VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

The World Wide Web has been so important to LGBT+ people – also known as queers – that to understand queer life, one has to understand queer digital culture. Extant research fails to do this culture justice, which not only sustains queer invisibility in research but also endangers their cultural heritage. In this presentation, I will discuss how this problem can be overcome by means of born-digital collections. Using the special collection of over 350 archived Dutch LGBT+ websites of the Dutch National Library (KB), my project will answer the question: What does the Dutch queer web sphere look like and how has it changed over time? It will show the distinct web sphere that queer organizations and individuals formed, its connection to other websites, and its evolution. Notably, I will show how this can be done by means of a computational, distant-reading method: hyperlink analyses. Consequently, I will not only shed light on the cultural heritage of marginalized groups (touching upon topical debates in cultural heritage studies, e.g. about ‘archival of the fittest’) – a history worth preserving if we want to the polyvocality of our past right. Moreover, I will discuss concrete workflows to research rich-yet-underused web archives, which will help other scholars to engage with these vital cultural heritage repositories. Finally, I will show how hyperlink analyses can result in semi-automated means to enhance decisions about which websites to include in cultural heritage collections; decisions which to date are criticized as arbitrary, biased, opaque and establishment-favoring.