As summer approached, I was looking for an internship/field experience for the summer to gain more library experience. At the time, I was still interested in academic libraries, digital archives, metadata, and digital humanities. From Adrianna Brugliarello-Wondrich, the president of SCARLA, I learned that she had been working on the digital archive project for the Institute for Women’s Leadership under the supervision of Kayo Denda, the Head of the Margery Somers Foster Center and Librarian for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library. At that point, I was interested in digital archives and metadata, so I decided to contact Kayo. Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies also sounded intriguing to me.

I had a conversation with Kayo, and I decided to do an individual practicum/field experience where I could practice creating metadata records, learn more about digital humanities (I wanted to know much more about this before I began the practicum), and use some of the programming skills I learned last semester. At the same time, I wanted to work on a topic related to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. I decided to work with Korean shamanic songs/chants (mugas), which are performed by Korean shamans (mudangs) even today in blessing ceremonies. These mudangs sometimes become possessed by spirits while performing dances and rituals. They pray for good fortune in many different purposes, such as good harvests, success in business, healing illnesses, or even soothing the souls of the dead. By the late Joseon period (17th–19th centuries), mudangs had become associated with women and the lower social classes under the Neo-Confucian social order, and they sometimes represented their voices as well.

I also remembered my mother talking about mudangs and the performances she had seen, even recently, and telling me how inspiring they were to her. I thought this would be a great opportunity to learn more about my own culture’s history, as well as women’s agency and oppression during the late Joseon Dynasty and how these themes are reflected in Korean Mugas. I thought the project would be very meaningful to me.

Figure 1. Shamanic Dance (Munyeo Sinmu) by Shin Yun-bok, ca. after 1805. Kansong Art Museum, Seoul. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 2. A Pretty Sorceress, 1904. From En Corée by Angus Hamilton. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The main source I used in this study is the Compendium of Korean Oral Literature (한국 구비문학 대계), provided by the Academy of Korean Studies, where I was able to locate most of the mugas. When I first read them, I realized that many of these songs contained Korean regional dialects. This was one of the challenges I faced.

Figure 3. Content from the Compendium of Korean Oral Literature, (한국 구비문학 대계)

Most of the mugas were recorded in the late 1980s and 1990s by researchers who wanted to document people who knew the lyrics of particular mugas. In order to understand the dialects better, I decided to use AI, Gemini, to translate the dialectal text into modern official Korean.

By analyzing the muga texts, I wanted to find out what they revealed about gender representation and the social conditions of the time. Unfortunately, many of the sentences were missing subjects, so I could not tell which verbs belonged to which characters immediately. Because of this, I assigned each verb to a female or male character  by examining the surrounding sentences and figuring out who was doing each action. After doing this, I had separate lists of sentences for female and male characters for each muga.

To examine gender representation, I extracted verbs from the texts using Python.  I then looked at whether certain verbs were associated with female or male characters. My hypothesis was that verbs expressing more action or initiative might be more closely associated with male characters, while verbs such as giving, clothing, and sacrificing might be more closely associated with female characters.

After I had a list of verbs extracted by Python, I analyzed them using the digital humanities tool Voyant to see which verbs appeared most frequently. Voyant Tools helped visualize the frequency of these verbs and see whether there were any patterns. It was the first time I had a chance to see how digital humanities tools work.

Figure 4. Verb Frequency Word Cloud Generated with Voyant Tool

Figure 5. Python Script

Figure 6. Python Generated Verb Frequency Results

After creating metadata using different metadata schemes to describe the mugas, my final goal is to create the project webpage using programming. I am excited, but also a little nervous, about this final stage of the project.

Through this practicum, I had the opportunity to explore different methodologies and realized that many of the knowledge and skills I learned in different courses can be easily connected. It was rewarding to bring together research on one aspect of my cultural background, metadata, digital humanities, and programming in a single project and to see how each area could influence the others. In the meantime, I was able to identify the areas that I found particularly intriguing and would like to develop further.
I am especially thankful to Kayo for giving me the opportunity to explore this project, allowing me to develop my own ideas, guiding me throughout the process, and staying genuinely engaged in my work.

The deliverable of the project is this website. It includes methodology and metadata records of the 5 Mugas analyzed, using Dublin Core, MODs, and VRA metadata standards.

