Digital Archival Ethics

Ethics of Care in Digital Archives

The ethics of care framing that undergirds this essay can be traced to, among others, Carol Gilligan’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, specifically her well-known book In a Different Voice. Even when treated within the context of second-wave feminism, Gilligan’s work has been criticized by some for essentializing women as caretakers. However, Gilligan’s theorization of care continues to offer a poignant response to dominant masculinist worldviews that emphasize individual rights at the expense of the collective, as well as arguments that interdependence and care should be widely valued, irrespective of gender. As summarized by Bethany Nowviskie, an ethics of care offers two essential shifts: “The first is toward a humanistic appreciation of context, interdependence, and vulnerability—of fragile, earthly things and their interrelation. The second is away from the supposedly objective evaluation and judgment of the philosophical mainstream of ethics—that is, away from criticism—and toward personal, worldly action and response.”4 Applied to a digital archives context, a feminist ethics of care pushes beyond any singular focus on the contents and workings of particular digital archives, and instead asks us to consider broad humanistic contexts that are based on interdependence, affective connections, and real-word action.

Caswell and Cifor’s widely cited article “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives” explains that, by taking an ethics of care approach in an archival context, “archivists are seen as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual affective responsibility.”5 They highlight the role of archivists as being central to the dynamic web of relationships among a number of different stakeholders who are integral to the archival process. This framing is a significant departure from typical archival practices that either focus on highly individualized rights or neglect to consider the rights of some stakeholders altogether. In a feminist ethics of care, archivists can approach their work as always in conversation with and connected to a series of others for whom they take on some affective responsibility. Caswell and Cifor further specify that archivists should consider their relationships with four groups—record creators, record subjects, record users, and broader communities—and all of these relationships should be “marked by radical empathy.”6 As they explain, “the notion of empathy we are positing assumes that subjects are embodied, that we are inextricably bound to each other through relationships, that we live in complex relations to each other infused with power differences and inequities, and that we care about each other’s well-being.”7

Elspeth Brown and Myrl Beam extend Caswell and Cifor’s work to trans archival contexts by discussing the care work involved in conducting trans oral histories and making them accessible in digital environments. Closely echoing both Nowviskie’s and Caswell and Cifor’s use of ethics of care, Brown and Beam explain: “Trans care work in this context is a form of mutual aid, built over time through consensual interaction, affective labor, and resistance to hierarchy. This form of queer and trans care work values interdependency and queer kinship models in producing an ethics of care that does not rely on a definition of the normative family unit.”8 Here again, archival work informed by an ethics of care centrally values interdependency, relationships, and affective responsibilities. Brown and Beam continue: “Those engaged in writing metadata . . . must enter into an affective bond with the narrators, their community, and their history. This archival work is a form of emotional justice, a praxis of trans care in relationship to the documentary evidence of the trans past.” Drawing explicitly on Hil Malatino’s concept of trans care in that passage, Brown and Beam theorize metadata creation as a critical moment of care work that is central to digital archiving.

In the context of the DTA, attention to care is particularly pressing in light of our contemporary moment in which trans people in the United States are facing unprecedented public attention and attacks while we continue our struggle for fundamental human rights. Within this landscape, Brown and Beam’s description of trans archival work as “mutual aid” speaks to how desperately history is needed to support the ongoing work of trans activism. Malatino beautifully explains: “When the milieu you inhabit feels hostile, it’s deeply comforting to turn to text and image from another time. I was desperate for representation, but more than that, I was desperate for some sense that other subjects had encountered and survived some of the transphobic, cissexist bullshit with which I was being repeatedly confronted. I needed resources for resilience. I wanted a roadmap for another way of being.”9 To borrow Malatino’s phrasing, the DTA’s work can thus be understood as providing contemporary trans people with critical “resources for resilience.”

