This panel showcases three historians pursuing public, digital history as part of the University of Toronto’s Critical Digital Humanities Initiative. How are digital historians pursuing public humanities projects that reach broader publics? These three digital history projects are working within an alternative genealogy of digital humanities sketched by Tara McPherson, a history that might be traced to Charles and Ray Eames rather than Father Busa and IBM. Rather than emphasizing text and processing, these public-oriented DH projects align digitality with visuality, emphasizing aesthetics and design. The three papers sketch out various approaches to the creation and communication of public history projects in the digital age. Collectively, they engage with challenges facing digital historians relating to digital preservation, research creation, audience engagement, and the pitfalls of corporately-owned social media platforms.

Session Chair: Prof. Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto

Paper #1: “An Essential Tension between Presentation and Preservation: The Case of Visualizing the Americas,” Kevin Coleman, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto Mississauga

Digital humanities projects are often pulled in two different directions. The scholar has an interest in presenting research in the most attractive way to garner a larger audience, while the librarian must ensure that the project remains accessible in perpetuity. This tension between the researcher’s emphasis on presentation and the librarian’s on preservation is essential. This paper describes how the competing interests between presentation and preservation were negotiated in the Visualizing the Americas project at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

Visualizing the Americas examines the history of capitalism through the production and consumption of a single commodity, the banana. The project also preserves rare, endangered records that are integral to the histories of the multinational banana companies and the Latin American and Caribbean communities in which they operated. This project digitizes these archives and makes them freely accessible to anyone in the world. This history and the archives through which we know it enable us to better understand corporate techniques of dividing labor forces along lines of race and ethnicity, of enclosing land that was previously held in common, and of converting biodiverse tropical forests into plantations with genetically identical banana plants.

I will argue that the tension in digital humanities projects between presentation and preservation does not result primarily from miscommunication or personality conflicts or administrative divisions between faculty and librarians. Rather, this tension arises from rapidly changing aesthetic preferences and technologies. Hence solutions to it must be negotiated between scholars, librarians, and designers. I will describe how the Visualizing the Americas project came into being through a collaboration between myself as PI and the UTM librarians. I hired Underline, an award-winning Toronto-based studio to design the website and the UTM Library had a contract with Adam Matthew Digital to host our archival collections. In the end, the Principal Investigator and the designers had to give up beautiful features of the original proposal and the Librarians and Adam Matthew Digital had to develop new parts of the platform to handle our newly negotiated design. This negotiation slowed the project down and made it less pleasing to the eye, but it hopefully guarantees that Visualizing the Americas—its radical content and its counterarchives—will be available to students and researchers around the world for decades to come.

Paper #2: “Instascholar: Effective Research Engagement Strategies for Big Social Media Audiences,” Dr. L.K. Bertram, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto, St. George campus.

How do we make accurate data go viral? This presentation offers insights and advice gleaned from running a large-scale, anonymous open classroom on Instagram (13.5 million views). It describes five of some of the most important data packaging strategies that researchers must consider for generating higher public engagement with their work. Responding to widespread concerns among BIPOC, women, and queer scholars, it also discusses safety and equity approaches that are essential to surviving the power imbalances embedded in these privately-owned and deeply biased platforms.

While some within academic communities simply attribute the disinformation crisis to social media platforms as a whole, the World Health Organization reminds us that the infodemic has only been made possible by a corresponding vacuum of quality, public-facing data online. Building from the interdisciplinary work of scholars like Joy Buolamwini, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O’Neil, Serge Noiret, and Timnit Gebru, this presentation discusses opportunities for building better data pipelines out of universities on the scale required to address some of the most pressing challenges of the digital age.

Paper #3: “Research Creation and Queer Oral History,” Dr. Elspeth Brown, Professor of History, University of Toronto, Mississauga.

On September 15, 2000, five Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace, an exclusive sex party and bathhouse event for 350 queer women and trans people. The police charged two organizers with violating liquor laws, resulting in a public trial. There has never been an oral history project about this event, the last police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history. The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, in collaboration with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, has collected 36 interviews with bathhouse patrons, event organizers, and community activists. The research enables us to historicize this event within the longer history of Toronto police hostility towards non-normative sexuality, exemplified by the gay male-focused bathhouse raids of 1975-1984 (Warner, 2002; Kinsman and Gentile, 2010; Hooper, 2016).

We have completed our collection and preservation work for this project, having collected the interviews, written the metadata, created transcripts and captions, and donated the materials to The ArQuives, all in collaboration with our narrators.

We are currently working to animate and activate these interviews through research creation in the form of audio portraits, video shorts (via You Tube and Tik Tok), Instagram stories, a digital exhibition, and a series of public events. This paper will reflect on our work in research creation to address the lack of user engagement with digitized, full length oral histories. First, I will outline a critique of digitization, on its own, as an approach in engaging with audiences in relationship to oral history practice. Second, I will offer research creation as a partial strategy in connecting with queer public history audiences. Research creation, as now defined by SSHRC, is “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation.” My presentation will showcase some of our strategies, situating them in the DH literature relating to oral history and public history praxis.

Comments: Audience.

Participants:

Kevin Coleman's research examines the intersection between capitalism and photography, primarily in Latin America. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden (2016), a number of book chapters and journal articles, as well as the Principal Investigator of Visualizing the Americas, a major digital humanities project. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the United States Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship. With support from a SSHRC grant, he led three major collaborative inquiries into the relations between capitalism and photography: Capitalism and the Camera (2021), Photography and Culture (2020), and Radical History Review (2018). He has recently completed a documentary film, The Photos We Don’t Get to See, that attempts to make visible how physical violence gets repeated at the level of the archive.

L.K. Bertram is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto specializing in the delivery of critical historical data through social media algorithms and the history of migration, gender, sexuality, and colonialism in the 19th century North American West. She is the author of The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans (Winner CHA Clio Prize/ UTP 2020) and is currently finishing a book on the financial lives of sex workers in the 19th century West. Bertram's newest work focuses on how scholars can more effectively combat digital disinformation campaigns. As the anonymous curator of a large-scale public history campaign that hit 9 million views, she focuses on high-yield data packaging strategies for larger scale publics using video-based algorithms (TikTok and Instagram). This new SSHRC-funded project asks: “how do we make good data go viral in the disinformation age?”

Elspeth Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a multi-year digital history and oral history public, digital humanities collaboration. At the University of Toronto, she is also to Faculty Lead for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, a three-year Institutional Strategic Initiative. She is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University, 2019); co-editor of “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014); and Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014), among other books. Recent articles include “Trans Oral History as Trans Care” (with Myrl Beam) and “Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ+ Community Archive” (Archivaria 2020). She has published in GLQ, TSQ; Gender and History; American Quarterly; Radical History Review; Photography and Culture; Feminist Studies; Aperture; No More Potlucks, and others).