CAMSandi Toksvig (Girton 1977) is the first Qantabrigian Q+ Fellow Sociology and a Bye-Fellow at Christ’s.
Mapping the world of great women and their incredible stories
Sandi Toksvig (Girton 1977) discusses the Mappa Mundi project.
Published on:
24 July 2024
What do you have to do to be a ‘notable’ woman on Wikipedia, that supposed repository of all the world’s knowledge? After all, the eminent Canadian physicist Donna Strickland was deemed not ‘notable’ enough to have her own entry. Contributors kept writing and posting the page, and it would then disappear, in what’s known as a ‘drive-by deletion’. This kept happening right up until the day that Strickland won the Nobel Prize. There you go, women: if you want to be ‘notable’ on Wikipedia, just win a Nobel Prize.
It’s certainly notable that Wikipedia is 80% by, and about, white men. And it is, of course, not the only place where women are erased. Take the film Oppenheimer. So many amazing women living interesting lives are given no background or hardly noticed at all. Imagine what it must have been like to be one of the youngest female scientists at Los Alamos – yet acclaimed chemist and feminist activist Lilli Hornig apparently merits only one line.
I have decided this is not OK. But what to do? Initially, I considered writing an atlas. But you can’t fit all the world’s women into a single book. Then I met Professor Sarah Franklin in the Department of Sociology, who founded the Qantabrigian Fellowship: it enables distinguished Cambridge LGBTQ+ alumni to spend time at the University to conduct a research project or incubate a new idea. I’m now honoured to be the first Q+ Fellow. And with the help of Professor Alan Blackwell in the Department of Computer Science, we are creating Mappa Mundi.
The name is inspired by a map from 1300 – the Ebstorf Mappa Mundi, created by the nuns of a monastery in Ebstorf, Germany. Three metres square, the Mappa Mundi is a piece of art showing what the nuns thought the world contained. I want to do that again – but online. In our Mappa Mundi, you’ll be able to click on an interactive globe to watch and listen to women speaking about their lives. You’ll see the data about how they live, and access information about great, overlooked women of the countries you click on – historians, scientists, musicians and artists. It will be curated in each country by the women of that country. And the support of feminist men will also be critical to the project.
Lilli Hornig died in 2017. She is not ancient history. Yet if we’re not careful, women like her will continue to disappear from the historical record – or be remembered simply as a single line from a film. That’s not good for society. The fact is, women have not achieved equality in a single country in this world. And it’s better for everybody if we have equality. If you have diversity everywhere, everybody does better. I’m trying to change the world by changing how we look at it.
Wikipedia is 80% by, and about, white men. It is, of course, not the only place where women are erased. I have decided this is not OK.
But we must do it properly. There is no way we can create Mappa Mundi as a crowdsourced free-for-all: the website would be destroyed within an hour of going live. So we need funding to hire a small group of people who can give this project the attention it requires. We need to find more ways to give the project academic rigour. And we need a board of trustees, as the aim is for Mappa Mundi to become a foundation. Right now, it’s just me trying to do everything. That includes sitting in wonderful computer science meetings mostly not understanding what anyone is saying.
So, let’s make it happen. I’ve been stunned by the reaction to the project, and I’ve been swamped with offers of help. Recently, I spoke to a group at Newnham. I assumed they’d ask me about The Great British Bake Off. Nobody did – all the questions were about Mappa Mundi. But now I have to find a way of achieving it, of creating this vast repository of amazing women and data and stories and using it to drive equality. And I think we can do that at Cambridge. After all, if we can’t do it here, where can we do it?
To find out more about supporting the Mappa Mundi project, please contact: rosalind.griffin@admin.cam.ac.uk
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