As we orient the DTA’s work according to an ethics of care, what that means, in the simplest terms, is that we strive to center people rather than objects. This upends the “normative focus within archives,” which is “the care of objects, rather than the care of people.”10 Though we have an expansive “web of mutual affective responsibility,” to use Caswell and Cifor’s phrase, for the purposes of this article, I will narrow my focus to two particular groups of people we extend care to: those who are represented in our collections and those who access our collections. In the next two sections, I will discuss our specific ethical considerations and our protocols for representation and access in the DTA.

Representing People with Care

How do we respectfully and accurately represent people in digital archival collections? Within the context of the DTA, this is a pressing question with high potential impacts. A number of the people on our site are still alive, and so we are accountable to them in a very present and literal way (i.e., it is not uncommon for us to be in direct conversation with people included in our collections). However, our commitments of care are certainly not limited to those individuals who are still alive. For the very reason that the DTA was created—to provide greater access to trans-related histories in the face of systemic exclusions and erasures—we are attuned to the exclusions and erasures that we can inadvertently perpetuate through our archival processes, including our descriptive practices. Mx. A. Matienzo argues: “Naming is fundamentally unavoidable in knowledge representation. As such, we need to make a decision whether we choose to name with an intention of justice, or with the pretense of neutrality and objectivity.”11 As a project driven by social-justice aims, we recognize and seek to navigate carefully our impactful role in the knowledge representation process.

Before we delve into some of the specific considerations of representing people in the DTA, it’s helpful to put trans archival representation into a broader context of historical documentation of a minoritized group. Consider this simple visualization of historical information loss (Figure 7.1). Even if it were desirable, we could never fully document all of a person’s lived experiences or a community’s activities. As Figure 7.1 reminds us (though it is far from being to scale), there is a tremendous amount of information loss in each stage of the documentation process. Of the selected documentations of individual people’s lives and community activities, only a miniscule percentage become archived, or stored for long term preservation and made available for researchers. In effect, then, each stage of the archival process functions as a representational layer that gets further removed from people’s lived experiences, which illustrates that archival documentations are always already representations of the lives they are documenting.

I have belabored this point, which is generally taken for granted, because the information loss represented by the dotted lines is significantly greater for oppressed communities than for more privileged groups. As a result, we have a particular responsibility to attend to ethical representation because we have fewer materials representing fewer people, and thus they hold more power and impact. The earlier we reach back into history, particularly for pre-1950s periods, the more likely it is that the documentations that we have available were produced by those in power in order to exoticize, ridicule, and shame those who refused to conform to gender norms (while cautioning others against such behaviors). The combination of these forces, such as the lack of materials overall and the rarity of finding materials created by those who transgressed gender norms, dramatically increases the importance and representational effects of the documentations we include on our site.

The DTA itself is a powerful representational layer in that our collecting scope, which states that we include documentations of any person who transgressed gender norms pre-2000, requires us to interpret the actions and activities of historical figures and highlights those activities as key features of a person’s life. Though we are focused on practices of gender transgression rather than those who identify as trans (or other related terms), we strive to be careful in how to represent individual people so that the “transgender” framework of our project does not become deterministic over the individuals represented in our holdings. Not only is the term “transgender” anachronistic as an identity label prior to the late twentieth century, but our conceptions of sexuality, sex, and gender as separate identities is a recent phenomenon, and it remains highly culturally specific.

Given this broader context, we have developed an ethics review that involves a series of questions concerning representation (the subsequent section will share our questions concerning access). Though these questions are often unanswerable, we use them to slow down our archival process. Here, we take inspiration from Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson’s argument concerning decolonial Indigenous archival frameworks that slow archives can productively disrupt the “ongoing colonial logics of rapid access and endless circulation where Indigenous materials continue to be subject to the same colonial logics.”12 As with Christen and Anderson’s approach, ours is an intentional strategy to infuse an ethics of care into our workflow and ensure that we are focusing on the people represented in the materials we are handling. We use the following questions to evaluate how we represent people ethically in digital archives, with some elaboration on each:

