LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory

If you’ve been following our social media posts, you may have noticed that interviewing is now well underway for our oral history project focusing on the 1998 delisting and 2008 re-listing of sex reassignment surgeries in Ontario (as medical procedures funded by the province). So far our team has conducted three interviews, two with Susan Gapka and one with Dr. Greta Bauer. Both have shared rich reflections about their involvement, their work, and their engagement […]

            I have been continuing my interviews with partners of trans men—folks who have been with their partners before and during some aspect of the transition. At this point I’ve interviewed 48 people in the US and Canada about a range of topics, including gender and sexual identity; visibility; coming out; affective labour; parenting; sex, and other topics. It’s been about 5 years since I put out an actual call. More frequently, people learn about […]

On April 1, scholars, students, community members, clinical practitioners, artists, and activists came together from across Canada and the US at U of T’s University College for the inaugural Trans Temporalities Conference to share work and ideas about “the unique interdependence between narratives and constructions of normative bodies and linear time.” The conference was organized by Celeste Pang, Ido Katri, and Simon Daniel and sponsored by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. […]

L-R: Nick Matte, Al Stanton-Hagan, Oli Bedard ***************************************** It’s exciting times at the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory! We’ve recently purchased new equipment for our upcoming video oral history project and yesterday several members of our Toronto Collaboratory team met at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives to explore and experiment with the equipment in preparation for our first interviews. We’re working with the Canon VIXIA HFG20 Camcorder, portrait studio lighting, and lavalier microphones. Many thanks […]

  LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory @ Moving Trans History Forward 2016 Moving Trans History Forward 2016 at the University of Victoria was a wonderful conference, to say the least. At Thursday night’s Opening Ceremonies attendees were warmly welcomed and heard Randall Garrison, MP for Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke discuss the history and hurdles involved with getting gender identity and gender expression into human rights legislation. Jamison Green gave a keynote during lunch on Friday on the triumphs and challenges of trans […]

  Moving Trans History Forward is front-page news in Victoria, BC and making waves well beyond the West Coast! It’s been a while since we last reported on LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory activities, but we have lots to share this week! Many of our team members are gathering in Victoria with folks from far and wide for the 2nd Moving Trans History Forward conference, expertly organized by Dr. Aaron Devor and the University of […]

This week I have Oli writing a guest post ! Oli is digitizing a number of projects for the co laboratory, which involves listening to sometimes uplifting, and some times traumatic anecdotes from LGBTQ history. My name is Oli Bédard and I’m a work-study oral history archivist for the LGBTQ Oral History Collaboratory. What I do, for the most part, is digitize tapes—hours and hours of tapes of oral histories. Each one goes into the […]

I worked at the Collaboratory for the 2014-15 academic year, developing digitization protocols for audio tapes. Through this work, Nick Matte, Al Stanton-Hagan and I designed a digitization station, wrote a training manual, and offered a volunteer orientation program aimed at creating digital versions of oral histories tapes at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. This work drew on my academic background as a media studies researcher who has examined grassroots digitization practices in community […]

Following up last weeks focus on one of our partner projects, this week I would like to point you towards the Transgender Archives at the Victoria University. Run by Founder and Academic Director Dr. Aaron Devor and University Archivist Lara Wilson, the Transgender Archives have been actively collecting documents, rare publications and memorabilia associated with transgender activism since 2007. The collections include significant donations from the personal papers of Reed Erikson, the University of Ulster […]

This week marks the first of a series of blog posts about our Collaboratory Partner Projects.  In case you missed them, we currently have four partner projects, you can find links to the all under the Projects tab at the top of this page. Todays post features the Archives of Lesbian Oral History. ALOT, short for the Archives of Lesbian Oral History, was founded in 2010.  ALOT is a project that  collects and makes available […]