I was first introduced to Voyant in December 2024 as a Library Student Assistant by Kayo Denda, the Head of Margery Somers Foster Center and Librarian for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Douglass Library. At that time, I created brief cataloging records of materials from the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) for the circulating collection at Douglass Library. When all of the books were officially cataloged, the materials were officially configured as the Women’s Rights as Human Rights collection. Another project involving the collection was going to be conducted using Voyant, so I became a bit familiar with the tool, but it wasn’t until I came back in December 2025 as a Digital Humanities Project Librarian that I really familiarized myself with Voyant.

Voyant is a web-based text reading and analysis tool. It’s specifically utilized for “reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars as well as for the general public” (Voyant, 2008). The goal of the project using Voyant was to create a visual to properly show the wide range of subjects covered in the CWGL’s materials using the publications’ title fields. There are several visuals Voyant can create—bubblelines, graphs, links, and termsberry. For this project, the word cloud or cirrus as Voyant refers to it as, is what we were interested in. Out of the visuals Voyant creates, the word cloud was the best fit for the project as it displays all of the words it picks up the most in one place. The bubblines and graphs are restricted to the top five words while links and termsberry only show small portions of words within a data set that are connected. To get an idea of what the final visual could look like and to learn how Voyant works, I used other fields gathered from the CWGL cataloging project—publishers, authors, languages, publication dates, and countries of publication. Out of those groups, languages (Figure 1) and publication dates (Figure 2) were the most straightforward visuals. Numbers are easy for Voyant to distinguish and the languages were all single words. The issues started with the authors and the countries of publication. It quickly became clear that Voyant wasn’t able to register anything longer than a single word. For example, it categorized “United States” as two words. It also separated the first and last names of all the authors. Considering how long all of the titles of the materials in the CWGL collection were, this was a very big problem. After putting the titles into Voyant, some of the most prominent words were mainly “a” “it” “the” because those words popped up the most in all of the titles, which isn’t what I was looking for. There were also several phrases that should’ve connected to properly show the frequency of those topics, such as “women’s health” and “women’s rights.” The solution proposed was to use an underscore to connect phrases so Voyant would be able to register them. (Figure 4). This worked well, but the next obstacle was taking out the words not needed and figuring out what to keep. At the time, the only way to filter out those words was to manually go through the document to delete and combine words. For example, “The Montreal massacre” became “Montreal_massacre.” However, it wasn’t always that simple as several titles were very long and contained a variety of subjects. “The United Nations commission on human rights and the different treatment of governments: an inseparable part of promoting and encouraging respect for human rights?” is one of the longer titles, and for the sake of the project was shortened to “United_Nations” and “human_rights.” When that has to be done for over 1,000 titles it takes a good amount of time.

Figure 1: Visual created with Voyant for the languages of materials in the CWGL collection

Figure 2: Visual created with Voyant for the years of publication of the materials in the CWGL collection

Figure 3: Visual created with Voyant for the countries of publication for the materials in the CWGL collection. Voyant did not recognize “United States” as one entity

Figure 4: Visual created after using “_” to connect two words

Since the process was taking longer than planned, I decided to see if there were other digital humanities tools I could use. Something important to note is that Voyant isn’t an AI tool, so I wanted to avoid using one as an alternative. The tool I ended up using was CATMA (Computer Assisted Text Markup and Analysis), which is mainly used for annotating text. Unlike Voyant, you do have to create an account to use the tool since it saves projects you’re working on. CATMA does produce a few of the same visuals as Voyant, mainly graphs and word clouds, but the thing that stood out was the Doubletree. It connected words that appeared the most after going through the titles and each time you clicked on one word, it led to several others they were associated with (Figure 5). For example, “women’s” would lead to “rights”, “violence”, “conference”, etc. Since the Doubletree is very big, it’s not possible to take a picture of the full thing to use as a visual to showcase the diversity of the collection, but it’s still a good interactive way to see how words connect to one another. However, despite this cool feature, this tool shared the issue Voyant had in only identifying single words. When trying to use the underscore to resolve the problem, CATMA wasn’t able to register it and glitched. If not for the glitch, it would’ve been a great alternative to Voyant, but since this tool is mainly used for annotations, it’s also understandable why it wasn’t able to register the underscore.

