The Digital Transgender Archive

K.J. Rawson, Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Coordinator of Digital Integration Teaching Initiative, Northeastern University
April 29, 2022
12-2pm CST

In this presentation, Dr. K.J. Rawson (he/him/his) will discuss his work founding and directing the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) and serving as the co-chair of the Homosaurus: An International LGBTQ+ Linked Data Vocabulary. The DTA is an open-access, primary source digital archive that Rawson created to address the barriers that researchers face when conducting historical research on transgender topics. This presentation will discuss those barriers and the new possibilities for historical discovery that digital archives like the DTA can open up for researchers. Dr. Rawson will also introduce the Homosaurus and the queer worldmaking possibilities of linked data vocabularies.

K.J. Rawson works at the intersections of the Digital Humanities and Rhetoric, LGBTQ+, and Feminist Studies. Focusing on archives as key sites of cultural power, he studies the rhetorical work of queer and transgender archival collections in both brick-and-mortar and digital spaces. He has co-edited special issues of Peitho and TSQ and co-edited Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Rawson’s scholarship has appeared in Archivaria, Enculturation, Peitho, Present Tense, QED, RSQ, TSQ, and several edited collections. K.J. Rawson is founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an award-winning online repository of trans-related historical materials, and he is the co-chair of the editorial board of the Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary.

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