librarypunk - 118 - Queer Internet History feat. Dr. Alex Ketchum

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Download some sage jpegs and ponder the AI, we’re talking with Alex about queer Internet histories, LGBTQ2S+ archives, email archiving, feminist restaurants, and technopaganism. Be sure to check out the notes on this one! https://www.alexketchum.ca  Register for the Queer Food Conference:  https://www.queerfoodconference.com/p/registration.html Media mentioned https://www.lgbtqarchives.com/ Disrupting Disruptions: https://www.feministandaccessiblepublishingandtechnology.com/ Cait McKinney, Information Activism: https://www.dukeupress.edu/information-activism Deep Sniff: https://www.adamzmith.com/deep-sniff-poppers-book The Log Books: https://www.thelogbooks.org/ Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045926/the-distance-cure/ Google study [pdf]: https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf?ref=404media.co 40 years of magic on the web:  https://airtable.com/appBlKZqOs8ATBq6f/shr1SocSlfKqSP8YV   Report on the State of Resources Provided to Support Scholars Against Harassment, Trolling, and Doxxing While Doing Public Media Work:  https://medium.com/@alexandraketchum/report-on-the-state-of-resources-provided-to-support-scholars-against-harassment-trolling-and-401bed8cfbf1 Missing Datasets: https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets Moya Bailey, #transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000209/000209.html  The Historical Cooking Project: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com  The Feminist Restaurant Project: http://www.thefeministrestaurantproject.com 

I have here a note from my producer. We have some birthdays to read out. Happy birthday. Uh, uh... Shannon! Justin, I'm Skalkan Library, and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a music library director, and my pronouns are he, him.

Hi, I'm back. And we have a guest. Do I introduce yourself? Sure. super eager to do so. I'm Dr. Alex Ketchum. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm an assistant professor. I'm a Gill University's Institute for Gender Sexuality and Feminist Studies. Gender? What is it? Soviet Russia? I'm going to use that a lot. Take you anywhere. Great. So, Alex, you've sent me a lot of cool stuff to go over. Do you want to do your plugs up front? Because you have a lot of projects going on. And it might just be easier for you to tell people where to go to find everything we're going to talk about besides the show notes. For sure, yeah. So I think the easiest place is to go to Alexcatcham.cahom. That's my personal website, my Instagram's Dr. Alex Ketchum. My Twitter X is A Ketchum 22, but I'm not using that as much anymore. But I think we're going to talk about some of my different projects, but most of them are embedded within my main website. And there's links to my lab and everything like that there, as well as links to my books. So we're going to talk about queer internet history. We're going to do internet culture.

which I don't think we've done in a while. I feel like just internet culture stuff has been a while. We used to do it a lot more. I can't remember what we do episodes on. There's over 116. Where should we start? You reached out to us with the LGBTQ Archives project and asked if we could mention it on the podcast.

Do you want to tell me about that project and how it got started? For sure. So for folks listening, the LGBTQarchives.com is a directory of every LGBTQ. 2S plus archive in the U.S. and Canada. So it builds off of the Lavender Legacy's project from the Society of American Archivist, but that hadn't been updated since 2012. And so I want to create an updated directory of archives that are specifically queer archives.

So either community archives or sometimes if community archives entered a larger collection, and then there's another database of archives that also have large collections of queer materials. And so I had created this database or directory for my own research because I needed to contact every queer archive in the U.S. and Canada is part of another project I was doing. And I thought, why not make this publicly available so others can make use of it? Very cool. Yeah. Was there anything that you found, any sort of like trends you found in like LGBTQ2S plus archives? Like we've talked with like the leather archive and the way that they got founded through like basically like one or two people just donating a. a ton of stuff and then a community kind of keeping it going. Do you see any trends with

queer archives? Yeah, I mean, in general, queer archives tend to be started by a few interested folks in their communities. A lot started out of HIV, AIDS, and folks that were passing away and people wanting to save their materials, so their family went throw it away. And so that's how many of them got started, although there's actually been a big push to create a lot of oral history projects that have then started to lead to people to collect more material objects as well. And then there's been more collecting on the part of kind of larger universities and some collecting from state and provincial archives now attending to that deficit that they had in their materials after so many years. But we kind of see ebbs and flows of some of the

community archives. Their material is then being absorbed by other archives over time when the main people that were kind of driving the push to lead the community archive, either burnt out or needed to pass on the responsibilities. Yeah. With the oral histories, so you're talking about collections that started as oral history projects and then started adding materials because I find it's usually the other way around, isn't it? You kind of have someone's junk and then you're like, well, we've got to contextualize it. Yeah, so I think it's been going both ways.

