All posts filed under: Collaboratory News

Coding the Pussy Palace Oral Histories: NVivo for the Digital Humanities

December 16, 2021
by Emily Mastragostino
Collaboratory News / Interview Coding / Oral History / Pussy Palace Project

WHAT IS INTERVIEW CODING? Coding is the process of organizing data in preparation for analysis. Through coding we identify common themes that allow us to compare and contrast experiences, perspectives, and descriptions from our data. Fundamentally, coding helps us figure out what is salient across stories and most important to the narrators.   It’s a fairly straightforward process! Coding involves identifying, creating, and updating themes, as well as sorting data into those themes. Among the Pussy Palace oral histories, common themes can be as simple as descriptions of the carpet or more complex like individuals’ experience of care at […]

Call for Abstracts

December 14, 2021
by Elspeth Brown
Academia / Activist Histories / Collaboratory News / Opportunities / Queer History / Trans History

How have queer and trans activists challenged the repressive status quo in the past? Which forms have queer and trans activism taken over the decades? What role do emotions and affects play in activism – and how can affect theory be utilized in the study of queer and trans histories and temporalities?   These are among the questions that will be addressed in the workshop on affective histories of queer and trans activism, which is the […]

“Transvestia had a spine”: Digital Exhibit Design and the Trans Activism Oral Histories

December 2, 2021
by Amelia Smith
Archiving Oral History / Collaboratory News / Trans Activism Project / Trans History

Image Caption: Some of the early issues of Transvestia were printed in this miniature format (left). This allowed a reader to conceal their copy within a shirt pocket. It was very important to show how the size differed for the exhibition. I’m Amelia Smith, and I’m the digital exhibit designer for the Trans Activism Oral History Project with the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria and the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory. The exhibit I’m creating is the culmination of a […]

Field Trip to the Palace

November 18, 2021
by Aisling Murphy
Collaboratory News / Photography / Pussy Palace Project

For the first time in-person since the Pussy Palace Oral History Project began in early 2021, the project team met to explore the grounds of Club Toronto (now Oasis Aqualounge), the former gay men’s bathhouse that once hosted the Pussy Palace — a series of exclusive bathhouse events for queer women and trans people.   Alisha Stranges and Elio Colavito (Co-Oral Historians), Ayo Tsalithaba (Creative Producer), and I (Aisling Murphy, the PPOHP’s Social Media Assistant) met, coffees and cameras in hand, to explore the grounds of […]

On the Record, On the Stand

September 10, 2021
by Elio Colavito
Collaboratory News / Pussy Palace Project

Pussy Palace Oral History Project narrator, Renee Racine, was a security volunteer at the September 14, 2000, bathhouse — the night the event was raided by Toronto police. She later testified in court in defense of two fellow security volunteers charged with contravening the Liquor License Act in Her Majesty the Queen v. Hornick and Aitcheson (OCJ, 2001). Both on the stand in 2001 and on the record 20 years later, Racine recalls vividly a troubling encounter between police […]