Figure 5: Doubletree of the CWGL titles created by using CATMA

As stated before, I didn’t want to use an AI tool to replace Voyant, but out of curiosity, I decided to try out a few to see how they would do in comparison. Something I didn’t expect while searching for AI tools to test is that most of the tools were behind a paywall. While free trials were offered, it was still required to create an account and list a payment option. There were tools that were free to use, but I wasn’t expecting so many of them to require payments. The nice thing about Voyant is that it’s a free tool that you can use without jumping through any hoops. While I ran into a few issues with CATMA, the tool is also free to use. After searching through more AI tools, quadratic, domo, and tableau are the tools I ended up trying out. Quadratic is an AI spreadsheet that goes through the data users upload and analyzes anything it’s asked, and both domo and tableau created tables and other visuals from uploaded data. None of them were able to register the titles of the CWGL materials. An error resulted in each tool regardless of what I tried. I thought it was because of the titles, so I tried the other sets of data I had just like I did with Voyant. I thought at least the publication years would register, but regardless of what group of data I uploaded, it all resulted in error messages. I was honestly surprised not even one tool worked considering how widely praised AI tools are for being efficient. I also did try to use ChatGPT since it’s the most widely used AI tool, but it wasn’t able to understand the data either. It could just be that AI tools aren’t suitable for a project like this, but it also calls into question if AI is supposed to make things easier, then at least one tool should’ve been successful.

After using CATMA as an alternative didn’t work out, I met with Francesca Giannetti, a Digital Humanities Librarian at Rutgers University about Voyant’s features. The current method of going through each title was very time consuming, so if there was a feature Voyant had that would make the process easier, the next best course of action was to meet with an expert on the tool. In our meeting, she showed me that Voyant does have filters to remove unwanted data. There’s an option for stopwords where you can list words you don’t want Voyant to recognize. It automatically lists words when it creates word clouds and other visuals, but you can also add more words to filter out. The stopwords helped immensely, but adjustments still needed to be made to the actual titles to properly display the different topics in the CWGL collection. I also mentioned using AI tools, and Francesca explained that AI can’t count. Voyant is specifically made for statistics and to count data which is why I ran into so many errors with AI tools. As suspected, for this project, those tools aren’t compatible with the data. After going through all of the titles and adding more stopwords, I reached the final visual to represent the collection (Figure 6). In addition to words such as “women,” and “human rights,” which were expected, the resulting image includes “health” and “domestic violence” which are closely related to women’s human rights, but may not be obvious to the general public. The visual is also a powerful tool to represent specialized collections in digital contents such as blogs and websites. I’m happy with the end result as I think it properly displays the range of subjects the Women’s Rights as Human Rights collection features.

Figure 6: The final word cloud made using Voyant

 Throughout the process, Kayo and I have been working with the RUL digital team, which has helped shape our decisions on practical concerns such as copyright law, digital storage, and metadata schema. Sasha Taner, IWL’s Program Director and Research Coordinator, has helped guide the project with the IWL’s vision and purpose in mind. Kayo and I have been working to merge the information science world of RUL with the feminist world of the IWL by exploring what a functional feminist digital archive looks like. So far, our work has been informed by this query in several ways. In our descriptive metadata, we strive to ensure that the resources are represented through an intergenerational feminist lens that equitably describes all the women who have created and have been featured in the various resources, whether they are undergraduate student interviewers or interviewees at the top of their field. We are also carefully working to find ways to include descriptive metadata that facilitate equitable access to resources regardless of participants’ and creators’ race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. Additionally, we have been taking steps to ensure all resources meet proper accessibility guidelines.

Moving into 2026, there is lots more exciting work to be done. I look forward to continuing to collaborate on envisioning a feminist digital archive for the IWL, bringing the final product to fruition, and getting to share it with the broader Rutgers community and beyond.

The Women’s File is a collection of magazines, pamphlets, newsletters, posters, and academic articles from the 1970s to the 2000s pertaining to women’s issues such as abortion, education, employment, and the liberation movement. While there is a focus on New Jersey and the United States, there are international materials included as well. The File was started in the 1970s by various librarians of the Mabel Smith Douglass Library and materials have been added to the collection since then.

Working on the Women’s File for the past four months has been an immersive and transformative experience. As a current LIS graduate student in the School of Communication and Information and a part-time public library employee, my focus is on public librarianship. Last semester, Kayo Denda approached me about evaluating new materials preserved in boxes from former WGS professors for the Women’s File, adding them into the collection, and updating the Women’s File digital spreadsheet. The Women’s File has been my introduction to archives, organizing, and cataloging.

There is something about working with historical materials that feels sacred. As I flip through the materials I feel connected to the feminist activists who worked tirelessly to fight for gender justice. Many of the organizations whose materials are contained in the Files are no longer active, but their ideas and legacies live on. Whenever I see materials that a friend of mine may appreciate or relate to, I snap a picture. My friend who is passionate about the intersectional identities of being Asian and queer would be interested in the Breakout Newsletter, a publication from a lesbian activist group out of Manila, Philippines in the 1990s (pictured below). My friend who loves Renaissance history and critical gender analysis would love to read the academic paper on “Hermaphrodites in Renaissance France,” published in Critical Matrix (also pictured below). Even the fact that these materials have been collected and preserved for so long feels like a form of activism in itself.