I think for some of the archives that started out really focused on kind of white, gay, cis male materials, which was the case for quite a few archives. They've been trying to amplify their collections by having oral histories, especially of groups that they didn't have physical materials of. But I've also started to find that there are some projects where like one or two people started to do oral histories and then people want to start giving them materials. So then they're like, oh, now we have some physical materials as well. So these are some kind of growing projects. And one thing, if people visit LGBTQarchives.com, they'll see the kind of two different lists. And for the one list that I have, that's kind of other materials, there's also links to oral history projects as well. And the LGBTQ digital collaboratory also has a list of ongoing queer, trans, oral history projects. And I found through some of those, there's been some collecting of physical materials. But no matter what, it's always hard to kind of create these directories because it's like what counts as an LGBTQ, like specific archive or, you know, like if it is part of a larger collection, some of those things are harder.

to delineate. Like, you mentioned the leather archives, and I include it because of their large collecting of queer materials, but any definitional, like, designations are always kind of a challenge. So I've tried to be kind of capacious in this collection, because the whole point is I want people to be able to find resources that they need. And like I mentioned, the Lavender Legacies was a really great resource, but it just hadn't been updated in over a decade. Actually, I'm curious with, I've seen a lot of stuff that you're doing research on, but what? What about your teaching? Do you get to actually talk about this stuff in your instruction? Yeah, I do. So I teach a lot of queer survey courses, feminist studies, survey courses. And so I really

want my students to do research. So I oftentimes bring in archivists from our community. So I have some official archival training. I've been doing a certificate in digital archives management over the last few years. But I'm trained as a historian and I really value the role of archivists in our community. So I live in Montreal, and we have the archive gay to Quebec and the Ashib Lesbian Archives of Quebec and Lesbian Archives of Quebec. They're two separate organizations. And so I bring in archivists from those organizations to come and talk to my students. And then I also bring my students to those archives. And I also have them do assignments with digitized archives as well. So it's been amazing to have students work with these materials and some

of them have built exhibits and then big research projects out of it. So it's been really amazing to be able collaborate with those local organizations and also with the digitized we can look from around the world. Yeah, I want to return to the exhibits thing because I've worked in around doing digital exhibits before and it's always tricky. So I want to get back to that. Oh, I also realize something that would probably make sense because you had brought up the internet history part. The like big driving force behind making this directory I mentioned it was related to my own research. And part of it was that I want to see how queer archives, in particular, were dealing with emails and how they were archiving emails, because that's been a really important resource for my own research on queer internet histories.

I printed out emails in particular. So I had sent survey to different, basically I sent to every queer archive in the U.S. and candidates to understand how they were doing with emails. What did you find overall? Because I would, I would recommend printing in a lot of situations. Yeah, so many of them had no policies regarding emails. It was really common in the 90s and basically until about 2002 for archives to print out emails even sent to them. I mean, I think there's just a larger culture of printing emails, but some of them continue to print some emails and through doing this process, a lot of them decided to also start to print more emails because many of them

don't have the resources, like their community archives, they don't have the resources to have digital archives. Some of them have a little bit, but, you know, what's oftentimes recommended for email archiving just isn't available to these community archives. And as a researcher from that perspective, it has been so valuable to find this printed correspondence. And so we have this kind of gap where people haven't been printing emails and they haven't been digitally archiving the emails. And so, you know, we've just lost a lot of that kind of correspondence. So I think that's going to be something that's going to be a huge challenge for researchers in the future. future too. Especially with the news that like Google is going to start like purging old accounts that

like people aren't logging in anymore. It's like there's probably a lot that's in that as well. Then we'll just be like lost. Yeah, definitely. And I've been an issue too earlier on with other email service providers was that there was a way smaller limit on your inbox or in your folders. And so people just delete it a lot. But like I've been able to benefit from folks who printed so many things. You know, maybe they could have toned it down on how much they were printing because they would print every single reply and then it would just, you know, like every link in the chain. But, you know, it's amazing to not just see the events that folks are talking about, but also the different listservs they were on. And so even like listservs from BBS, like bulletin board systems and stuff

like that. So, and because I'm interested in queer internet histories, it's just amazing to see even printed, things that we might find really like boring if we got today, but it's an email to a list serve that just lists a bunch of other listservs people could join. But from finding that, I can learn so much about how people were doing information activism and organizing on the early web. Yeah, I believe we were talking about this in the Discord recently. Someone said something about digital archiving and I said paper is my choice for the medium because it's easy to access and it's easy to, it's shelf stable, especially if the paper is not very acidic in its makeup. It just lasts hundreds of years and most buildings aren't made out of wood anymore. So fire is not like a

