For Journalists, Researchers & Institutions

What Herstory Offers Researchers

Herstory is a structured, searchable archive of women's stories analysed for emotional and thematic content. Unlike traditional archives, it organises material by meaning — motifs, threads, and corrections — rather than by date or geography alone.

This makes it uniquely valuable for:

• Women's and gender studies — longitudinal analysis of recurring themes in women's experience
• Digital humanities — a living example of AI-assisted narrative analysis at scale
• Oral history — motherline and ancestral stories preserved in structured form
• Sociology — patterns of care, silence, courage, and belonging across cultures
• Journalism — data-driven stories about what women are experiencing now and how it echoes history

Available Data

The following are publicly available through the Herstory website:

• Story excerpts — short, anonymised fragments (never full stories)
• Motif analysis — which emotional motifs recur and how they change over time
• Thread maps — how meaning-threads connect stories across centuries
• Correction panels — how women's stories reframe dominant historical narratives
• Unnamed Women section — stories of women whose names were never recorded
• Archive statistics — story counts, motif frequencies, era distributions

The AI Model

Herstory uses Claude AI (by Anthropic) for narrative analysis. The AI identifies:

• Emotional motifs (from a vocabulary of 20 defined motifs)
• Emotional arcs (rising, steady, turning point, contracting)
• Relational context (self, mother, grandmother, ancestor, collective)
• Cultural echoes (connections to historical figures, movements, and events)
• Thread contributions (how a story adds to a broader meaning-thread)

The AI does not judge, rank, or evaluate stories. It identifies structure and connection.

Ethics & Methodology

All stories are shared voluntarily. Contributors choose their level of anonymity. The archive shows excerpts only — never full stories, never identifying details. There are no comments, no profiles, and no engagement metrics.

Herstory is designed to resist the extractive patterns common in digital platforms. Stories are not content to be consumed — they are meaning to be witnessed.

Search the Archive

Use the search function to explore stories by keyword, motif, era, or reference. The motifs page provides a visual overview of emotional frequencies across time.