While looking through the boxes I came across dozens of memos between former Rutgers professors and deans regarding the status of the Women’s Studies Program at Rutgers from the 1990s to the 2000s. Because it used to be a program and not a department, professors who taught within the program (almost all women at the time) found it much more difficult to achieve tenure, an essential mark of career stability and success for academics. A department designation would also lead to a larger budget. There were memos from a consortium of Women’s Studies Program professors advocating for each other and proclaiming to the administration the value of Women’s Studies. There were letters to Women’s Studies departments at other universities, asking for the steps and process of how they became an official department. There were printouts of statistics from WS departments at other universities. Looking through these papers I felt the extent of the tenacity and perseverance necessary to achieve even the smallest of structural changes in a historically male-dominated field. I couldn’t help but be impressed and also frustrated at how much work it takes. When we preserve documents such as these, we show scholars of the future that change is possible but that it takes incredibly hard work, a mountain of patience, and the ability to endure many setbacks. These memos have been sent over to Special Collections and University Archives at Alexander Library to be processed.

In the digital age, working with physical materials is a rare and intimate delight. While flipping through these newsletters and pamphlets, I often find myself thinking about the time, care, and effort it took to write, print, and distribute these ideas. Someone had to write the memo, then someone had to type it (usually someone trained to use a typewriter). Then copies had to be made and addresses had to be written on the envelopes, then a mail carrier had to deliver these envelopes to hundreds of recipients. Recipients in the Women’s Studies Department at Rutgers then held on to these papers for decades. People often view social media as integral to organizing for social change, but people were mobilizing long before social media was invented.

A university professor browsing the materials for her feminist theory class expressed awe at the fact that some of the ideas presented seem so radical and progressive for the time. For example, filed under “Abortion,” there are pamphlets from the 60s and 70s distributed by pro-abortion religious organizations reconciling religion with abortion and advocating for safe, accessible abortions. It feels intense to consider this idea when just three years ago Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States, with many advocates citing religious reasons for the decision.

It is also fascinating to consider the issue of subject headings and terminology when it comes to these historical files. Should the historical subject terms be preserved when cataloging these materials? Should terms such as “Blacks” (now replaced as “Black people”) and “Hermaphrodites” (now replaced as “Intersex people”) which may be considered offensive be updated or preserved to showcase the language of the time at which the materials were gathered? I chose to update the labels concerning identities due to the fact that users accessing the materials may feel uncomfortable at encountering outdated or dehumanizing terminology. Additionally, those subject terms have been updated in the Library of Congress Subject Headings and our collection should be updated to reflect those changes.

The Women’s File can currently be accessed on the Mezzanine floor of the Mabel Smith Douglass library on Douglass Campus at Rutgers University– New Brunswick. For access, please contact Kayo Denda, Head of Margery Somers Foster Center and Librarian for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (kdenda@rutgers.edu).

The Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) stood as a beacon of transnational feminist advocacy, leaving indelible marks on the world through its tireless efforts in promoting women’s rights internationally. CWGL was founded in 1989 by feminist activist Charlotte Bunch as a project of Douglass College and was instrumental in the ‘Women Rights are Human Rights’ Global campaign in the 1990s. As I reflect on my experience curating the CWGL exhibition and analysing its extensive resource collection, I am reminded of the profound impact of feminist activism and scholarship, as well as the challenges inherent in bridging the gap between academia and grassroots movements.

There are moments when your faith in the kind of work you want to do is affirmed. The inauguration of “The Transnational Feminist Advocacy of The Center for Women’s Global Leadership Exhibition” was a moment of profound affirmation for me, as I had the honor of moderating a panel featuring esteemed scholar-activists Charlotte Bunch and Radhika Balakrishnan. Their four decades of work at CWGL have shaped feminist discourse and activism worldwide, evidenced by the over 100 countries represented in the organization’s resource center publications. Collaborating with such inspiring individuals and witnessing firsthand the tangible outcomes of feminist social change reaffirmed my commitment to this transformative work. They humored my jokes, gave us feminist gossip and left us with hope that feminist communities are possible.

