Category: Uncategorized
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Preserving (a bit) of Our Queer History Online: Yahoo! Groups
EDIT: A page with further details on the project and methods is now up at the Queer Digital History Project. I’ll admit, I haven’t though much about Yahoo! Groups in the past ten years or so. Much like other early formats, they’d slipped into what I mentally lumped into the loose category of “legacy” products–still…
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Seeking Interviewees: GenderLine/Prodigy/GEnie Participants
I’m looking to conduct informal informational interviews with folks who, during the mid 1980s into the 1990s, were active on any of these services: Compuserve’s (aka CIS) GenderLine forum Prodigy (pre or post the closure of the “Frank Discussions” forum) GEnie (such as the GEnie Girls). I’m hoping to learn more about the structure of…
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Announcing my new DH project: the Queer Digital History Project!
I’m happy to announce the public launch of a site I’ve been working on the past few months: the Queer Digital History Project, which collects and catalogs the history of LGBTQ communities and discussion online roughly pre-2010, but especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Currently, it has a growing catalog of early LGBTQ communities online…
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Archiving Usenet: Adopting an Ethics of Care
(Cross-posted from the MITH blog.) “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Most folks have no doubt encountered this adage, coined in a 1993 New Yorker cartoon, through one of the many, many cultural riffs and references, or maybe in a reproduction of the original cartoon. The idea, of course, represents public perceptions about…
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Listening for the Static
(Cross-posted from the MITH blog.) As you can guess from my last post, I’ve been relying heavily on the Python email and mailbox modules (which inherits many functions from email) to process and analyse the Usenet collections. Instead of having to manually sift through each message, the parser identifies key information, logs it in a…
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Visualizing Poster Activity on Usenet
(Cross-posted from the MITH blog.) One of the biggest challenges of working with Usenet Archives is their sheer size. For my five newsgroup collections, the average message count is between roughly 50,000 to 100,000 per archive. (To place that in context to recent news stories, presidential candidate HIllary Clinton’s private email server held 62,320 total…
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Contextualizing the Usenet Archives
For my first detailed post about the Transgender Usenet Archive project, I wanted to provide a bit more background about online trans spaces during this time period and Usenet overall. While some of this information may already be familiar to some folks, hopefully, this post will also give some more context for the cultural moment the…
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Call for NCA Panel Participants: Trans* and Queer Discourse
I’m looking to put together a panel on trans* and queer discourse for the 2016 National Communication Association (NCA) convention in Philadelphia (Nov. 10-13, 2016); specifically, I’d be submitting to the GLBTQ Communication Studies Division. The panel’s specific focus and rationale with be shaped by the panelists, but it would broadly be about the creation…