Publishing and Queer/Trans Public Praxis

Publishing

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As historians such as myself move from more traditional forms of scholarly work to a form of ongoing digital “making” that is the work of the Collaboratory, how do we make this work professionally legible? I have the great fortune to be tenured, so for me the stakes are not quite as high as they are for my more junior colleagues, where digital humanities and community-engaged research and scholarship remain, sadly, invisible and unvalued in most R1 settings. This blog post seeks to answer a basic question: where and how to peer-review publish on projects such as the Collaboratory? One possibility is Ada, which is not the journal of record for the American Dental Association (the first hit that shows up on Google). Rather, Ada is a journal of gender, new media and technology that (I assume) is named after Ada Lovelace, the 18th century British mathematician. Ada is committed, in particular, to politically engaged, intersectional approaches to feminist media scholarship, so this bodes well as a site for Collaboratory work. They publish twice each year, but their next cfp isn’t up yet. However, this does seem like a great place to write about some of what we’ve been up to recently, whether it’s trying to shoehorn trans content into a gay and lesbian archive, digitizing oral history collections about pre-Stonewall gay or lesbian life, or building digital exhibitions on Omeka with undergrads, grad students, and volunteers. For example, Ada published this Roxanne Samer’s article on “Revising ‘Re-vision’: Documenting 1970s Feminisms and the Queer Potentiality of Digital Feminist Archives” in issue #5. So here is a good possibility.