History Librarians Interest Group

Introducing our Keynote Speaker:

K.J. Rawson is the Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Co-Director of NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. K.J. works at the intersections of the Digital Humanities and Rhetoric, LGBTQ+, and Feminist Studies. By focusing on archives as key sites of cultural power, he studies the rhetorical work of queer and transgender archival collections in brick-and-mortar and digital spaces. Rawson is also the founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an award-winning collection of trans-related historical materials, and he chairs the editorial board of the Homosaurus, an LGBTQ+ linked data vocabulary. He will present: "Curating Digital Archives with Care: The Ethics of Representation, Description, and Access."

What ethical responsibilities are held by those of us who direct, host, curate, or contribute to digital archives? Drawing upon feminist and Critical Race Studies archival scholarship, this talk will focus on the potential impacts of facilitating access to digital content in online archives. Dr. Rawson will share his experiences founding and directing the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA), an open access collection of materials documenting gender transgressions throughout history that is hosted at Northeastern University and harvested by Digital Commonwealth. He will discuss the ways that even as the DTA responds to archival absences, the project has revealed others, including the severe underrepresentation of people of color in trans-related archival collections. Rather than treating collection scope as a byproduct of external forces, Rawson will frame it as a form of racialized power that directly shapes representational equity. He will then focus on two groups of people directly impacted by digital archives––those who are represented in our collections and those who are accessing our collections––since these two groups often have the least voice and power in digital archival ecosystems. Given that it is not possible to eliminate all ethical concerns from digital archiving, it is the responsibility of those of who contribute to these spaces to carefully attend to the impacts of representation, description, and access, even when doing so may seem insurmountably challenging. Dr. Rawson will conclude with some practical takeaways, including questions for evaluating ethical representation and access in digital archives.