Katherine Clare Mackinnon, University of Copenhagen Marika Cifor, University of Washington

Digital archives 

Archiving Platform Community with Katherine Clare Mackinnon​ & Marika Cifor
As social media platforms age, change and become inaccessible through their proprietary interfaces, web archives emerge as a vessel through which social media data can continue to be accessed, analyzed and studied. In this short talk, I will discuss the significance of examining not just how archives are made, but when, to uncover the temporal politics of archiving platformed community and the subsequent production of platform(ed) archives. Katherine Clare Mackinnon is pursuing her postdoc research within the project "Data loss (DALOSS): the politics of disappearance, destruction and dispossession in digital societies" at University of Copenhagen.

Metadata as Mediation: LGBTQ+ Knowledges, Archives, and Information Activism in the Homosaurus with Marika Cifor
Description: In this talk, Marika Cifor examines how archives function as critical sites of queer information seeking, identity formation, and community and social movement building, while also revealing how their underlying information infrastructures shape and constrain these knowledges. Using the ongoing development of the Homosaurus—an international linked data vocabulary for LGBTQ+ materials— and its recent expansion in the Spanish-language as a case study, her presentation explores queer information activism as both a corrective effort to expand subject description and an analytic intervention that challenges the classificatory systems themselves. By foregrounding how metadata and vocabularies mediate access to queer and trans knowledges, we can examine the critical tensions between institutional infrastructures and the aspirations of community-driven, transformative archival description. Marika is Associate Professor, Information School, University of Washington. Currently, she is a visiting Scholar at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.