My delight and enjoyment is evidenced by the pictures from the event. The joy of working with inspiring people, of seeing evidence of feminist social change through archival curation and of finally sitting next to such role models was palpable. My co-curators and the amazing team of Kayo Denda, Ezra Downs and Nicole Blemur have taught me feminist joy of collective work. Joining this project was a serendipitous shoulder tap by Dr. Rebecca Mark at a party when Kayo was seeking assistance for its completion. It felt intimate, personal and powerful to be surrounded by archives, both written and living, of feminist activism. I know this is the kind of work I was to do for the rest of my life. One which makes a mark, one rooted in feminist ideals, one where I can make silly jokes and get compliments on my necklaces.

Curating the exhibition and analyzing CWGL’s resource collection provided me with invaluable insights into the intersection of academia and activism. As I delved into the diverse array of publications, from handbooks to conference proceedings to magazines, I was struck by the disconnect between academic scholarship and on-the-ground activism. While academic journals often dominate library databases and pedagogical training, the resources produced by grassroots organizations remain marginalized and inaccessible. The more I went through these publications, one comment from a paper I read stuck to mind about academia’s disconnect with on-the-ground work, “as if nothing has changed on the ground.” None of these books or articles in these handbooks, conference proceedings, radical aesthetic magazines, etc., would pull up in a search engine when we do our research. Only academic journals or likewise academically legible resources get the legitimacy to be part of library databases and, in turn, part of our pedagogical training and research.

So if you want to know what’s being done by organizations on the ground, you have to know the organization, check its website and work. In contrast, you can use keywords to pull up articles on academic research without knowing the researcher or journal name in advance. We assume we have found the divine literature gap when nothing comes up on these search engine results on our question. And why won’t we since the on-the-ground produced resources aren’t similarly centralized and accessible to us? Time is limited in our capitalist hustle culture. We have to churn out more work for work’s sake.

It raises questions for me on: How do we inform our research with praxis, how do we reduce the academia-activist gap, how do we legitimize work of activists and organizations as theory, when our academic institutions structurally limit such intellectual engagement? And likewise when activists and organizations consider theory arm-chair rambling? The disconnect is jarring. This disparity raises critical questions about how we inform research with praxis, reduce the academia-activist gap, and legitimize the work of activists and organizations as theoretical contributions.

As I am wrapping up my last semester of MA program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and starting to look for work and imagining what kind of work I want to do, the desire to keep this particular dilemma in mind of bridging the activist-academia divide remains an ever-present thought. Do I want to be a scholar-activist or an activist-scholar or neither or both? Let’s see what feminist futures await.

Analyzing CWGL’s resource center material also brought to light the pervasive exclusions present within academic discourse. As a Pakistani graduate student in an American classroom, I have experienced firsthand the challenge of advocating for the inclusion of non-Anglo American perspectives. The labor often falls on us, the outsiders, to educate the white classrooms. If your people don’t have epistemic or geopolitical power, your thought is probably not taught here, and without your physical presence actively championing its inclusion, it probably won’t be anytime soon. Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak have somewhat broken the barriers into conversations on South Asian thought. Gloria Anzaldua and Cherri Moranga have done the same for Latin America. But heterogeneity as peoples is largely absent in most discussions which centre the North American-European experience as the default human condition. In CWGL’s collection, I found books and reports from organizations working in and with many of these excluded people. We assume people aren’t producing theory and literature to discuss and debate in classrooms. But these thousands of titles said differently. Despite having these precious perspectives in our physical proximity at Rutgers, the challenge to make space for them in our classrooms is foreshadowed by poor funding to social sciences, shadow banning gender and sexuality rights research, teaching and work, and a neo-liberal university who structurally couldn’t care less. Inclusion is for college brochures.

However, CWGL’s collection serves as a testament to the wealth of knowledge produced by marginalized communities around the world. From organizations working tirelessly to amplify these voices, I discovered a treasure trove of literature challenging dominant paradigms and enriching feminist discourse. Yet, the challenge lies in translating this wealth of knowledge into institutional change within academia, where funding constraints and neoliberal structures perpetuate exclusionary practices.

In light of CWGL’s recent closure by Rutgers University, the importance of preserving its legacy and advocating for its invaluable contributions to feminist activism cannot be overstated. I was deeply honored to play a small part in safeguarding CWGL’s resources for future generations. By analyzing decades of advocacy work, I hoped to ensure that the spirit of transnational feminist solidarity continues to inspire and empower activists around the world.