huge problem. Yeah. And there's just so much more knowledge about how to preserve paper than the file changes all the time and what's readable. And yeah, so it's not to say that the digital, like digital archiving is really important, but especially with this ring correspondence. Yeah. there's a lot that's going to be lost. So it was really exciting with this project to have some the archives start saying like, oh, actually we might change some of our practices and print some stuff, too, or have a plan of what we're going to do. Yeah, but I think the probably more valuable thing that came out of this project for other people was the directory, because I know some people have been using it and sharing it. Because there have been quite a few projects over time where people start doing

this, but then they get frustrated and stop. So there are a bunch of incomplete lists, but I just want people would be able to find more of these resources. So you talked about this being related to queer, like your archives project being related to queer internet history, but like what brought you to doing before the LGBTQ archives project, what even got you looking into queer internet history? Yeah, for sure. Okay, so there's a few different pathways. I'll try to make this as like interesting or exciting as I can.

So part of it is I run this speaker series that I totally recommend your listeners check out because all the events are free and either virtual or hybrid, and we hire cart captioners, so they're more accessible, and we usually have recordings of them on the website, disruptingdisruptions.com. And so a lot of this series is focused on feminist and social justice-oriented responses to development of AI technologies, as well as other topics around communications technologies. But there's a big focus on AI. And so the series really highlights the voices of scholars. artists and creators that are either women, non-binary folks, trans folks, people of color,

basically folks who oftentimes their voices aren't a big part of these, like they're not the highlighted voices and lot of conversations around AI and digital technologies. And so in working in that, because I'm a historian and I'm really interested in how people organize and community build. And I have a book on accessible scholarship. and I also have a book on feminist, lesbian, queer restaurants, which I know it seems like a stretch to the tech stuff, but it's basically my interest is in how people are organizing, trying to make the world better.

Food is the technology. Yeah, exactly. And food is the technology. Yeah. Thank you, Jay. So, yeah, so I started working on a project about feminist responses to AI and kind of historicizing those, but, and I'm still technically kind of working on that, but out of that project because I was really interested in kind of especially the queer women's responses within

that. I found the more interesting history was actually how queer folks and organizations in particular navigated the rapid changes of needing to adapt to the worldwide web in the early 90s because I think sometimes we take for granted that, okay, people just built a website. But there's a period of transition as internet usage became more ubiquitous in kind of the mid-90s, when a lot of groups just needed to get online really quickly, but not everyone had those skills. So I've been really interested in the history of how those groups actually did the nitty-gritty details of moving online. And there were these amazing organizations, such as digital queers, where their entire organization was motivated by getting modems and computers to LGBTQ organizations across the U.S. as well as internationally, so that they could operate more efficiently. and be part of this digital discourse.

And I was really interested in other organizations devoted to hosting computer workshops and training other activists, how to build websites and this kind of transition and how fair archives also had to deal with moving stuff online. So that's kind of the history project that I'm working on. And all of this email stuff basically has been just to do, that was like because it was an important part of my own methods.

And so basically all of that work is basically, quickly going to maybe two footnotes or three sentences of part of this larger project. But I'm really building on folks like Kate McKinney's work on information activism. I'm not sure if you've read that book. If you haven't, highly recommend it. But I'm really interested in that kind of nitty-gritty of like how did folks not just theoretically think about the internet and how the internet could be useful for queer folks, but really like how did they actually train people use websites and how did organizations transition between, okay, they're doing a lot of things on the telephone, but now they also have email and how are they trying to adapt to it? Like there's some interesting

things how organizations such as, I believe it was P-Flag, I want to say. I think it's P-Flag for this example, but they had just worked with digital queers in around 1994, and they're really excited to have email up and running. And they told some of the people who followed the organization and other activists involved in an organization that just expect about two-week response time for our email inbox because like it was just not such a different scale at that time. So I know that was a long answer, but there's like a few different ways that I got into this project. I'm finding the two-week response for emails are really funny because bring it back those. Yeah. Your email did not find me well. Please takes me three weeks to respond to a text message. Like bring it back. Slow communication.

