This project started life in late 2019 as a bit of fun by a handful of feminist scholars - Quinn Dombrowski, Katia Bowers, Roopika Risam, Maria Cecire, me, and a little later Lee Skallerup Bessette - whose overlapping backgrounds in library science, modern languages, English literature, digital humanities and children’s literature turned out to be surprisingly handy when it came to turning a simultaneously critical and nostalgic lens onto a young adult fiction series we had all read and felt ourselves to be shaped by as girls and teenagers in the 1980s and 1990s: Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club. Quinn, our inexhaustible and endlessly creative Kristy, describes how the project got started on the chapter 2 section of our website.

Since then, the Data-Sitters Club has gathered considerable momentum, winning places in two categories in the 2019 DH Awards, being featured in Inside Higher Ed (and subsequently picked up by BookRiot), and getting a lot of love on Twitter for Quinn’s gallery of covid-19 public service announcements which pastiche BSC book covers. At this point (April 2020), we have seven ‘books’ in total: four in the regular series - of which #4, AntConc Saves the Day, is my contribution - and three in the Multilingual Mysteries series which investigates translations of the books. It’s a project I’m very happy to be part of: it’s an example of feminist pedagogy in action, it embodies the digital humanities ethos of openness and accessibility, it’s a reminder of the importance of taking popular culture seriously, and we see it bringing joy on a regular basis to those who discover it on Twitter, at a time when joy is in short supply. I am drafting my next DSC book, on some compellingly weird BSC-esque prose generated by a neural network, so that should be out over the next little while: stay tuned to #DataSittersClub for more.