In conclusion, my experience curating the CWGL exhibition and analyzing its resource collection has been a journey of discovery, reflection, and reaffirmation. However, this reaffirmation of feminist values is not just owed to the archives, but the active, warm, kindness of Kayo Denda, Ezra Downs and Nicole Blemur. It was only in the continuous presence of beautiful feminist community that I was able to explore the archives and the exhibition with the joyful gusto that I did. I am truly grateful to have been able to work alongside them all, and I owe the beauty of these few months to them first and foremost.

From L-R: Nicole Blemur, Maira Asif, Ezra Downs, Kayo Denda & Radhika Balakrishnan.

Kayo Denda, Radhika Balakrishnan & Charlotte Bunch.

The first project was a multiple parts project for the retirement of Professor Mary E. Hawkesworth, a distinguished professor in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Rutgers University. I created the event program and the PowerPoint Presentation using design elements, book cover images of books authored and edited by Professor Hawkesworth, and images from her significant career accomplishments. The event posters used the images of the front (right) and the back (left) covers of the event program below.

The second project consisted of a set of Douglass Library’s signage with the purpose of orienting the students and visitors to their desired destinations, including study rooms, bathrooms, and computer labs, in order to enhance their experience in the library. The colors used are bright, warm, and welcoming to the visitors, with easy to understand and straight forward information, perfect for everyone.

The third project was a collaboration with a fellow co-worker Merna Ahmed, an amazing design student and friend. We designed the user manual for the new presentation technology in the Mabel Smith Douglass Room, with easy to understand, and clear step-by-step guide of setting up and using the new devices in the room.

The fourth project consisted of the creation a poster about the former Douglass College Dean Margery Somers Foster, as a way of honoring her legacy and accomplishments. I used photos from her deanship years from the yearbooks and archives.  The color palette of the poster is on a pastel side, and I used the existing decorative patterns in the room creating a sense of harmony to the room.

 The fifth project is a bookplate for the Celebration of Scholarship 2020 event that was scheduled in the Margery Somers Foster Center, but it was cancelled due to the novel coronavirus. However, the design is still relevant. The picture of the MSFC that I took depicts the beautiful room and an environment that makes the Center a great place to study, learn, and relax as well.

(Post by Laura Gonzalez)

I am a graduate student in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, in the Master of Information program. My concentration is in Archives and Preservation and in the future I hope to work in as an archivist or a records manager, in a non-profit organization or government. My goal in creating these workshops was to blend instruction on information resources, with opportunities for communication and art creation for students. I have a background in the arts and art history, and when I was an undergraduate student working as a resident advisor, my supervisor used to tell us that our programs for residents could look and taste figuratively like cotton candy, but that we needed to disguise a nugget of education in the center of that, to try and pass along to the students. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to do something similar with these workshops through the Margery Somers Foster Center. I hope participants will walk away with some tangible skills and ideas to reflect on, but ideally really enjoy themselves and feel inspired along the way.

Without further ado, here is the Fall 2020 Workshop lineup!

Exploring Google Street View: Learn Landscape Drawing with Virtual Mediation and Metadata 

Thursday, September 17, 2020, 7:00-8:15PM

Registration for Exploring Google Street View: Learn Landscape Drawing with Virtual Mediation and Metadata.

“Weeding” Books and Creating Your Own Blackout Poetry

Thursday, October 15, 2020, 7:00-8:15PM

Registration for “Weeding” Books and Creating Your Own Blackout Poetry.

Augmented Reality: Bring Your Resumé and other Projects to Life with Zappar

Thursday, November 12, 2020,  7:00-8:15PM

Registration for Augmented Reality.

A reunion of sorts was held on October 25, 2018 for the “dink dykes” of Douglass College (DC). In “Dink Dykes: Lesbian Culture at Douglass College, 1967-1977,” Kay Turner (DC Class of 1971) facilitated a roundtable discussion with Douglass graduates to reflect on the lesbian culture that emerged at and around the women’s college in the 1960s and 1970s. The panelists were Adria Evans (DC ’71), Barbara Lee (DC ’72), Gail Walker (DC ’73), Paula Schorr (DC ’74), Joanne Fuccello (DC ’75), and Rue Watson (DC ’77). Their former classmates at Douglass College, faculty and staff members, and current Rutgers students made up the audience.

Kay posed questions to Adria, Barbara, and Paula about their experiences at Douglass and Joanne, Gail, and Rue responded to these stories. The topics Kay presented to the women on the panel were cultural creativity driven by lesbians on-campus and off, Douglass campus politics, sex and love, faculty and staff allies, connections to evolving gay culture and political activism, local businesses, and post-college social bonding. The discussion began with discussions of each woman’s unique coming out process and the role the Douglass College played in understanding their sexuality. Barbara described her early moments at Douglass as “this time of change that everyone was going through” and many of the other women shared this sentiment.