• Should this person be included in our collections?
  • Rather than evaluating specific objects for inclusion, we reorient our focus to the people being represented by those objects. We take this approach because we recognize that the simple act of including a person on our site has the potential to shift the way they are remembered and represented elsewhere.
• How will circulation and dissemination impact this person or their memory?
  • Once we determine that a person can be included in our collections, we then consider the potential impacts of inclusion. Is this individual alive, and if not, how recently did they pass? Does this person already have a public profile? Is this person already known to have transgressed gender norms or are we outing them in some way? Has this person already been interpreted to have a particular identity (e.g., someone claimed as a lesbian) that we would be challenging by including them in a transgender project? In answering these types of questions, there is no formula or rubric that we use to determine how to represent a person; instead, these questions slow down our process, inform our descriptive practices, and often suggest additional pathways for research or conversation.
• Will any private information be shared?
  • While some forms of information such as social security numbers and home addresses need to remain private, most of our collections include information that some would consider private whereas others wouldn’t. Ruha Benjamin argues: “The politics of knowledge . . . is deeply entangled in a politics of the private and in who gets to lay claim to privacy and subjectivity.”13 It is certainly difficult to be in the position where only rarely can we directly communicate with those who are represented on our site in order to ensure that they retain their claim to privacy and subjectivity. In the absence of that opportunity, we try to follow any historical evidence that we can find that would help us understand how much privacy a person sought. On the one hand are figures like Lou Sullivan, who demonstrated clear commitment to sharing his story: he helped to establish the GLBT Historical Society, sought to publish his extensive diaries, and worked to ensure that all of his records were available to researchers. On the other hand, we encounter figures who marked their materials “private” or carefully presented their life stories to erase all of their trans-ness. In cases like Sullivan’s, we have very little hesitation to include materials documenting his life, even those that are highly private (though we do try to restrict the exposure of other people’s private information within those materials). For those who have indicated a greater desire for privacy, we evaluate how much exposure they already have and the kinds of representations that are presented elsewhere. We are careful not to assume that all people want to be publicly out as trans or gender nonconforming, but we also do not want to default to a shame-based assumption that being out is undesirable. Benjamin goes on to argue: “For oppressed people, I think privacy is not only about protecting some things from view, but also about what is strategically exposed.”14 With that in mind, we strive to balance privacy with strategic visibility. Our policies page explains that we “redact last names on sensitive materials that were not designed or intended for public circulation,” and we urge visitors to contact us “if any materials on this site violate personal privacy.”15
• Beyond copyright, what rights do the subject(s) and creator(s) of this resource have?
  • Copyright is an important consideration for any digital archival project, but it is only minimally helpful for evaluating ethical usage. For our project, evaluating official copyright can be useful in that it builds in a clear and intentional step where we determine who owns rights to content and we strive to contact them. Through this process, we often have an opportunity to discuss not only whether people want their materials to be included on the site, but how they want to be represented. Frequently, though, we are unable to contact either the creators or subjects of a resource and we are left to evaluate the materials on our own. Generally, we focus on how much creative content is involved, whether there are expectations of privacy that we might violate, what kind of audience a resource was created for, and what expectations the subjects and creators might have had for the circulation of this resource. As I will discuss at greater length in the subsequent section, we have also been following the lead of Indigenous archival initiatives that have challenged the cultural heritage sphere’s over-reliance on state-granted intellectual property rights, which fail to properly value community creation practices or the various people who may have deep rights to objects that are legally unrecognized.16
• Does this individual have an opportunity to represent and describe himself, herself, or themself?
  • A significant portion of our holdings are about, rather than by, people who transgress gender norms. As a result, it is common for individuals who are represented in our collections to be spoken about and spoken for, without having the opportunity to represent and describe themselves. Not only does this impact the ways that they are described with subject terms and free-text description, but our team is often left to interpret a person’s life based on highly flawed and severely limited documentations. For example, we are often unaware of how particular figures felt about their given names—did they consider it a “deadname” (a given name, usually assigned at birth, that a person no longer uses and might be used to out or shame a person), or did they continue to embrace it for strategic or personal purposes? Since we do have some people who are represented on the site who ask us to include both their given name and their chosen name, we can find ourselves in a difficult position between respecting a person’s presentation of themselves, which we always do, and being careful that we do not appear to endorse the use of deadnames for all trans people or in other contexts. With certain historical figures, we do opt to include full given names, even when that person’s chosen name is available, because in those cases censoring a person’s given name would effectively render that individual invisible and undiscoverable by the name by which they were publicly known. Despite our project’s trans-affirming context, this practice has the problematic effect of perpetuating the transphobic documentations of a person’s life, but we have yet to identify any less harmful options that do not further erase that person’s existence.
• What subject terms are available to describe this person, and which ones should be supplied?
  • Only after we have determined that certain materials will definitely be included in our collections and we have reviewed privacy, rights, and opportunities for self-representation, do we turn to questions of description. Within the first few months of processing materials for our database, we learned that it was incredibly difficult to describe trans-related historical materials using the subject terms that are available in broad vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Instead, we turned to the Homosaurus (homosaurus.org), a thematically focused set of more than three thousand terms related to LGBTQ+ cultures that can be used in any cultural heritage institution in order to allow users to find materials related to those concepts. The Homosaurus was an immediate and transformative benefit to the DTA because it offered a degree of granularity to accurately and ethically describe people represented in our materials. Of course, archival description is rife with power differentials, and scholars and archivists can consult a rich corpus of scholarship on description.17 Within the scope of the DTA, we attempt to favor community-based terminology versus terminology created by outsiders, though this is rarely straightforward given the complexities of language development and circulation.

