Join us for a talk by Dr. Bridget Whearty, Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University: “Digital Manuscripts for LGBTQ+ History: Curation, Accessibility, and Metadata Ethics”

This will be a hybrid talk, held in person at the Rossell Hope Robbins Library and online via Zoom. If you would like to attend via Zoom, please register here: https://forms.gle/bRj4aVG4MaVwU9Y79. And if you're interested in this talk, then you may also be interested in attending the events and panel discussions being held through the Roc Rainbow Rally, October 18 to October 21.

Experiments with digital imaging of medieval manuscripts have been occurring for approximately 50 years. Mass digitization and online access to medieval manuscript copies have become standard over the last quarter century. We have millions of digital manuscript images online today. Now what? Now that we have them, what do we do with them? Who are digital manuscripts for?

Dr. Whearty proposes that what we have digitized can be a vital tool for the recovery of LGBTQ+ literature and history, and support a necessary revitalization and radical expansion of the queer, genderqueer, and trans* medieval canon. In this talk, she discusses her new project “Always Here: A Queer+Trans Global Medieval Sourcebook,” and its deep roots in my ongoing work on manuscripts and digitization. Digitized medieval texts, she will show, must be central to any recovery project centering queer and trans* topics. Because many modern translations and editions have distorted--at times, subtly; at times, blatantly--medieval texts to make them align with those translators' and editors' own values (and bigotries), we cannot merely trust and remix others' data. We must go back to the source, which in many cases, are much-studied, extremely canonical medieval manuscripts. Given the necessary pressures of access and preservation for hardcopy medieval books, digital manuscripts are our best tools for recovery.

Particularly now, and in the face of rising levels of intolerance and violence against trans and genderqueer people, and queer people more broadly, Dr. Whearty ultimately argues that we must create more accessible, ethically sound entry points to the vast material evidence of the queer and trans* medieval past.