Collect, archive, and publish. 

These are the three phases of an oral history project. You can break it down into smaller processes and objectives, but those smaller categories can be collapsed into these three categories. Record your interviews, archive them, and publish an article that makes use of the collected material. The most community-engaged (and generously funded) projects, especially in the digital age, have broadened the idea of what it means to publish public history outcomes. At their very best, these public outcomes provide accessible information about the queer and trans past. After all, it’s only right to give the histories that were so graciously shared with researchers back to the communities that volunteered them.

The expansion of oral history into the public realm usually includes access to full oral history interview recordings (as permitted by the narrators). While oral historians have certainly employed other public history mediums, a digital platform that hosts the project materials is the go-to for public access to information. This provides people the opportunity to watch hours of narrator footage from the comfort of their own homes! It’s not the most effective way to engage with larger audiences… Is there a way that oral historians can engage with broader publics more effectively?

The Collaboratory thinks so.  

The Pussy Palace Oral History Project (PPOHP) offered a unique opportunity to think about digital curation. The project interviews focus on a single event: the night of Toronto’s 2000 Pussy Palace police raid. With narrators more or less bound to a particular time and place, it was easy to identify emerging themes and imagine how we might organize the information from the interviews into a cohesive narrative. From the beginning, the team knew that a publicly accessible, curated exhibition would be a project outcome. Despite hopes for a physical installation that moved exhibition patrons through a gallery in a way that one may have moved through the labyrinthine Pussy Palace, it became clear that a digital exhibition would most effectively showcase the materials to the largest audience possible. But we didn’t have to abandon the concept of recreating movement through the Palace. What if our exhibition operated similarly to an early 2000s computer game that took audiences through different rooms at the click of illuminated objects? Carmen Sandiego, who?  

Peter Luo, the Collaboratory’s User Experience (UX) Design expert and Master of Information Student at the University of Toronto, is making it happen. Driven by his passion for helping others, Peter centers his work on creating intuitive and pleasant digital experiences; he’s the perfect person to be designing the scaffolding for the PPOHP choose-as-you-go exhibition.  

I sat down with Peter to talk about his work on the exhibition and how thinking about UX Design can help bring the PPOHP materials to more people. With user experience at the forefront of his design principles and a team with a strong sense of what information they want people to have access to, Peter has nurtured the choose-as-you-go exhibition beyond its infancy.  

Listen to Peter’s thoughts on UX Design, how UX Design principles are helping him create the PPOHP exhibition, and get an early look at the site’s development process.