Category: research
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Announcing the Transgender Usenet Archive!
I’m happy to announce that after almost a year of hard work, the Transgender Usenet Archive is now officially available for public use! You can search the archive for any single word or two word phrase, and searches can be filtered by newsgroup or post publication year. By default, all searches are case sensitive, but…
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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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“If it gets us talking, it can’t be bad:” Building the Transgender Usenet Archive
(Cross-posted from the MITH blog.) “If only one life is saved by the creation of this group, wouldn’t it be worth it? It’s only a communications medium, and people are needlessly losing their lives and wasting their potential in self-destructive, maladaptive, denial-bases coping strategies. The loss to our society is great, and needless…If it gets…
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Trans Internet Use Study Call for Participants
I’m currently working on a qualitative study on trans folks’ internet use. I’ve included the official Call for Participants below. If you would be interested, please let me know at the email address below. Thanks! – I am Avery Dame, a doctoral student in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am recruiting individuals…
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Writing Interlude: Approaching “community”
The big writing roadblock, lately, has been understanding just what “community” is, and how it functions for the folks in my data set. Is it a social space? Is it an entity on its own? If you can “belong” to it, does that mean it functions like a collective membership category? If so, what are…
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Building a Vlogger Network on YouTube: A Visualization
One of the problems I’ve run across in working with YouTube is that its social network elements are tied us with its primary function as a platform for user-generate content (UGC). This content is also primarily user-filtered, based around the idea of “tags.” Presumably, a YouTube user “subscribes” to another’s videos because of the content.…