Yeah, for sure. Stop treating email like instant message. And just for all of that, I think we've just really taken for granted that people just acquired these skills. I'm using weed maybe to like broadly, but I do think that it's one of those histories that it was such a short time period of how fast organizations had to adapt, but that it was expected of them without training or funding or support and how different queer activist groups, like cyber activist groups were like, okay, well, let's get people these

skills. And it's also at a time when there's a lot of changes within HIV and AIDS activism. And so there's also McKinney talks about this a little bit, but Critical Path was another really important organization. I don't know if you've heard of Critical Path, but they're located in the Philadelphia area. And basically, they're printing out every single resource that they could find on HIV AIDS. They had newsletter. They had like publications on BBS systems, as well as when the World Wide Web became available and they served as an information resource where people from all over the U.S. would call in. And so there are these really important information sharing projects around HIV AIDS as well as other queer resources and all of these guidebooks that were

built up around it. And people used to also create, because search engines weren't like really useful, they would create physical guidebooks that they would print out as well. So there's things like lesbian and gay guide to the internet. And there are these 400-page thick books. I think I've seen that one, actually. A lot of these guidebooks got thrown away. And while some do exist in queer archives, you can find a couple of editions. They've been able to track some down from used bookstores. Mostly, the Library of Congress has some pretty complete collection. So I was able to visit and see them. And it's pretty exciting to see the different trends with them too. And they'd have a CD-ROM that you could put into your computer and then click to the links because you couldn't find them through

web browsers. So it's really interesting that during this, it was a pretty short time period, but there's all these different physical media to speak to the digital world at the time. So those have been some of the really fun resources to dig into with this project. Yeah. I like the idea of having like software carpentries for queers. Like everyone just needs to learn how to use email in the 90s. I like, I like, I like that idea. And then I thought it was something, I was like, when did we talk about like the queer help line. And I realized we didn't. It was just me and Jay read a book about poppers and that love a lot. Yes, because the person who wrote that book has a podcast on Switchboard, on the help line in the UK. Yeah, yeah, Adam Smith. Yeah, Adam Smith, because he's part of that

amazing podcast, The Logbooks, based off of the logbooks of the bishopsgate Institute. Were there any groups like that that you ran across that were like doing phone line help and then had to go online? Yeah, so that's actually going to be one of the chapters of the book. So I actually, because I love that podcast so much, I went to the Bishopsgate Institute this summer in London and read through the logbooks to see all the different entries around when they're transitioning online because that podcast had a quick episode. So I reached out to Adam and his co-host about it. And they're like, oh, well, we saw more stuff, but we couldn't talk about it. So I spent a few days reading through every blog book. But there were other organizations. So there was one in Toronto

whose official name, I can't think off the top of my head, what it was called. But they were navigating the change that Switchborg later went through too of having the phone line, but also running like an instant messenger chat too for queer youth. And Hannah Zeven also has this book about long distance therapeutic technologies and it's called the distance cure. And in it, she talks about this queer hotline called Call Bruce. And there's like a short mention of this, but there's actually, you can find small traces in a bunch of different queer archives about the phone lines.

And then looking when they first introduce email addresses. So it's something that I've been tracing is like when they start to have it where people can write them by email and then later when they introduce instant messenger. And, you know, the help line that Adam Smith was talking about in the logbooks, switchboard, exist today, and they offer phone instant messenger and email still today. So it's like a trifecta. So it's kind of like an ongoing thing where for a lot of these organizations, they didn't completely drop the phone line. They just added more services. That's so cool. I've been thinking about like things like queer switchboard and

stuff like that a lot lately because I do a lot of volunteer work at like a radical bookstore at an infoshop and just like thinking about like spaces that are designed for like specific types of information seeking. and they're like, hey, I need this type of resource that isn't covered by traditional modes of information sharing. This is where I can come to that. So it's just like, I've been just like really into like that as a concept. Yeah, for sure. I was thinking about that. You did the recent episode talking about your work and about that. And as like that being another form of information activism and the other spaces that you had mentioned too of like red emmas and stuff like that of having these different resources and all using different.

names, but like how much that is like the vital work of activism is making information available and having to share it again and again and finding different ways to make that more accessible through scenes or websites or, you know, like other ways of communicating having workshops. And so that's the other thing that kind of ties together some of my projects. Like the project on feminist restaurants, I talk a lot about how those spaces were places where there was that community building, but there was also information sharing and training and so forth. And so I think that's something that just continually is of interest in my work, right? Whether it's in a cafe in the 1970s or if it's at a computer resource center in the 1990s or even one of the groups that I talk about in this project is Dyke TV,

which was a lesbian-produced television show on public access, like television networks, It started in New York City, but they were distributed across the U.S., but also internationally. And they would host workshops first teaching other lesbians or queer women how to create TV shows and like films and video clips. But then they also later had media workshops as well and like how to use the internet and stuff like that. I think that is a part of activism that is an oftentimes seen as like the sexy activism. But I think it's like what sustains the movement and makes it that people can continue to do their work and bring people in. Yeah, especially if we, there's that tweet going around today or whatever about

