All posts filed under: Digitization

Pride Toronto 2024: The Accessibility Information You REALLY Want

June 26, 2024
by Atticus Hawk
Digitization / Disability / Queer History / The Gays Did What Now?

Calling all disabled dandies, handicapped homos and crippy queers; it’s Pride in Toronto! Time to get nasty with it and whip out our big, fat, throbbing media literacy degrees to scour the Pride Toronto™ website for any shreds of accessibility information we can actually use. Read on for all the accessibility information you need to know and bask in our homemade, screen-reader-compatible Bare Minimum Accessibility Map: Pride Toronto 2024 Edition!

Dignified Lives: A Digital Archive for Preserving Trans Memory in Mexico

June 23, 2023
by Juan Carlos Mezo-González
Activist Histories / Collaboratory News / Digitization / Trans History

The Mexican trans community recently launched a digital archive that will play an important role in reconstructing, documenting, and preserving the memory of this community. Named Archivo Memoria Trans México (Trans Memory Archive Mexico), this digital platform and its related social media will also play a significant role in bringing the community together, engaging trans Mexican folks in the process of writing their history in their own terms. In this regard, Archivo Memoria Trans México […]

Digitizing Archival Cassette Tapes: A Brief How-To

May 22, 2018
by Elspeth Brown
Digitization

Between 1981 and 1986, The Foolscap Gay Oral History Project collected over 100 oral histories with Canadian gay men born in the first half of the 20th century. These interviews, conducted by John Grube and Lionel Collier, were informed by conditions contemporaneous to the project: Operation Soap (police harassment of gay men), HIV/ AIDS, and the proliferation of queer community spaces and groups in Toronto. These interviews were originally recorded on cassette tapes, which have […]

Zine Digitization and Accessibility

July 18, 2017
by Elspeth Brown
Digitization / Mirha-Soleil Ross Project / Public Humanities / Trans History

A potential benefit of digitizing zines is increasing their accessibility. While a physical copy of Mirha-Soleil Ross’ gendertrash from hell might be hard to come by for many people in 2017, putting a high quality scan of the zine online makes it accessible to anyone with an internet connection, right? Not really. Depending on the context, “access” can take on very different meanings. I think we should think critically about what it means to make […]

Foolscap: The Social Responsibility of Digitizing Erasure

May 19, 2017
by Elspeth Brown
Digitization / Foolscap Project / Gay History

Listening to the Foolscap interviews, it seems impossible to have been in Toronto in the 1960s without realizing that the St Charles Tavern was a hotbed of gay activity. However, researching press coverage of the bar, it’s clear that this watering hole’s queerness was fairly hidden from most of the public in the 1960s. A brief review of Globe and Mail articles between the 1940s and 1960s rarely link homosexuality to the St. Charles Tavern. It’s […]

Digitizing Oral Histories on VHS

February 1, 2017
by mckinneycait
Digitization / Oral History

Over the last several months we have been working toward expanding the formats we are able to digitize in order to preserve and improve access to oral histories recorded on video tape. Our VHS digitization station is now up and running at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. University of Manitoba Historian David Churchill‘s oral history interviews, conducted with gay men in Toronto in 1991, are the first batch of tapes we are working on. Churchill […]