Speakers invited to campus seemed particularly important to the lesbian culture of Douglass College in the 1960s and 1970s. Joanne described the importance of Adrienne Rich on staff at Douglass College. Visits to campus by Rita Mae Brown and Anne Sexton were particularly important to Ruth’s time at Douglass. Kay remembered a talk with Margaret Mead. Carol Sanchez was the woman behind many of these influential events. Ruth described Carol Sanchez as “the patron saint of Douglass lesbians.” Carol directed the Voorhees Assembly Board and worked with Douglass students to bring in many of the speakers and artists the women described as important to their own development and the lesbian culture of Douglass College. Gail stressed not only the importance of bonds with each other as lesbians at Douglass College, but also supportive relationships with faculty and staff. Geoffrey Hendricks from the Art Department and Gordon Clanton, Christine Downing, and William Doty from the Religion Department were named as especially supportive faculty members. Janet Yocum and Joan Hayward, in attendance at the event, were also highlighted as important Douglass administrators who supported the panelists during this time. Janet described the dissonance faced by herself and other administrators who wanted to support and accept the lesbians of Douglass College but did not want outside students to think Douglass was a “lesbian school.” “The lesbian community contributed way more to the college than the population at large” according to Joan and this declaration was met with a round of applause.

Music and the arts scene at Douglass College played an important role in the lives of the women during their time at the college. Paula discussed the importance of the New Haven Women’s Rock Band, where she saw a same sex couple kissing publicly for the first time, and Lavender Jane Loves Women. A show for the latter group was particularly important when a male attendee disrupted the performance and in response Kay shouted, “I’m a lesbian.” Paula and Kay both saw this as a turning point where the gay women of Douglass began to use and embrace the term on campus. Barbara discussed the founding of their own all-lesbian band, Slip of the Tongue, at Douglass College and their first performance outside of Gramercy Books on Church Street in New Brunswick. Paula described the bands, the Oral Tradition and the Lesbosonic Funk Force, and the power she felt when singing openly about gay love with the band. Many of the women contributed to Watermark, the Douglass literary magazine, and Kay’s journal Lady Unique: Inclination of the Night. The labor that the women put into writing, publishing, and distributing Lady Unique was an important bonding activity remembered by both panelists and some audience members.

The “Dink Dykes” discussion ended with audience members discussing the impact of the panelists and the lesbian culture that emerged and flourished between 1967 and 1977.

A full recording of the event is available.

Please contact Rutgers University Libraries if you would like to discuss donating materials related to lesbian culture at Douglass College.

This post was written by Dan Delmonaco, Graduate Specialist with the Margery Somers Foster Center.

Could you tell us where we are now and where are you from?

I owned and lived in this house since 1982. This house was home and social place for many of the New Brunswick Gay and Lesbian community members, and over the years, lots of people lived here. I was a DJ and in that role with music and dancing being a MAJOR social aspect of the Lesbian and Gay Community in that era. Dance parties and dance clubs were the primary places people relied upon for socializing, networking, along with the dissemination of pertinent information. My role promoting and throwing events for dances and parties is why I had the privilege to know so many people and to be involved in so much of the community activities.

My family was from Washington DC where I lived until I was twelve years old. My parents were looking for a summer home in Wildwood, New Jersey near Cape May. But during the sixties nobody would sell a house in Wildwood to Blacks. My parents learned from the realtor that many Blacks lived in McKee City, and they could buy a house there. We gave up on Wildwood and headed to McKee City, which is fifteen miles inland from Atlantic City. Many Blacks lived on the other side of the train tracks, but my mother refused to join them. After purchasing a bungalow on the right side of the train tracks, my father bought the chicken farm across the street, where I lived before attending Douglass.

What was your major at Douglass College?

My major was American Studies and I sort of minored in art, with a focus on photography. I was really into photography and enjoyed taking pictures all the time. I thought it was wonderful. I also thought American Studies was a great major. Professor David Burrows, from English Department, was great and open to students of all sexualities. Professor Burrows taught a Photo Essay course in which the students in pairs took photos of each other and wrote an essay or a poem about each other. I loved it!  He had a professional photo studio in Princeton. With his encouragement and guidance, I took many pictures of campus events and people. His class was certainly a safe place for lesbians.

Were you aware of the Student Homophile League at Rutgers?

