Tag Archives: lgbtq

Read Hot and Digitized: Preserving the Outcasts with The Queer Zine Archive Project

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Zines have long been a medium for weirdos, freaks, and outcasts on the margins, which means they’ve been a staple of queer expression. The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) has been digitizing and preserving queer zines for twenty years

First of all, what are zines? Zines are DIY publications, usually staple-bound and made with printer paper. They’re cheap and easy to produce, and most zine makers give them away for free or sell them at low prices to recoup costs. This allows them to bypass mainstream publishers, so zines are often a medium for marginalized and radical voices. 

Zines developed out of Science Fiction fan culture in the 1930s. In the 1970s, the onset of photocopying technology coincided with the rise of punk music. Punk fans (who often overlapped with Sci-fi fans) latched onto zines as a way to write about their favorite bands, share stories, and build community. As such, zines have always been a venue for outsider expression and radical politics. In the 1990s, feminist and queer zine makers really took hold of the medium. Punk communities might have been made up of outcasts, but they weren’t immune to misogyny and homophobia. Women and LGBTQ punks experienced marginalization and discrimination within their scenes, and zines provided a much-needed space to voice these experiences and find other like-minded queers. 

So a project like QZAP is pretty revolutionary! This searchable database is run by a collective based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it is and will remain free and open to use. QZAP’s goal is to create a “living history” so they continue to accept new submissions from contemporary queer zine makers. They hold a broad definition of “queer,” too, recognizing that identities and language change over time. Zine makers submit their physical zines to QZAP, and collective members, usually librarians, archivists, scholars, and graduate students, scan the zines and create the metadata. Like zines themselves, QZAP is a DIY enterprise!

QZAP’s homepage features a rotation of different zine covers. This featured zine is about the representation of Black Lesbians in the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

QZAP allows users to browse zines, which is one of my favorite ways to explore their collections. With so much interesting and obscure content, browsing QZAP’s collection is a fun, serendipitous experience. QZAP also has an Advanced Search option for users to find zines by author, place of publication, or year of publication. I’ve used QZAP when working with Women’s & Gender Studies classes so students can see a broad set of queer zines over time. While the website’s look and feel are pretty simple and the technology is a bit dated, students respond enthusiastically to the content. I think QZAP’s simple design and stable technology have made it a sustainable project, especially because it is run by a volunteer collective independent of a university or institution. 

Here’s a screenshot of a digitized zine and its metadata record in QZAP. I like that the metadata is so prominent next to the digital object.

One of my favorite things about QZAP is that it uses a specialized metadata schema just for zines called xZINECOREx, based on the more common DublinCore schema. Cataloging and describing zines are challenging. They often don’t have a title page with publication information. Sometimes no author or creator is listed, or the author goes by a pseudonym. Maybe they have a publication date, but often they do not.

A sample record using the xZINECOREx metadata schema.

Given these complexities, libraries and archives handle describing zines in all sorts of ways. The xZINECOREx schema provides a standard that can be used across institutions and by independent projects like QZAP. QZAP contributes metadata from its collection to the Zine Union Catalog, which aims to be a single place to search for zines across multiple libraries, archives, and independent collections. Because zines are ephemeral, this catalog is a great resource for scholars interested in the history of zines. 

A digital collection like QZAP is vital to preserving the history of these rare, hard-to-find publications, yet there remains great value in studying physical zines. The physical objects provide the reader with a unique, tactile experience. This is especially important for LGBTQ+ history, which is so often erased or hidden. Reading a personal, first-hand account from a queer punk in the 90s – from the actual paper zine that person made by hand – is visceral and powerful. It’s an experience hard to replicate in an online setting. If you find QZAP intriguing, I encourage you to stop by our Zine Collection on the 5th floor of the Fine Arts Library. Our collection has many queer zines, including many published in Texas, and dates back to the 1990s.  

Want to learn more about zines? Check out these resources:

Read, Hot & Digitized: Visualizing Wikipedia’s Gender Gap

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this new series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Wikipedia is a website that many of us use every day – yes, even us librarians! Wikipedia was founded with utopian ideals, with its democratic approach to content creation and always-free, open knowledge. Therefore, it seems like the ideal platform to address structural inequalities in our information systems that reflect and reinforce racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia and combinations thereof.

