Good afternoon,

A technical Fem Friday for you this afternoon!

Please enjoy this write up of a project – more broadly about mapping the relationships of people in the 1500s-1700 – and the new categories of relationship that the team had to create to express how women related to and interacted with one another. I, for example, am currently in the relationship of “communicated poorly with” and “in disgrace with” at least two of my favourite colleagues, another beautiful example of women defining for themselves how they want to interact with one another.

The diagram below is a map of the relationships of Margaret Cavendish, who has featured in at least one previous Fem Friday:

What we found as we started entering new women into the SDFB database and tried to catalogue their relationships was that the existing relationship category options were inadequate for women. In other words, while “spouse of” and “child of” were still helpful, we were stuck when it came to more ambiguous (and, thus, more frequent) female network categories.[…] We needed a relationship category for “dedicated a work to” or “referenced in writing” or “wrote a poem about.” Similarly [.. w]e needed a relationship category for “served as midwife to.”

https://spinningwiththebraine.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/networking-women-digital-tools-and-the-archive/

Frequently, my regret in reading an obituary is not having heard of someone great while they were still alive. This obituary of Claire Gooding, journalist and hacker, is one of those:

While working as a programmer, she was challenged by a director of a South African bank to break into his "fully secure" IT system. [spoilers – ha ha ha]

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240054159/Former-CW-software-editor-loses-cancer-battle

Although I’m usually the first person to be cynical about new enterprise messaging systems, one reason why I quite like Slack is how publicly they commit to diversity in their hiring. There are some graphs and charts (mainly illustrating how far it still has to go) for those of you who like those sorts of things:

According to its own numbers, the company has [set] the bar for the industry in two measures: it employs the highest percentage of female engineers (and women in general) and black engineers at any tech company.

http://www.wired.com/2016/02/slack-wants-to-be-more-diverse-as-it-grows-fast/

Enjoy the long weekend if you have one,

Alex.