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Lecture Avery Dame-Griff

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Lecture Avery Dame-Griff

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Avery

Gijs: to be clear. We ask you to take notes during the presentation in this shared document.

Avery is on the West Coast. It’s 6am local time.

Avery can talk about web archiving in the Q+A, but will focus more on digital communities in this presentation

Introduction

Avery Dame-Griff is a Lecturer in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Gonzaga University and author of The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (2023). He founded and serves as primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project, an independent community history project cataloging and archiving pre-2010 LGBTQ spaces online. Based on this experience, Avery shared his experience with the (collective) act of archiving online activity, why it matters, and what it means to archive typically private content like emails or messages on boards.

The Queer Digital History Project (QDHP)

The Queer Digital History Project (QDHP) archives queer web history. From the outset of the early internet, English was the primary language for communication.
Not always have been using the same internet. Minitel famous example of national video network.

–> What people talk about, how and why.

In early days of internet exhilirating to communicate long distance through email.

in the late 80s and early 90s, email offered a safe space for communication

CDForum example of mailing list where

archiving average user communcation, not well known people or activists

The archive is very complicated

People keep rights to their messages. List started in 1988. At time different ideas of privacy.

Messages posted to the list were expected to be private.

quoteit was very common to republish things that you encountered online in community newsletters

The Key issues:
* The collaborative nature of digital communities * Question of publicness, privacy, access and right to be forgotten. * questionPeople often change their mind over time - link with 'the right to be forgotten'? Is it okay to use what people have written a long time ago and interpret it as something they find important, even though now they might no longer have the same perspective? #ethics * the way people felt about their messages might be very different today then when they first posted, and they might want them to be forgotten and erased completely
*

Messages have been archived by one of the members of the list

Yahoo Groups (launched in 1998) became very popular, especially among queer community. One of the reasons of its popularity was its accessibility. It has:

Mid 2000s, they were eclipsed by newer online services like Tumblr.

Became legacy platform. Not driving income for the company. But kept available.

Early 2020 Yahoo groups were (announced to be) taken down, how to preserve them? This project tries to answer this issue

Challenge 1 : Community as Collaboration

Locating individual posts within the ecosystem of the larger community/ Recognizing poster’s rights (I missed this part it was in the slides)

Authors keep copyright over their messages. While they are also responding to each other. (Can’t just archive a single message)

questionWhat if people reference something outside of the environment their conversation takes place in? Do you archive that as well?

This is an ‘ecosystem’ problem. This makes it complex, because it is e.g. difficult to isolate single messages, or connect them to their wider context.

Web preservation is not only what is visible. It’s also the code, infrastrcture, people’s experiences. Authors have rights to their message, and the right to be forgotten.

Challenge 2: Privacy and Post Content

Yahoo groups had a variety of levels of privacy. Some groups required requests for access.

In (some of) their posts and groups there was very private information like full names and locations and images not meant for a wider audience. Also topics about surgery were discussed. It was not meant for a wider audience.

Posts were considered “publicly private”: Technically it is public. But it feels private (to the author).

How did Avery end up approaching it?

Decide scale, or collection scope: Avery decided to focus on message texts (and not images, etc.)

Avery discussed the idea of “tiered consent”. Identify:

Groups considered for collection: Public, Non-Active Groups: these are groups that Avery contacted and collaborated with to archive

Tried to find community partners > send an email to someone who was .. as moderator. Avery worked with the moderators.

quoteNo one checks their yahoo mail any more.

A way to do it was to use a donation form to collect things like background information

Also included a way to ask for material, like images or texts, to be excluded: right to be forgotten.

the community partner was expected to be able to reflect the wishes of the community

Internet archive > rapid scraping. Getting as much as we can.

In order to address the scope, think about:

Avery commented on the tension between getting as much as we can before it all goes away (due to the fleeting nature of digital material, online communities, infrastructures etc.) vs. slower community-oriented practice.

challengesDefinition of public and private are not universal.

interesting-practiceExports originally in json, translated to plain text to make them accessible to the community members.

How to involve the community:

In the process of defining the scope, think about the kinds of messages that should be saved and how they can be identified?

Important to think about defining public and private, what you are comfortable with being preserved and what private communication should be preserved? What sensitive information might be in your email inbox that should be excluded? When is it ethical to seek consent from other parties?

Example of the laptop of Susan Sontag. Researchers had access to it. But with it also her private emails with Annie Leibovitz.

Examples:

reflectionI was thinking about, how making it clear something will be archived might influence what will be there to archive in the end. It made me think of a similar problem often discussed around documentary film making. How does the film crew being present influence what they get to film? Doesn't the archiver by making him or herself visible also influence the content of the archive?

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