Spotlighting Hidden Histories

Digitization and online access are often presented as an important tool for making history, particularly those whose histories are rarely told, accessible to a broader audience. However, what happens to born-digital materials which can technically be accessed—but whose content and format may not be accessible in the contemporary media environment? In this presentation, I’ll talk more about my process working with materials from the Usenet Historical Collection to build the Transgender Usenet Archive and conduct my own research. I’ll discuss the technical and ethical challenges I faced in building the archive, as well as how these challenges informed my own research into early use of the term “cisgender” in transgender discourse.