Archival Work

Digital archival materials were obtained from the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA). DTA is “an international collaboration among more than sixty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections” hosted by Northeastern University in Boston, USA (Digital Transgender Archive, n.d.). This project has over 10,000 digitized artifacts, such as newspaper clippings, photographs, newsletters, periodicals, ephemera, oral histories, and finding aids for physical archives. Artifacts contain searchable metadata about their genre (e.g., oral history, newsletters, photographs), creator, topic(s), date of creation, geographic location, and more.

Within DTA, I identified 64 artifacts tagged with Internet- and digital-related terms. Most artifacts are text-based; all audio-based artifacts, such as oral histories, had accompanying transcripts. Drawing from Stefan Timmerman and Iddo Tavory's cutting-edge work in research analysis, I am currently conducting an abductive analysis of these textual artifacts.