how there was a year-long study about how Google searches have gotten like progressively worse and worse and worse. And it's like, one, we've been saying that for years in this profession. But like, thinking about like these kinds of like specifically intentional activists information, sharing spaces and services, how critical these are. Like even today, like they, they, They might feel kind of like retro or old school, but it's like when the other modes of information sharing that we have are either like Google, you know, or places like Elsevier or something, like these like data brokers basically. It's like I'd rather like call some like crust punk and ask them where things are, you know. Yeah, exactly. And it's still so much person to

person even today. Like there, I think there was a lot of disregard for how important that work was by some people when there was the phrase, just Google it. But if you don't know the search terms that you need or certain vocabulary, your Google search isn't going to be very good. Not to mention the way that Google is specific for you and your results will be different, all of that stuff. And now it's just like not working very well. And all the different issues, right, of how sites that basically are paying for higher search engine optimization, all of that. But I think, yeah, this is an ongoing effort. And we're seeing that more and more today. And also with kind of the the collapse of certain social media platforms to just search not working very well.

I think we're going to see maybe a bit more back to the physical material. And there's also, I think, some generational shifts to where people are starting to like really enjoy the tangible as well. So. Yeah, I've been writing a lot of notes. I like the idea of Dyke TV because it's like the equivalent now would be like the Alice Avizandum Institute for online posting. Just like learning how to post good is very funny.

I was also, I just also wrote down Tumblr and Discord and how people in like 15 years are going to be nostalgic for old Discord and how they like. Also so much data is being lost in Discord because people are treating it as a repository of information and then servers just go away and stuff. Right. And that was what reminded me of the, like, people are going to be nostalgic for it, but also the information is not stable. And like if you get kicked even temporarily from a Discord server, you lose your own access to it. So like, you don't see what happened in the. past on it. So if you get like timed out or whatever at any point, you can lose your own access. So if you're like a younger person, like all the conversations you had can just be white. But it didn't remind me that one post that was like Discord is like having to join a polycule to use the library.

Which I feel like I'm in several. I'm in several discords that are just a polycule. And then I'm like, they're like, hello. I like the thing this is phenomenally about everyone else in here is just fucking. Oh my God. Yeah, we all met on Tumblr. So I mean. And we've got no room to, like, talk because, like, if you want to talk about, like, a website with no preservation, no search function and no future. At least now, like, posts by, like, deleted users still show up and it will just have deleted after their username. So at least, like, posts don't really disappear as much on Tumblr, even if the user deletes.

Hmm? Except all the porn that got wiped. Like, a lot of stuff just got wiped. R-IP porn. So there's a lot of stuff that was, like, not even prurient. Like nudes and stuff that people were just sharing, you know, transition photos, that kind of shit are just, you know, gone. And so like it feels like, I think that's why it feels like Tumblr's dead because like a lot of the old posts are actually just gone because like the user was deleted or something when they really cracked down on porn. Yeah.

And also Tumblr search sucks. So you can't find anything anyway. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, this again kind of speaks to the value of a lot of these like things that have been printed out in archives. Like people aren't printing out their Tumblr posts usually and they're not printing out their Instagram posts. I mean, one of the things, because we were maybe going to talk about some of the exhibits, because I've made a few digital exhibits and they're built on air table.

They're not really built for long-term accessibility for too much. You know, like, I don't know how long-term sustainability. But I've done a lot of, like, for the, from Tech Wizard to Cyberwitch exhibit, I just screenshot. I love this one so much. of the internet just to like in a lot of its old Tumblr posts with people doing cyber spells on Tumblr using emojis doing these emoji spells and stuff but you know like to charge your blog to cast is that what it was yeah exactly and so like there's a lot of stuff like people are screenshoting some stuff but you know how many people are going to keep these files organized and

save them and so we'll see but yeah or that woman who is digging up human bones oh the human bones. Remember the buffity on Tumblr? That was fun. Yeah. For spellcasting. Yeah, I like the air table that's not giving it. Yeah, 40 years of magic on the web.

There's a lot of buffy stuff. So we have friends who do a Buffy podcast. And so I think they're really going to like this. Awesome. You already missed the episodes where it's like really heavy willow stuff being a techno pig. And they're in like season five now. But I don't know, maybe you should go on their podcast too.

