DSS Partners to Launch the Queer Archives Project Digital Humanities Site

The Queer Archives Project at Lafayette College is a collaborative, interdisciplinary initiative designed to illuminate Lafayette’s Queer history, advance teaching, learning and research in the area of Queer Studies, and promote positive institutional transformation.  Last spring, under the leadership of DSS Director Charlotte Nunes and QAP faculty director Mary A. Armstrong, the QAP team launched a new digital humanities project that integrates oral histories, archival materials, and undergraduate interpretive research on Queer histories at Lafayette College.

Landing page of the Queer Archives Project digital humanities site

Members of the project team include undergraduate researchers, faculty, and librarians, including the staff of Digital Scholarship Services and Special Collections.  The team selected the open-source software Scalar on which to build the site.  In Scalar, contents are heavily networked and interconnected across the site, rather than being hierarchically nested.  Given Scalar’s multi-nodal, non-linear format, it is an appropriate platform for research and teaching that approaches history-building critically and iteratively.  

Members of the QAP team who collaborated to build the digital humanities site

Students in Dr. Armstrong’s spring 2019 WGS 340 class had opportunities to contribute to the site; during the 2019-20 academic year, undergraduate researchers will continue to expand the site, adding new oral histories, archival materials, and interpretive “paths” that put these materials into conversation with each other to make an argument or tell a story about Lafayette’s queer histories.  

Read more about the Queer Archives Project in Dr. Armstrong’s recent article in The Advocate.  Read more about the QAP digital humanities project launch in this piece in the Lafayette News.