bri watson

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:12:44 -0500

I am a disabled, white, queer & nonbinary settler hailing from unceeded N’dakina in Aln8ba8dwaw8gan. I am now an uninvited guest on the traditional lands of the ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ (Anishinaabek), Haudenosaunee, Eelünaapéewi Lūnaapéewak (Lūnaapéewak) & Chonnonton nations. I live on lands between the London Township, Treaty 6 & McKee Treaty 2, 1790, and I work on lands connected with the Sombra Treaties of 1796 & the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum.

As a Vanier Scholar at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, I focused on the (multiple) histories of information and on the practice of equitable cataloguing in cultural heritage institutions, or GLAMS (aka Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Special Collections). I also serve as an Organizer on the Homosaurus Collective Collective; the Homosaurus is a widely-used linked data vocabulary for queer terminology developed by and for the queer communities for use in GLAMS. I support equitable knowledge work through CritCat.org, a database of literature on the topic, prepared as part of my doctoral program, along with more than thirty peer-reviewed publications during the same time period.

I received my MLIS and training as a knowledge worker and an archivist from Indiana University Bloomington and I continue my work as a community archivist on behalf of polyamorous and asexual communities. I am the the Archivist-Historian for the Haslam Collection on Polyamory part of the Consensual Nonmonogamy Committee of theAmerican Psychological Association and also to the ArQuives, the largest independent LGBTQ2+ Archives in the world and currently Canada’s only national LGBTQ2+ archives.

I also trained as a historian at Drew University, where I focused on the history of the book and the history of sexuality. My work in these areas has continued, and they are the central focus of my first book (Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad) and my third, tentatively titled: The Kinseys and the Myth of the Sexual Revolution. My second book was a co-edited collection called Ethics in Linked Data, published while I was a doctoral student. I also direct HistSex.org, a free and open access resource for the history of sexuality.

In 2022-23 I was one of UBC Library’s EDI Scholars-in-Residence; I was also an awardee of UBC’s Public Scholar Initiative in 2021 and again in 2025, when I also received a fellowship in Applied Ethics from the W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics.

I was a cofounder and the coordinator for both the Trans Metadata Collective and the Queer Metadata Collective, which were organizations of ~100 (TMDC) and ~1000 (QMDC) knowledge workers with a concerted interest in improving the description and classification of queer, trans and gender diverse people in GLAMS and other sociotechnical systems. The TMDC received the Nancy DeLaurier Award from the Visual Resources Association in recognition of our achievement. Finally, my work on the Name Change Policy Working Group to allow married, Indigenous, queer, trans, and gender diverse authors to change their publication names has affected the policies of tens of thousands of academic journals.

Queer Metadata Collective

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:12:44 -0500

Trans Metadata Collective

Sun, 01 May 2022 09:12:44 -0500

CritCat.org

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 09:12:44 -0500

HistSex.org

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 09:12:44 -0500

HistSex - Making History in 2020 Contemporary Issues in Historical Practice.

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Diverse Sexuality & Gender Section + Women's Collections Section.

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Workshopping Queeries: Linked Data Vocabularies and Ethical Cataloging (with Clair Kronk)

Wed, 08 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Homosaurus, the International LGBTQ Linked Data Vocabulary

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Critical Cataloging - Part 1

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Power of New Voices Lightning Round

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Homosaurus in the Room: Ethical Classification in GLAM Labs

Thu, 14 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Nature rarely deals with discrete categories:” The Kinsey(s) & the Ghosts of Sexualwissenschaft

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 15:56:58 -0500

Sexual Behavior of the American Media: Alfred Kinsey and News of the Sexual Revolution

Sat, 04 Jan 2020 13:30:00 -0500

Obscena: Resources [Ob/On/Off]scene.

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 09:19:50 -0500

50 Years on, Many Years Past:Bibliography of Sexuality

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 09:12:44 -0500

I created the theme and site design of this Omeka for the Kinsey Institute, as well as doing a number of transcripts. The project is run by IUB’s Gender Studies Department, along with the Kinsey Institute Library

The rapid change in legal rights of same-sex couples to marry, from state laws to the Supreme Court decision in 2015, sparked an increase in legal commitments among LGBTQ+ couples. Many couples never expected to be able to legally marry in their lifetime. As same-sex marriage moves into the mainstream of U.S. society, we need to tell the stories and capture the feelings of those who have experienced this radical change in their own lives.

The Marriage Equality Collection, held at the Kinsey Institute Library and Special Collection, includes audio and video files, photographs, historical documents and ephemera representing experiences of same-sex couples married in the decade of legal marriage in the U.S. The collection particularly focuses on the experience of couples in Indiana, but is open to nearby localities.

Subjects in Chains: Linked Data Vocabularies and Sexual Liberation

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Queer as Data

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 15:56:58 -0500

AskHistorians Podcast

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 15:57:31 -0500

Grasping Towards Pornotopia

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 14:00:00 -0500

NCPH - Democratizing the Digital Humanities?: The AskHistorians Experiment in User-Driven Public History

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 10:30:00 -0500

AHA 2016 -- AskHistorians: Outreach and Its Challenges in an Online Space

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 15:30:00 -0500

While the internet has become a significant tool in student research over the last decade, academic outreach online has made much more halting progress - especially in the humanities. The online forum “AskHistorians” represents a grassroots effort to fill that gap, creating an unprecedented space where anyone can have their questions about history answered by experts in the field. By directly engaging with people at all levels of understanding—from the preteen to the postdoc— AskHistorians makes history accessible in a new way, fundamentally different from approaches used by institutions such as museums and other historical organizations. AskHistorians is an all-volunteer, multi-platform new media forum with over 350,000 subscribers, making it the largest historical space of its kind on the internet.

Unlike most outreach, the forum is structured like highly public ’town hall meeting’ on a global scale—a question-and-answer session in which knowledgeable experts publicly interact with individual questioners while an audience watches. By inviting individual lay readers to ask a question, AskHistorians allows them to set the topic and thus direct their own learning. By making it public, other interested parties can both learn from and join in the discussion to take it in new directions, fostering total engagement. But this new environment creates many challenges. The volunteer operators of AskHistorians grapple with problems prompted by the anonymity of the internet, along with limitations posed by the forum environment, and the need to introduce an ever-changing audience to best practices in history as it emerges in this new space. In its nearly four years of existence, AskHistorians has repeatedly had to examine its rules and policies to address these needs. These activities must work in harmony with the democratic nature of the site; a delicate balance of appealing to both the subject-matter experts who form the main knowledge base and the average member, who may have less than a high school level of history knowledge. In the process, the Moderators have exposed lay readers to the making of history, promoting invaluable insight into how history is done. In this series of talks, the volunteers of AskHistorians will describe how our moderation team has developed strategies to connect with our global audience; we will explain some of the challenges and rewards of employing these strategies; and we will then invite inquiry into how those lessons can be applied to education and outreach on the web in general. AskHistorians represents a bold experiment in engaging the public with history, one that defies easy categorization into what traditional ‘public history’ is and how it works.

A Conversation on the History of Sexology, Pornography, and Knowledge Construction in Archives

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000