about society and be a cause of transformation both individually as well as societally. Movies are both an art form and a tool.

Although our cultural conversation has expanded to include more voices, there is still a need to address unequal and oppressive gender justice and promote social equity. The fifteenth groundbreaking women directors we choose to work on, representing diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, have made significant contributions to cinema by shedding light on unique non-mainstream perspectives and critical social issues. There is a worldwide need to lessen discrimination and respect non-mainstream experiences, identities, and knowledge to broaden our societal goal of achieving fundamental human rights.

Our project goes beyond the celebration of their artistic achievements. We aim to create a model, approach, and workflow for building a comprehensive and accessible digital archive that organizes and showcases data related to the women directors’ biographies, filmographies, and larger themes they tackle in and beyond their works.

By presenting their remarkable works, challenges and failures in the production, and supporting network they are relying on, we hope to inspire future generations of filmmakers and cinephiles, promote a more inclusive creative environment, and search for a possibility of global narratives on screen.

Please check out all of our pilot XML files/XSLT sheets through our Google doc. The team will keep releasing the original dataset and maintain them on a regular basis to ensure accuracy and up-to-date information.

Collaborative efforts are welcomed, feel free to contact us (directhers2023@gmail.com) and contribute any improvements or suggestions you may have. Thank you for your ongoing support and engagement in this endeavor.