This article analyzes a one-month, intensive digital collections lab focused on queer and trans community history, in partnership with the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, and based at Toronto’s The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBQT+ Archives. This collaboration between ten intergenerational scholars and two community organizations produced three digital exhibitions, focusing on post-1945 Toronto-based queer and trans activist history: Not a Place on the Map: The Desh Pardesh Project, an oral history project about the queer South Asian diasporic arts and culture festival Desh Pardesh (1988 - 2001); the Foolscap Gay Oral History Project, a 1980s community-based oral history project of Toronto gay life pre Stonewall; and gendertrash from hell, an early 1990s zine published by transsexual artists, sex workers, and activists Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillipa McKay. In analyzing our work within the context of radical pedagogy and critical DH practice, we focus on how we mapped spaces, (dis)inherited metadata, and designed interfaces that would offer tactile, affective engagements with these histories. We analyze our work through the lens of trans(affective)mediation, an approach that understands the conversion of analog to digital objects for online archives in relationship to anti-racist trans studies, affect, and the collaborative potential of community-engaged DH. We argue that this concept offers queer and trans community-based DH scholars and practitioners a means of challenging the ways in which white, cis-normativity is naturalized within both LGBTQ+ community archives and digital humanities tools and practices.
Brown et al. (Wed,) studied this question.