Faculty Research Fellows Lunch with Estelle Freedman

Estelle Freedman: A Retrospective “Me Too”?: Sexual Assault and Harassment in Women’s Oral History Narratives

Can large-scale data analysis help map historical memories of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse? In studying the centuries before #MeToo, historians have little access to women’s responses to sexual violence beyond the small subset within legal cases. What might the thousands of women’s oral history narratives conducted since the 1970s and digitized in the past decade reveal? The Stanford Oral History Text Analysis Project (OHTAP) is developing methods to organize, analyze, and interpret these transcripts through digital humanities tools, asking about the changing language and meanings of sexual assault across diverse groups and regions.

Estelle Freedman is Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History.