Multimedia Trans History Archives

June

June

It began with a desire (and a coping mechanism): in general, but especially in these times, I yearn deeply to be able to connect with my trans ancestry and culture, and I've been exploring what that means and how to foster it (and bookmarking and downloading everything 0_0). In my exploration of that topic, I've run into a number of facets of trans existence that act as obstacles to this particular pursuit.

First, historical material is rather scant. Trans people as a group do not have distinct cuisines, homelands, languages (with the exception of cants, or underground slang), historical buildings, religious practices, craft practices, aesthetic traditions, or culturally transmitted stories. Additionally, the material that has existed has often been destroyed.

Second, the distribution of trans people in the world is diffuse and unconnected. We appear in all places, at all times, and at relatively low rates. With rare exceptions, trans people grow up knowing no other trans people and have to search, cautiously, to find connection and community. Such a distribution inhibits cultural transmission and prevents interpersonal exchanges from snowballing into a larger body of culture.

HOWEVER! ^_^ There does exist a large body of historical pictures of people, newspaper clippings, zines, and digitally recorded oral history interviews. I'm not exactly sure how to best go about treating the first two categories of material. Pictures of people feel sensitive and possibly private (and I struggle with creative visual design). The newspaper clippings are … often quite painful to read. The zines and oral histories, on the other hand, were meant to be spread and were so, so beautiful.

I have been collecting queer and trans zines and oral histories and want to serve them up to people using self-hosted servers and non-traditional access methods and network topologies. To start, I want to post a QR code at my favorite trans space, Worker's Tap, which hosts a Trans Social Night every Friday.

Project Structure (TODO marked with **):

  • Oral History Archive
    • Yunohost server running AudioBookShelf app
    • Sources
    • We Who Feel Differently
    • NYC Trans Oral History Project
    • **LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory
    • **Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project
    • **Queer Appalachia Oral History Project
    • **Transas City
    • **UNC Story Archive
    • **Make it pretty
    • **Organization styles and finding aids
    • Tag system
      • Maybe user-defined like bandcamp
    • Webscraper in progress
  • Zine Archive
    • Yunohost server running Kavita app
    • Sources
    • QZAP - Queer Zine Archive Project
    • Queer.archive.work
    • **Queer Comics Database
    • **Queer Reads Library
    • **Shapeless Press (tiny NYC thing, love them)
    • **Organization styles and finding aids
    • Tag system
    • Webscraper in progress
  • **General Sources
    • The ArQuives
    • University of Victoria Transgender Archive
    • Digital Transgender Archive
  • **Interactive entry point
    • Single landing page for what might be multiple apps/pages
    • Paprika inspiration
  • **Submit / Get Involved
  • Further possibilities
    • Street Art
    • Bathroom Graffiti
    • Historical pictures
    • Interactive graffiti wall
    • Ascii?
    • Chats
    • Bbs
    • Q&A
    • Links to the wider queer internet

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As I'm embarking on this project, I also have a lot of concepts related to technology and media that I want to engage with. A common theme is that I like to view the entire world as a web of environments and evolutionary dynamics.

==TANGENT==

If you'll permit me to zoom out for a sec, I like to view the entire world as a deep series/web of environments and evolutionary dynamics. In a reductive sense, matter and energy flow to lower energy states, as described in the field of physics. From relatively stable states at the descriptive layer of physics, chemistry and chemical interaction form a slightly more complex domain with some simple evolutionary dynamics. Certain chemicals, for instance, catalyze the creation of more of itself, demonstrating basic self-replication. Layers of complexity and evolutionary domains continue to pile onto each other in the realms of biochemistry, biology, psychology, economics, and more. For this project in particular, I'm looking at technology, media, and information as evolutionary domains, and when I look at our technology and media environments today, I see an ecosystem that is mostly oriented at economic profit – the financial bottom line being the evolutionary bar that technology and media "species" are subject to and shaped by. But if your goal is not a commercial one, all sorts of other practical paths emerge, with tremendous potential yet to be explored.

==/TANGENT==

One direct example for my project is that I want to think of traits that would be evolutionarily advantageous for the information's survival, which is one of my principal goals. The first thing that came up for me was that it should self-replicate easily, and I interpret that meaning, "when someone wants to host a copy of this system or download the content, it should be as easy as possible (or with as few barriers as possible)". I ultimately want to make it so that the whole project could be flashed onto a storage device from a packaged image, which seems as plug-and-play as possible to me. In the end, having as many copies out in the world as possible is the safest way to ensure it transmits to the future.

Another example is that I want people to find it as easy to use as possible. If it's easier to use, it will have more users. If it has more users, it will both spread more and find more people who want to host or download it, so it eventually gets to the same goal as the previous example. The approach I'm taking on this is that I want whatever I'm serving up to be as palatable to modern media diets as possible. To do this, I want to emulate content delivery interfaces that have been developed by streaming services, which have the goal of being easy to use and engaging, although were developed for commercial ends. Evolutionarily, I also see this as a form of horizontal gene transfer.

In a similar vein, I want to be creative about finding aids and classification. Many archive searching tools feel dry, dead, and impenetrable, which is pretty discouraging if you're not hellbent on finding what you want. In the case of the oral histories in particular, I want people to be able to find interviews that could be important to them, more personally relatable than others, if no less fascinating. For instance, a friend of mine in Portland is ex-LDS (ex-Mormon), and I think someone in the same boat might really benefit from hearing the deeper story of someone like them.

Other concepts that I'm interested in focus less on usability. I'm fascinated by the idea of "soft gatekeeping." In most software systems today, gatekeeping is usually a simplified binary of who has been chosen to have access, via an account and password (or similar auth key). It can be employees who have access to business systems that others do not. It could also be customers who have paid for a service, and thus have access, in contrast to those who have not and do not have access. Much of the time there is no gatekeeping at all – the goal simply to reach as many people as possible for commercial ends. To me, the notion of soft gatekeeping is something that I'm borrowing from spaces that I like to exist in. Technically, there's nothing stopping anybody from entering a public commercial establishment (exceptions notwithstanding). However, in practice there is often a strong self-selection mechanism mediated by tastes and social dynamics. Queer hangouts tend to have queer (and at least accepting) folks, and very little antagonism. I trust the people there more. I trust the establishment more. Can such a thing be applied to a digital space as well? If the main way of accessing something is in a queer social space, will people feel more affinity towards the digital experience in front of them? There are many other forms of soft gatekeeping, like requiring someone to type out a social agreement before entering a space. I think, in a way, it might be weirder for a bigoted person to type out queer affirming statements as a requirement to enter a space. Or it might be educational or informative for a curious-but-uninformed person. Or welcoming and safe-feeling for the queer visitors themselves. I could be wrong about all of this, but I like speculating and hope more things really jump out at me eventually.

Lastly, these are all ideas that could help the information survive and spread connective experiences, but the other side of the coin is that so many of the behaviors that commercial entities cannot engage in (since it would hurt their goals) are now completely on the table. Who needs copyright if you don't care, if you just want it to spread as much as possible? Open collaboration. Communal ownership. Local hosting. None of these things are new inventions or ideas, but all of them hold some potential in the evolutionary landscape.