Nice. I mean, I have a Buffy. I have a Buffy tattoo. And yeah, they've got to have you on. I read an article recently about queer feminist Buffy podcasts. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, this exhibit was in part kind of speaking to a lot of like gender stuff in how we talk about the web, but also it came out of just I really enjoy that season

one episode where there's a demon that is scanned into the internet. And so that kind of started and this, you know, Jenny Calender's line about being a techno pagan. And so, yeah, it kind of started out as like a side interest, but it's been really interesting to see how much of the discourse around AI really just reflects these really magical thinking principles, you know. So I think we can see this kind of ongoing pattern, basically since early web, like prior to the worldwide web to today with AI technologies and how a lot of the discussion is really about it being basically magic. And then there's some interesting projects where people have created grimores using AI. and also how people have tried to, like, build that into their spellcasting. And there's all these really fun guides for witches

of how to use computers to do part of their spells. So they're like, if you don't have Sage in her house, you can just pull up the JPEG of Sage, like stuff like that. You wouldn't download a Sage. Yeah. So it's pretty fun. I'm going to write, like, on a picture of Sage and get your ass. They get into NFTs, where their NFTs,

were there NFT witches? They're like, I'm putting my spells on the blockchain. I mean, that wouldn't surprise me. I didn't find that directly, but there was some interesting, it's not technically fanfic, but like amateur writing of witches talking about like kind of related stuff. Yeah. And like kind of self-published. Forum role-playing. Exactly. Yeah. So every forum turns into role play eventually. Yeah. And the whole like emoji spell thing, there's just a period of time where kind of every magazine like traditionally like it marketed us like women's magazines or girls magazines had an article about emoji spells and casting through emoji so yeah it was kind of a trend for a while I bought a spell

or something on tumbler one time for shits and giggles like from a witch lady on tumbler it was fun just got to do that every once in a while yeah yeah all the world's a forum role play I think that was a Shakespeare line yeah sorry I didn't get that joke out earlier but it was just stuck in my had and I couldn't get it out. I'm looking at the attachment on the emoji smells Tumblr and please be functional Wi-Fi like emoji spell and then police-related emoji spells. Like those two things next to each other really say a lot about Tumblr, I think. And all this stuff kind of around Trump's first election too and like all the hexing of Trump through emoji spells and also coming together online to hex Trump. That was a big phenomenon. It's about as useful as all the

petitions. I mean, oh, that's so sad. What are petitions, if not also magical thinking, you know? Like this change.org petition. I saw so many, like, teenagers, like, doing their first, like, activism. I was like, that's cute. Proud of them. Yeah. This will change the world by a gun. Justin. What? I'm not wrong. I guess we can't talk about the book proposal, can we? I mean, we kind of talked about it already with the queer internet stuff. But what we could talk about is, like why I put all these projects online for folks because that could be a way to tie into kind of why I think public scholarship is important and different forms of communicating information. Yeah, public scholarship. Does that tie into like building digital exhibits?

Yeah. Does that tie into your teaching? Yeah. So with a lot of these projects, I try to make, I try to make them publicly available in a variety of ways. So I do the things that I'm expected to do as scholar in terms of like writing, journal articles, and writing books, but I always make sure that there's an open access version of everything I write with the articles, and then I made both my books that are out, ingredients for revolution and engage in public scholarship available open access. But I also usually build a website that goes

with it that has a lot of that information available for folks. There's oftentimes a podcast that I make affiliated with it with transcripts. And then I oftentimes make scenes or exhibits that kind of are also related to it because I want people to be able to have access to this information in ways that are potentially interesting for them. I say potentially because who knows if anyone is going to be interested in what I'm working on. But I'm hoping that people are able to access this stuff without paywalls. And it's, you know, just paying things up with open access, it doesn't mean it's accessible because if it uses jargon and stuff like that. So I want it to be interesting and something that someone can engage with at different levels.

And so this has been something that I've been really committed to with all my scholarship and in my teaching. And because a lot of folks don't have the time to go university or the resources or interest or they went to university and couldn't take courses in feminist studies but might be interested in it during the pandemic, because I didn't want my students to have to spend hours and hours on Zoom where they might just get bored or it just, it was a lot to be on Zoom all the time. So I taught my intro course via podcast episodes with transcripts and then to introfeminist and social justice studies. And then I have made the course available to the public for free.

And it's available on all major podcasting apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all the places you can find podcasts, basically, and the transcripts available. So people can essentially take the course. I mean, they don't get credit for it, but take an intro feminist studies course. So yeah, I think it's just something that I really. care about and I want encourage other scholars to do. I really hate the mentality in academia of trying to keep knowledge inaccessible. And I really, like a lot of our work is funded by taxpayers. A lot of my grants come from that kind of funny. I just, even if that weren't the case, I just want there not to be these kinds of barriers, especially now I work on queer history,

feminist history, histories of marginalized communities that I come from. And I also just want people in those communities to have access to their histories that a lot of folks didn't get to have access to in their other studies, you know, in high school or earlier. So yeah, so it's just something that's really important to me. And a lot of that work started early on with my feminist food and queer food work. Yeah, before you move on to the foodway stuff, I actually want to talk about open access and queer history because I just queer scholarship in general, because this is one of the, like, most effective, I think, arguments against open access is retaliation and lack of institutional support for queer scholars. So there are definitely people who do not want their work open access,

and they just only want other scholars to see it, because if you get on wokeprofessors.biz, your institution doesn't have a policy to, like, say, these people are nut jobs. They'll go, oh, well, you know, we're a intellectual community who cares about hearing all sides. And rather than And like, these are like, fuck asses and like, who cares about them? Yeah, for sure. So I actually ran a study in 2020. I talk about this in my book, Engage in Public Scholarship. I also have like a medium post about it.

