In collaboration with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s Scholars-in-Residence Program (SiR) and The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, my research initiative, the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, ran an intensive digital collections lab with five undergraduate students to create three digital exhibitions:

1. Not a Place on the Map: Desh Pardesh, 1988-2001

2. Gendertrash: Transsexual Zine, 1993-1995

3. Mapping Foolscap: Gay Oral Histories, 1981-1987

Based at The ArQuives, students undertook tasks such as digitizing audio cassette and VHS tapes, writing metadata, building digital exhibitions using Omeka, researching and writing exhibition text, and creating audio and video clips.

Toronto’s Desh Pardesh festival (1988–2001) was a multidisciplinary arts festival that showcased underrepresented and marginalized voices within the South Asian diaspora. In May 2017, the SiR team collaborated with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) to produce a digital exhibition that streams these already complete born-digital interviews with artists and activist of colour, and brings additional context to the interviews through digitized visual materials that document the festival.

Project Lead: Saj Soomal, SAVAC

SiR Undergraduates: Alisha Krishna and Amal Khurram

Mirha-Soleil Ross (b. 1969, Montréal) is a transsexual media artist, activist, and sex-worker who lived in Toronto from the early 1990s until 2008, the period covered by her fonds at The ArQuives. In 2016, the Collaboratory processed these unparalleled records of trans art and activist histories. The SiR team then produced a digital collection showcasing gendertrash, a four-issue zine published by Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay in Toronto from 1993-1995.

Project Leads: Dr. Cait McKinney and Sid Cunningham

SiR Undergraduates: Caleigh Inman and Mac Stewart
Collaborators: Nora Butler Burke, Aaron Cain, Trish Salah

Foolscap was a Toronto-based oral history project about pre-Stonewall gay life, conducted by John Grube and Lionel Collier in the 1980s. The project produced over 100 life histories, addressing a variety of topics, such as the Stonewall Riots, Operation Soap, HIV/AIDS, and sex work. The collection includes over 300 audio recordings from 125 interviews with 100 narrators. The SiR team digitized the tapes, drafted written abstracts and metadata, and created a digital exhibition.

Project Lead: Zohar Freeman