These six questions, though certainly not comprehensive, are key considerations for our ethics of care approach to archival representation. Shared across all of these questions is a sustained focus on the people who are represented in the materials on our site. There also are many more trans-specific considerations when determining how to represent people ethically in archives (and other cultural heritage institutions) than I have detailed above.18

The DTA assumes affective responsibilities toward the people who we include in our holdings, though we certainly do not claim to represent those individuals flawlessly. Unfortunately, it is altogether too likely that we are inadvertently perpetuating harm in the ways that we have represented people in our collections, or even in having collected materials about them at all. Yet our valuation of people rather than objects and our attention to ethical representation offer important preliminary interventions in digital archives initiatives.

The Ethics of Access

This back-end evaluative process about how to include people ethically directly shapes the front-end access we provide on our site. Most digital archives, ours included, are created based on a commitment to increase access to historical resources. Yet this goal of increased access is often taken for granted as an unequivocal benefit. Recent conversations around the ethics of access have been led by Indigenous archivists and scholars (and settlers who work with Indigenous resources) who have revealed the persistent colonial logic of archival practices, including digital archival practices. For example, Ellen Cushman (Cherokee Nation Citizen) points out that “the more decontextualized, categorized, itemized, arranged, installed, and chronologically organized, the more damage archives do to the understandings, practices, and objects they hope to preserve.”19 In discussing two projects developed with Indigenous knowledge frameworks, the Mukurtu content management system and the Local Contexts initiative, Christen and Anderson advocate for a “shift to building an archival ecosystem that emphasizes connections and care and archival processes that do not treat access and ownership as blunt instruments, but instead, recognize that there are various modes and types of culturally specific circulation, exchange, stewardship, and sharing practices that frame the hard work of archival caring.”20 Not only do these approaches reveal the harmful legacies and ongoing colonizing effects of archives, particularly the glorification of open and undifferentiated access and the harm that has caused to Indigenous communities specifically, but they offer a powerful alternative model that centralizes relationships between people, connections to place, and culturally specific access practices.21