However, Wikipedia has a long-standing problem of gender imbalance both in terms of article content and editor demographics. Only 18% of content across Wikimedia platforms are about women. The gaps on content covering non-binary and transgender individuals are even starker: less than 1% of editors identify as trans, and less than 1% of biographies cover trans or nonbinary individuals. When gender is combined with other factors, such as race, nationality, or ethnicity, the numbers get even lower. This gender inequity has long been covered in the scholarly literature via editor surveys and analysis of article content (Hill and Shaw, 2013; Graells-Garrido, Lalmas, and Menczer, 2015; Bear and Collier, 2016; Wagner, Graells-Garrido, Garcia, and Menczer, 2016; Ford and Wajcman, 2017). To visualize these inequalities in nearly real time, the Humaniki tool was developed.

Humaniki was created in 2020 by merging two previous data visualization projects. Data scientist Maximillian Klein created the Wiki Data Human Gender Indicators project in 2016. The French project Denelezh was created by Enzel Le Mir for Wikimedia France in 2017. Both projects utilized the Wikidata API and merged because of their significant overlap and shared mission, and Klein recently received a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to continue this work. Humaniki is also built using Python, and its backend code is available on GitHub

Humaniki has many ways to explore this data. One of the most interesting is to look at the numbers based on language. Wikipedia isn’t just available in English, and Humaniki offers users the chance to look at gender representation for biographies in 529 languages! Another interesting data point is Year of Birth, and the trends in the Humaniki data suggest the gender gap closes slightly for biographies about younger people. For example, 23% of biographies on people born in 1963 are about women. For biographies on people born in 1983, however, 29% are about women. 

Humaniki also provides numbers of biographies on people who identify as “other genders” (people whose gender identity is not cisgender). For each metric, you can review the “Other Genders Breakdown,” which lists out all the gender identities (trans women, trans men, nonbinary, genderfluid, two-spirit, etc.) included in that particular data point. The “Other Genders” metric is important because the numbers are so stark. Looking back to our examples from 1963 and 1983, only 16 biographies in the 1963 dataset and 31 from 1983 are about people who don’t identify as cisgender – that’s out of more than 50,000 biographies! This highlights the great need to create and expand articles on people who identify outside of the traditional gender binary.

Humaniki is a useful tool for building awareness of the Wikipedia gender gap, and there are many ways to act upon this knowledge and get involved. The UT Libraries sponsors multiple Wikipedia edit-a-thons focused on improving articles about women and LGBTQ+ people. Every March, we host Queering the Record, a homegrown edit-a-thon to improve queer and trans representation, and we participate in the international campaign Art + Feminism, which focuses on gender, feminism, and the arts. Additionally, we’ve hosted one-off edit-a-thons covering Latinx and Mexican women, Indigenous languages, and women and LGBTQ+ people in STEM fields. Keep an eye on the UT Libraries events page to learn about future edit-a-thons!

Scholarship and Popular Press on the Wikipedia Gender Gap

Bear, Julia B., and Benjamin Collier. “Where are the women in Wikipedia? Understanding the different psychological experiences of men and women in Wikipedia.” Sex Roles 74, no. 5-6 (2016): 254-265. 

Filipacchi, Amanda. “Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists.” The New York Times, April 24, 2013. 

Ford, Heather, and Judy Wajcman. “‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap.” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 4 (2017): 511-527.

Gordon, Maggie. “Wikipedia Editing Marathons Add Women’s Voices to Online Resource.” Houston Chronicle, November 9, 2017. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/article/Adding-women-s-voices-to-Wikipedia-12344424.php

Graells-Garrido, Eduardo, Mounia Lalmas, and Filippo Menczer. “First women, second sex: Gender bias in Wikipedia.” In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media, pp. 165-174. 2015.

Hill, Benjamin Mako, and Aaron Shaw. “The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation.” PloS One 8, no. 6 (2013): e65782–e65782.

Paling, Emma. “The Sexism of Wikipedia.” The Atlantic, October 21, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/how-wikipedia-is-hostile-to-women/411619/

Stephenson-Goodknight, Rosie. “Viewpoint: How I Tackle Wiki Gender Gap One Article at a Time.” BBC News, December 7, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-38238312

“The Nobel Prize Winning Scientist Who Wasn’t Famous Enough for Wikipedia.” The Irish Times, October 3, 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/the-nobel-prize-winning-scientist-who-wasn-t-famous-enough-for-wikipedia-1.3650212

Wagner, Claudia, Eduardo Graells-Garrido, David Garcia, and Filippo Menczer. “Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia.” EPJ Data Science 5 (2016): 1-24.

