« Digital Humanities Virtual Seminar 2023 »: Elspeth H. Brown (U of Toronto)

As part of the 2023 edition of the « Digital Humanities Virtual Seminar » series organized by the CRIHN, the Thinc Lab (Guelph), The Humanities Data Lab (Ottawa), and the Center for Digital Humanities (Toronto Metropolitan U) around the theme of « Communities », Elspeth H. Brown (U of Toronto) will present a talk entitled « Queering Digital History: The Pussy Palace Oral History Project » on Thursday 13 April 2023 in person at U de Montreal and via zoom:

This talk engages with the 2023 Digital Humanities Virtual Seminar theme of “Communities” through the lens of queer and trans community-engaged public, digital humanities research. The presentation will focus on the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, which documents the last police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history in September 2000. The Pussy Palace was a series of trans-inclusive queer women’s sex parties that took place in Toronto in the late 1990s and early 2000s and marks a period of radical sex organizing in Canadian queer history. Our team collected 36 interviews with bathhouse patrons, event organizers, and community activists, allowing us to historicize this event within the longer history of Toronto police hostility towards non-normative sexuality, exemplified by the gay male-focused bathhouse raids of 1975-1984.

The concept of community was foundational to the organizers and activists involved with the Pussy Palace, and it’s been central to our research creation efforts in connecting with queer public history audiences. The talk will situate this digital history project within an alternative genealogy of digital humanities outlined by Tara McPherson (2018), one that reminds of us the centrality of visuality, aesthetics, and the sensory to DH’s longer history as a field and practice. In particular, the talk will showcase our work creating audio portraits, video shorts, and a digital exhibition as public humanities strategies in both community collaboration and public engagement.

Elspeth H. Brown is Professor of History and Associate VP Research at the University of Toronto, Mississauga where her research concerns modern queer and trans history; the history and theory of photography; the history of US capitalism; and queer archives. She is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University, 2019); co-editor of “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014); and Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014), among other publications. She is currently the Director for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and the Digital Humanities Network, U of T. She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a SSHRC-funded multi-year public humanities collaboration with community and university partners. From 2014-2021, she served on the Board of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBQT2+ Archive, most recently as Co-President.

[Lien zoom pour la conférence]

This event is part of a day-colloquium on « History and/in Digital Humanities ».

The other speakers in the 2023 series are:

• Diane Jakacki (Bucknell U and Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities) on Thursday 26 January 2023 @ 10am: « For Want of a Nail: Need, Speed, and the Future of Cooperation in Digital Scholarly Production »
• Mike Annany (USC Annenberg) on Friday 17 February @ 11am: « Seeing Like an Algorithmic Error: What are Algorithmic Mistakes, Why do They Matter, How Might they be Public Problems? »
• Jas Morgan (Canada Research Chair, Digital Wahkohtowin & Cultural Governance, Toronto Metropolitan University) on Thursday 16 March @ 10am: « Screen Sovereignties: 2LGBTQ+ Indigenous Governance in Canadian Cinemas »

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 12 avril 2023 à 19 h 02 min.