But so my research team and I contacted every Canadian university and asked them what their policies were if their scholars were being trolled or doxed. And with the exception of one university, none of them had any policies in place. None of them had anything to officially support their scholars or provide their scholars with training. And of course, like as you're basically talking about, marginalized scholars are oftentimes the ones who are facing this trolling, doxying, and harassment. And so out of that work, I also was able to contact some folks at UMass Amherst that actually does have a policy so about like ways that universities could support their scholars.

A few of the universities were interested in taking some of this work on and some just didn't care. So I think there definitely is an issue when universities are encouraging their scholars to make their work publicly available and aren't supporting them in case there is backlash. So that is a really important component of this. But I think like a lot of times that backlash comes actually through people's social media engagement and other kinds of like public engagement. I think more than their open access articles. While there are people who target folks and are like looking at their journal. articles that might be made open access. It's oftentimes more in the public engagement, stuff with their, like, stuff on the media or on social media where it really comes from. I also think that,

like, everybody is able to make decisions about how they want to showcase their scholarship. But just for me, my work is grounded in community work. And so I need to make sure that the community I'm working with and part of can get that. Like, I have had death threats in the past, but, and, but it has really been as much as I would actually think I would get. So I think so, oh, sorry. The very fact that you had to say those sentences aloud, though, I'm just saying. Yeah, no, for sure. I think some of the bigger things, though, too, are that universities need to have, like, scholars need to know that their deans are going to support them or, I mean, most scholars that are doing this work are precariously employed. So I'm now tender track after many years of

not being tenure track. It's new this year for me, a B tenure track. I was in a non-tender track position for the last five years before. And I also think that a few universities are going make these policies. It needs to be for everyone. They're grad students. They're adjuncts. They're non-tenure track folks. They're tenure track folks. Their postdocs, all of that. But it hasn't been like it's not, it's not what I thought it would be or how bad I would ever think it would be. But there are certain times I've made decisions not to go on certain like radio shows or TV shows because of the potential backlash. But I have, I have. really found trolls to like go that would go through my academic article. So I think it would

require a bit more time than they'd want to put into it. Yeah. I think one of the bigger things too that I think is a really fair thing is talking about some of the projects if it's like maybe going give too much attention to like some of like people's research subjects or the folks that they're working with. If like a if something went viral, you know, people might have participated in a research study thinking like, oh, 10 scholars will read this and so forth. But I'm really transparent with the people that I work with, like how I'm going to share things. You know, you can do things like changing names. There's amazing work by Mimi Onuha, who has this project called Missing Data Sets. I don't know if you know her work. She's this amazing artist. And a big part of her work is,

this project is about like what data hasn't been collected and how is that like hurting surgeon marginalized communities. But she also has work showing what data sets should we not collect? because this data could actually hurt people, right? If you're collecting data and perhaps ICE might get a hold of it, and then it will hurt migrant workers or undocumented folks, right? And so I think that there are also responsibilities that scholars have to not always share things or release data, but for at least the topics that I'm working on,

the communities that I'm working with aren't being hurt. And many of the people want their stories to be told because they've been underrepresented and they want other folks to know these histories and learn from these histories. So I'm not saying that every single thing ever has to be open. And I'm also not saying that there's not value in having journal articles. But I do think that there's like other ways that we can share knowledge. And I find it really disheartening that a lot of people in academia don't see the value in doing that work and supporting that work and valuing it equally to that period view journal article, which I really appreciate your rant the other day and the other episode

about journal articles. So, yeah. I have to think about them too much. Sadie? Oh, I was just going to say that's a fairly frequent podcast topic is. Ranting about journal articles and all the bullshit that goes along with that. And Sadie's just like living the high life like in public library IT, not even giving a fuck about all of me and Justin's academic nonsense.