Kids and Queens: Drag Queen Story Time Comes to the PCL

Drag Queen Tatiana Cholula visits the PCL to read children’s book in order to promote positive roles models in queerness and gender fluidity. (link from Daily Texan. Photo Credit: Dakota Kern | Daily Texan Staff)

Small children running around the PCL’s UFCU Room is not a normal sight on a Tuesday morning. Neither is a drag queen dressed up in a gown and full make-up. But on November 27, the Perry-Castañeda Library brought them together for a special story time event. Tatiana Cholula read picture books to a crowd of about 20 small children and their parents. UT faculty, staff, and students joined in and took a seat on the floor to hear Miss Tatiana’s stories.

Drag Queen Story Time is a national phenomenon, and it is exactly as the name suggests – drag performers read picture books aloud to groups of small children, their parents, and adult drag fans. It has been a huge hit at public libraries across the country, and when our friends at Austin Public Library hosted their own Drag Queen Story Time event, they had to turn folks away because their room was at capacity!

While Drag Queen Story Time is not a typical event hosted by an academic library, we thought it sounded like so much fun that we had to give it a try. The PCL has an extensive Youth Collection, including a lovely selection of new and notable picture books. Faculty and students use the Youth Collection for research in education, cultural history, and art, and many faculty and staff with children check out these books for leisure reading. Because November is National Picture Book Month, it was the perfect time to hold this event.

We partnered with UT’s Gender & Sexuality Center to find a drag performer, and they directed us to Tatiana Cholula, a former UT student, who is popular in the local Austin drag scene. Miss Tatiana immediately was enthusiastic about the event, and she picked out three picture books from the PCL’s Youth Collection that featured LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color.

We are proud to have brought visibility to gender diversity and the joy and fun of drag performance to the library. The event also encouraged young children to be themselves, no matter their gender, and showed them a glamorous, queer role model. We received enthusiastic feedback from parents and students who asked us to host the event again, and Miss Tatiana said, “Showing my art to a much younger audience made my heart so full.”

 

 

70 Pages of Change and Counting

Most people think of SXSW as a giant party. But a for a group of us from the UT Libraries this year, SXSW presented an opportunity to make Wikipedia a more welcoming and representative place for LGBTQ+-identified people.

It started with an idea from some great folks at WNYC Studios, a public radio station in New York, to host an LGBTQ+ Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon during SXSW. WNYC produces the acclaimed podcast Nancy that covers modern queer identity. Hosts Kathy Tu and Tobin Low were at the festival to present on diversity in podcasting and wanted to do more in their off-time while in Austin. They noticed that many queer and trans topics don’t have robust Wikipedia pages, if they had pages at all, so they decided to tackle these significant information gaps.

I linked up with them in January, when they had the wisdom to reach out to librarians in Austin to assist with this event, Keep Wikipedia Queer. Event planning is more than one-person job, and I was able to partner with some graduate students from iSchool Pride, a group from the School of Information.

As we began planning, we realized that many people from UT might not be in town during SXSW. To encourage as much UT participation as possible, we decided to host Queering the Record, a pre edit-a-thon research event at the PCL during the week before Spring Break. Queering the Record provided structured time, space, and snacks for librarians, students, faculty, and staff to use library resources to identify topics that need Wikipedia pages and collect a list of sources that could be used and cited by edit-a-thon participants. More than 35 people attended Queering the Record, and by the end, we created a 23-page Google doc that we were able to share and work from at Nancy’s Edit-A-Thon.

Speaking of Nancy’s event – it was a lot of fun! During the 4-hour event held downtown, we met people from around Austin and around the country, all of whom are passionate about LGBTQ+ representation. Seven folks from UT attended, including some PCL Graduate Research Assistants, and we connected with a librarian from the City University of New York system. As a group, we edited more than 70 Wikipedia pages on topics as wide-ranging as comedian/blogger Samantha Irby, LGBTQ+ rights in Syria, Austin’s QueerBomb celebration, and the children’s book series Frog and Toad.

The response to both of these events from students and staff was so positive that we hope to hold more LGBTQ+ Wikipedia edit-a-thons in the future!

 A group photo from the SXSW event Keep Wikipedia Queer, including librarians and student staff from the UT Libraries. Photo by Jeanette D. Moses/WYNC
A group photo from the SXSW event Keep Wikipedia Queer, including librarians and student staff from the UT Libraries. Photo by Jeanette D. Moses/WYNC

Special thanks to iSchool student and PCL GRA Elle Covington for her contributions to these events!