The DTA uses an ethics of care approach to be carefully attuned to the dynamic and transtemporal relationships between the people who are represented in our collections and those who are accessing the collections. More specifically, we strive to evaluate critically the impacts of access on both those who are represented in the collections and those who are accessing them. The access benefits for contemporary researchers who are using a digital archive are generally obvious: researchers can gain understanding, knowledge, and “resources for resilience,” often leading to personal enrichment or professional gain.22 However, there can also be moments when the needs of these two groups are not in alignment, such as when researchers seek all available primary sources and want them in pristine and untouched shape (for fullest access), on the one hand, and when subjects in our collections request that we restrict, redact, or otherwise edit sources to protect privacy or ensure appropriate access, on the other. While we understand the research benefits of having unfettered access, our first priority is to protect the interests of those who are represented in our collections, even when it curtails access. Part of our affective responsibility to subjects involves providing access that does not further harm. This commitment is particularly pressing in our current political landscape and given the instances we are aware of when people have used materials from the DTA for harmful effects. In other words, ethical access is an imperative if we are striving to have a just and equitable project that attends to the actual impacts it has on people, particularly trans and gender-nonconforming people.

Christen offers a helpful reframing of what most digital content providers mean by open access: “While openness may seem to be a neutral and homogenous term and standard for access, it is in fact a culturally determined and political act. Making digital content open to all, to do with what they will without question, is very rarely what proponents of open access mean. Access and openness are almost always more complicated, more nuanced, and conditional.”23 This has certainly been true for the DTA. While we recognize that our efforts to make trans-related materials more widely available to the public is itself a political act, we recognize that the ideology that undergirds the concept of open access is itself political and is always heavily conditional. To help elucidate the DTA’s evaluative process concerning access, including our approach to the complicated impacts of access, I have included below a series of questions that we consider, along with a brief discussion of each.

• Who will most benefit from access to this item?
  • While conversations about access often focus on researchers who are most likely to be working with archival collections, rarely is such access framed in terms of benefit. In theory, archives, specifically digital archives, provide a public service by collecting, preserving, and providing access to historical materials (private and restricted-access archives notwithstanding). But who are the actual researchers using these collections and, importantly, what do they gain by working with archival resources? In the case of the DTA, a significant proportion of our users of whom we are aware are academic researchers or public historians, both of whom stand to benefit from our collections, both in status and financially. When contextualized within the extensive history of cisgender researchers benefiting from studying trans people (often with considerable harm done to trans people), it becomes clear that the DTA can contribute to this problematic legacy if we rely too heavily on engagement by cisgender scholars as a central indicator of our project’s impact. Instead, rather than defaulting our inclusion decisions to support credentialed, institutionally affiliated, and privileged (particularly white, cisgender) researchers, we consider first and foremost whether trans people and trans communities will benefit from accessing specific resources. We expand our understanding of benefit by striving to value personal enrichment over academic research potential, and connection with community over number of hits.
• Who will pay the costs of access?
  • As the general public is becoming increasingly aware of the importance of data privacy, digital archives need to examine more closely the potential impacts that our work has in making information about people more widely available. Even when we are careful not to share information that obviously compromises privacy, we are contributing to a dynamic information landscape where it is increasingly possible to gather information on specific individuals from seemingly innocuous data points. Who is most likely to be targeted or harmed by such access? More broadly, just as the benefits of access are not equally distributed, the costs of access are also inequitably shared. For the DTA, in particular, following the trenchant critiques of trans visibility presented in the book Trap Door and in the film Disclosure, we are attentive to the ways increased trans visibility can inspire a violent backlash that often targets trans people of color, particularly trans women of color.24 Beyond the individualized impacts of sharing more information about specific trans people, both alive and deceased, our project itself contributes to the increased cultural visibility of trans people that can elicit a violent response. Finally, and again following the leadership of Indigenous cultural heritage practitioners, we need to be aware of the harm that can be caused by unfettered access to certain materials and the harm that encounters with certain content will cause some users. In addition to our small but growing collections related to Two-Spirit and trans Indigenous people for whom access protocols can be highly important, we are also mindful of the broader harms of access that users of our site can experience when they encounter difficult objects in our collections.
• Are users of all abilities able to access all resources?
  • In centering an ethics of care approach to access, we consider how users of varying abilities will be able to engage with our site and the contents of our collections. For example, we check our site for color contrast, alt text of images, form and tab labels, and other elements that support full access. As we upload items, we aim to provide machine-readable descriptions of content, such as text transcripts of audio resources, captions for videos, and descriptions of images; however, we are admittedly not always able to do so because of funding capacities, time limitations, or donor restrictions. This becomes particularly concerning if there is an entire subset of items (such as oral histories from a particular project) that are not accessible for users, in which case we will flag those items for enhanced description. We also consider access in terms of intellectual accessibility and we write our content with the intention of making it comprehensible to young teenage users (and we periodically get feedback from users in this age group to evaluate how successful we are).
• Should there be limited access to certain items?
  • As part of our evaluation of the costs and benefits of access to our collections, we also consider whether differential access—meaning that only certain users are granted access to specific materials—is a necessary step to support ethical access. This approach is quite common in physical archives, where embargos, restrictions, and mandatory usage agreements are part of the everyday work of offering mediated access to archival collections, though these practices can certainly introduce problematic gatekeeping. In the digital archives realm, most content providers are either fully open or limited by paywalls to subscribers. Mukurtu, a content management system designed to share Indigenous digital heritage materials in “culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways,” has added significant nuance to conversations about access to highlight who is best served by unfettered access and who may be most harmed.25 The DTA has not yet formally implemented differential access (though the technical infrastructure is mostly in place to do so), largely because we do not have a decision-making body who would oversee this process. We are currently exploring traditional knowledge (TK) labels, available via the Local Contexts project, to determine whether they would support more ethical access to some items in our collections.26 Beyond these database-hosted solutions, we do make de facto differential access decisions when we work with archivists to digitize collections that we do not make available on our site, though they are available to researchers upon request.