Yes, once I was at Douglass, I was affiliated with the Gay Alliance, which later became Gay and Lesbian Alliance. If something good and fun in terms of social event was happening organized by the Alliance, everyone would attend the event. In addition to social events, the Alliance did outreach to different communities to increase understanding and to end discrimination of gays and lesbians. I did volunteer for a few sessions. I got the courage to participate in the outreach to the State Troopers. We lesbian students wore dresses and tried to look feminine just like your next-door neighbor girl. We felt that it was important to show the troopers that we were  ordinary and not threatening. My dad was a policeman, and I was comfortable with law enforcement officers. I wanted to help them understand that we were pretty normal people.

What effect did Stonewall have on you?

I think it was major impact for me because I found my community at the university. Coming to Rutgers not long after Stonewall, people were energized from it and established the Homophile League. I came to Douglass just by luck. The girl I was in love with in high school was coming to Douglass, which prompted me to apply. No one in my family had gone to college, so I knew nothing about college. If this girl had gone to a typing school, I would have followed her there. It was just the luck of the draw. I was following her around like a little puppy when I first came to Douglass. After the first three months at Douglass we grew apart and didn’t see much of each other. I found “my people.” She was into fraternities and was looking for a boyfriend.

How did your family take it when you came out to them?

I came out in high school during “The Supremes” concert at Chez Paree on New York Avenue in Atlantic City. My friend R had invited me to go with him to the concert. I was impressed and excited about this! The show started and these women who looked like “The Supremes” were singing. There was something quite different about this Supremes group…as it turns out, they were drag queens and they were incredible! I had never seen anything like that! R looks at me and goes” I’m gay” and I look at him and I go “me too.”  That is when I came out. R and I are still friends to this day.

When I came out, it was hard at first with my family. My mother said “you’ll be better off dead” and we didn’t talk for a while, maybe almost a year. But the reason why I have this house is because after they accepted my sexuality, they said “you are never going to have a husband and we need to get you a house so that you have a roof over your head.”

What kind of LGBTQ reading material was out there at the time you were in college?

I can’t explain it and don’t know how exactly it happened, but I was reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir in high school. It might have been a suggestion from my high school English teacher Ms. M, and she might have given it to me. Otherwise I am not sure how an African-American girl living in the countryside on a farm came by this book, but I read it and it was so informative. It helped me understand the fact that I was a woman, gay and Black, and I had to form my own identity.  There were so many negative opinions about Black people and most likely many people held negative opinions about gay people. I knew I was not a bad person and the gay people I knew were not bad either, so I pulled all that together. And reflecting on that book, I carved out an ideology that the powers that be, men in power especially, want to have you think negatively about women, and anyone who they deem to be different a threat. I was a good person, and as a woman, and Black and now a gay person. I was not going to be oppressed by or buy into the negative stereotypes that were being framed for me to take on. The book had a great impact on me.

I came to Rutgers in the summer of 1973, before college, as an EOF student to take classes in math. I lived in one of the river dorms on College Avenue Campus before moving to Douglass Campus. I went to Alexander Library and searched for “homosexuality” in the card catalog and found the name of Rita Mae Brown. I also learned of a place called “Village” in New York with many gays and lesbians.  I got on a bus and I went by myself to find the “Village.” Just by chance, I saw in front of a firehouse a sign that Rita Mae Brown along with now famous lesbian couple and activists Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon were doing a reading.

As it turns out the firehouse was a gay center in the Village. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were the founders of the organization Daughters of Bilitis and its magazine The Ladder. They also wrote the book Lesbian/Woman which was a staple of every lesbian library. This book provides useful tips for people who came out as a lesbian, on how to host a pot luck dinner for networking and how to receive a copy of Lesbian/woman. It was an amazing day. I had no idea what Rita Mae Brown looked like and had my breath taken away as she did not look like any of the drag queens down on New York Ave in Atlantic City. Rita Mae Brown was quite beautiful! Poised and well dressed. She was also very down to earth and earnest. I introduced myself and we kept in touch.

In the fall, Rita Mae Brown invited me for other events in New York City.  She sent me an invitation to the launch of her book Rubyfruit jungle, which was in a loft in the “Village.” I went there with two friends. It was an exciting loft party with distinguished lesbians and cool people that made us feel less isolated and alone. And then Rita Mae gave us a copy of the book and signed it. What an amazing evening to get invited! I look back now and see it as a pivotal literary event—the publishing of one of the most iconic lesbian novels of all time, which became an overnight success with women everywhere of all persuasions. In 1977, Rita Mae Brown came to Douglass as a speaker thanks to the Vorhees Assembly Board [the Douglass Student Organization].