Yes, that's true. but like the discussion. You just let us get our yawas out. I mean, I find it interesting. But yeah, no, like, thinking about the, like, as we were talking about earlier, like the email thing, thinking about email archiving, I'm like, that just makes my brain go down a whole different track that, you know, could run parallel. So. Yeah, there was a local queer project that some faculty wanted to do and make it open access. And they had brought someone in as well. And they wanted to make like an edited volume of like interviews. and stuff with people locally and it would be published at our university. So it all be very hyper-local. And I remember giving them like the rundown on this like, okay, but identification, are we going to de-identify? Are we going to anonymize? Do you have support from your boss? Like, you know, your department? How do you feel, how is your relationship with your boss? And I just remembered about that project because I never followed up on it. But now I kind of want to see what they're doing. Yeah, for sure. And a lot of times research ethics boards like R-E-B,

or IRB haven't really caught up to a lot of digital stuff too and like sharing stuff online and what that means. The Association of Internet Researchers, the AOIR, has their 3.0 guidelines that kind of speaks to some of these things. And there's also a really great piece by Moia Bailey about how to share this work and do some of this work, especially with black trans communities. And that piece was published Open Access in Digital Humanities Quarterly. few years ago. Folks might be interested in that one. Nice. Okay. So we'll wrap it up with the food ways. So how did I interrupted you earlier as you were about to segue, but going back to your feminist restaurant project and historical cooking, I mean, how did that all get going? Yeah,

for sure. So some of the ways that I first started getting into doing a lot of public scholarship work while I was always interested in kind of sharing what I was learning in school and with my own research later on. In 2013, I co-founded this blog with a few other students at the time called the Historical Cooking Project. The blog still exists today. And so what we were doing was we were looking at old cookbooks. We were cooking through the recipes and writing quick blog posts about it. But I was finding that was a space where I was able to actually interact with other folks about some of the research I was doing in a fun way. And so that inspired me that when I was starting my doctoral work on the history of feminist restaurants, cafes and coffee houses in the U.S.

and Canada, which I mentioned, were mostly founded by lesbians and women who today might identify as queer women or they use different labels for themselves, but they're pretty queer spaces. I started to just early on list the spaces I was finding in, I was making basically a directory because no one had ever created directory of these spaces or studied them. And so I'd just find names of these spaces within periodicals and their advertisements. sections or in old lesbian travel guides and stuff like that. So I wanted to create a website so I could share it with folks and say like, hey, am I missing any place? Let me know. And so that then meant that I kept adding to the project and putting all of my writing about the topics on that

website. And on that website, thefeminist restaurant project.com, there's also a link to open access version of my book, Ingredients for Revolution, as well as I made a podcast related to the book, too. I just like that kind of got me into this path of always creating websites that accompanied the projects I was doing. And I'm very aware that digital humanities projects oftentimes run out of money and funding and support. But right now I maintain about around 10 different websites, which sounds wild. But I built them on the blogger base. So I'm not paying web hosting fees. I just renew the domain names from time to time. And yeah, again, it's not going to be necessarily sustainable for like even 20 years from now maybe, but I do think that's kind of what started my interest

and what I'm building on today. And even though I'm doing a lot more of the tech stuff now, in part because my interests have shifted, but also because I can get grants for my tech projects a lot easier than food projects because granting bodies really love tech stuff in a way they don't seem to care about food. I'm still doing queer food stuff. And so I'm co-organizing the queer food conference, which is happening in Boston this April, as some, There's the physical conference, but I think we're sold out now for the 100 people. But we also have unlimited amount of people who can participate virtually because it's going be a hybrid conference for accessibility for a variety of folks, right?

People with caregiving responsibilities, people who don't want to travel, can't travel, people with different disabilities. So, yeah, that conference, and we kept a really glow registration fee. So, yeah, I hope folks who are interested in queer food participate. So, yeah. I wish I'd known earlier. I might actually be in town around them. Well, we might have like some other like kind of side events as well. So yeah, it's April 27th and 28th. But the website for that is queer food conference.com. I love a domain name that is essentially the thing. So historical cooking project, the feminist restaurant project, queer food conference, you know, everything is like it is the name.

I mean, that's what they tell you to do with links and accessible web design anyway, right? So you're just like removing even one more barrier to translate link to what it is. Yeah. For sure. Was there anything else you want to mention before we go? No, just that it's been great to be on this podcast. I'm a huge fan. I really listen to like pretty much all of your episodes. And so, yeah, thanks for letting me be on. Yeah, I hope this was okay for y'all.

Thank you so much. Absolutely. Yeah, it always sounds better after every episode we're like, did that go good? And then it comes out great. Seriously. Every episode, I'm like, that was dog. shit and it's like the best moment we've ever done every single time well thank you so much yeah

I really I really enjoyed the podcast and yeah it's been it's been great thank you good night