• Should users give consent before viewing explicit content? If so, how?

  Should users be warned about harmful content? If so, how?

  • These two questions cover similar ground and, taken together, demonstrate the range of curatorial options that we have developed to provide more care-oriented access for users. Within the context of the DTA, we classify items as explicit when they visually depict “violent, graphic, or racist content,” and harmful when they include “references to or depictions of self harm, hate crimes, violence (sexual, physical, and systemic), and discriminatory or dehumanizing language and images, as well as material produced or circulated in exploitative contexts.”27 Though an unfortunately significant portion of our collections can be classified as harmful given the nature of trans history, we felt that it would better reflect our project’s values and educational aims to frame harmful content overtly for our users. To do this, we developed a visible but minimally intrusive content warning statement that we add to item-level descriptive metadata so that users encounter it when they navigate to an item-level page. Our approach to explicit content involves a higher degree of mediation: in recognition of our users who are underage or who do not want to be confronted with unanticipated explicit content, we follow a feminist consent model where we add a popup warning that visitors must click through in order to see an item (and we use a stock thumbnail if there is explicit content in the thumbnail image). Beyond these approaches to harmful and explicit content, we have two additional and more intensive levels of mediation, as represented in Figure 7.2: redacting or blurring access to items, or not including them at all. We exercise these two options only in rare circumstances when the benefits of access do not outweigh the potential harms caused.

In Race After Technology, Benjamin defines the “new Jim Code” as “the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era.”28 Digital archives, which have certainly been promoted as progressive tools for supporting more equitable access, can often be rightfully accused of reproducing inequities, often to the detriment of oppressed communities. While the platforms that underlie our work have tremendous potential, particularly for projects focused on oppressed communities redressing historical erasures, if we are not guided by people-centered ethical frameworks, our projects will only uphold and extend discriminatory systems.

Put another way, I would offer Sofia L. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight’s poignant question to evaluate information environments: “What does it look like to NOT oppress another group of humans?”29 This chapter can be read as an exploratory response to that question through a detailed discussion of the practices of the Digital Transgender Archive. The feminist ethics of care approach that I have advocated for here brings us to precisely the same outcome that Leung and López-McKnight offer: “When we accept everyone’s humanity and realize our responsibility toward one another, what kind of futures can we build together? Any futures we construct must take into account the experiences of all peoples, not just the most vocal, privileged, and visible.”30 As with the Indigenous-focused projects that inspire our practices, we have sought to “include cultural, ethical, and historical checks at each step,” which then “encourages collaboration, relies on historical specificity, and has ethical considerations embedded at every step.”31 We are still developing our processes and our practices are still evolving, which is to say that our work is always ongoing and we invite feedback, critique, and change.

Notes

1. 1. Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier, “Introduction,” in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center, ed. Anne B. McGrail, Angel David Nieves, and Siobhan Senier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021): viii.

2. 2. McGrail, Nieves, and Senier, “Introduction,” x.

3. 3. See, for example: Eamon Schlotterback, Cailin Flannery Roles, and K.J. Rawson, “Investing in Project Maintenance: Auditing the Digital Transgender Archive,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2022), digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/1/000611/000611.html; Rawson, “The Rhetorical Power of Archival Description: Classifying Images of Gender Transgression.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2018): 327–51.

4. 4. Bethany Nowviskie, “Capacity through Care,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019): 425 (emphasis original).

5. 5. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (2016): 24.

6. 6. Caswell and Cifor, 25.

7. 7. Caswell and Cifor, 31.

8. 8. Elspeth H. Brown and Myrl Beam, “Toward an Ethos of Trans Care in Trans Oral History,” The Oral History Review 49, no. 1 (2022): 34.

9. 9. Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 51.

10. 10. Brown and Beam, “Toward an Ethos,” 35.

11. 11. Mx. A. Matienzo, “To Hell With Good Intentions: Linked Data, Community, and the Power to Name,” keynote address, Library Information Technology Association Forum, Minneapolis, Minn., November 14, 2015.

12. 12. Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson, “Toward Slow Archives,” Archival Science 19 (2019): 99.

13. 13. Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 127.

14. 14. Benjamin, 127.

15. 15. “Policies,” Digital Transgender Archive, accessed September 26, 2022, digitaltransgenderarchive.net/about/policies.

16. 16. Kimberly Christen, “Relationships Not Records: Digital Heritage and the Ethics of Sharing Indigenous Knowledge Online,” in Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018): 403–12.

17. 17. See two recent examples: Jessica Tai, “Cultural Humility as a Framework for Anti-Oppressive Archival Description,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 2 (2021); and Dorothy Berry, “Descriptive Equity and Clarity Around Blackface Minstrelsy in HTC Collections,” accessed September 29, 2022, dorothy-berry.com/minstrel-description.

18. 18. For a more extensive discussion of trans affirming metadata, see the Trans Metadata Collective, “Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources,” accessed September 29, 2022, zenodo.org/record/6686841#.YzX41OzMKFF.

19. 19. Ellen Cushman, “Wampum, Sequoyah, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive,” College English 76, no. 2 (2013): 130.

20. 20. Christen and Anderson, “Toward Slow Archives,” 111 (emphasis original).

21. 21. We are admittedly still in the early stages of reckoning with the DTA’s colonizing logics and impacts. The DTA was awarded a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to support a three-year (2022–2025) trans BIPOC digitization initiative. One major part of that initiative is to develop resources and protocols specific to the Indigenous materials in our collections. This process is already suggesting major paradigm shifts that are dramatically reorienting our work.

22. 22. Malatino, Trans Care, 51.

23. 23. Christen, “Relationships,” 406.

24. 24. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, ed. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017); Disclosure, dir. Sam Feeder (Netflix Original Documentary, 2020), 100 min.

25. 25. Mukurtu CMS, accessed September 29, 2022, mukurtu.org/.

26. 26. Local Contexts, accessed September 29, 2022, https://localcontexts.org/.

27. 27. For more details on how we make determinations about each of these categories, see our detailed “Policies” page, accessed September 26, 2022, digitaltransgenderarchive.net/about/policies.

28. 28. Benjamin, Race after Technology, 5–6.

29. 29. Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, “Conclusion: Afterwor(l)ding Toward Imaginative Dimensions,” in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, ed. Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021), 318.

30. 30. Leung and López-McKnight, 318.

31. 31. Christen, “Relationships,” 407.