OutHistory:Helping Us To Think Historically

Creating an Internet Site on Sexual and Gender History

Entry in progress by Jonathan Ned Katz As of 2-8-08 12:38 pm

PROTECTED ENTRY: This entry by a named creator or site administrator can be changed only by that creator and site administrators, so they are responsible for its accuracy, coverage, evidence, and clarity. Please do use this entry's Comment section at the bottom of the page to suggest improvements. Thanks.

Introduction

To my mind, the main, identity-determining, defining purpose of OutHistory.org is to foster a historical understanding of human sexuality and gender.

OutHistory.org is a website in development about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, in particular, and sexual and gender history, in general.

Ideally, it should encompass the history of heterosexuality as well as homosexuality, the normative and the deviant, the straight and the queer, because all these categories of human sexual and gendered experience depend on and reflect each other.

At its best, this site should encourage us to think deeply and critically about the passage of time as it effects human social relationships, about alienatation and intimacy in those relationships, about historical evidence. The site asks what does it mean to understand LGBT, queer, and heterosexual life in the perspective of society and, especially, time.

OutHistory should help us ask and begin to answer questions about the erotic acts and feminine and masculine behaviors, the sexual and gendered feelings of people within social structures over time.

As a formal Internet-based structure, OutHistory includes elements of an almanac, archive, article, bibliography, book, encyclopedia, library, and museum, but it is not identical to any one of these.

As, specifically, a history website, on this site time is of the essence. What that means -- what this history website is, and what it does -- will become clearer as it develops its own historical life and identity over time.

How can OutHistory creatively represent sexuality and gender in time, and help us think more clearly about eros and femininity and masculinity as historical?

Are there ways that OutHistory can, in its ordering and reordering of its structure, functions and its content, help us to think more creatively about sexuality and gender as temporal-social phenomena?

This entry is intended to open a public discussion on the issues raised. Please use the Discuss function on the top of the page yellow bar to add your comments. Thanks.

How Does OutHistory Now Represent Time and History?

Search (generic)

If a user searches, for example, for “transgender“ content, that search yields “Article title matches” and many “Page text matches.”

By default, the “Article title matches” are sorted by “Time,” and if they don’t have a date, alphabetically.

“Article title matches” can also be sorted by the user by “Title,” which should make them appear in alphabetical order of the title.

<PROBLEM 1: The matches do not appear in alphabetical order, although they change their order. A title starting with “Transgender” appears above a title starting with “Pauline.” How the titles are ordered is now unclear.>

<PROBLEM 2: When “Article title matches” first appear, sorted by Time, the active Time function is blue or purple and the non-active Title function is black. In order to sort by “Title” a user has to click on “Time.” This is very confusing and counterintuitive.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION: Both the Time and Title functions should by default appear as active, but they should be distinctly different colors. The primary function, Time, should remain blue or purple, and the secondary function could appear in red.>

NOTES for further clarification

Alternate TITLE: OutHistory: Time, Sexuality, Gender, and the Web

How can the site be creative in helping people think historically about sexuality and gender, intimacy and alienation.

How to establish OutHistory’s identity as, specifically, a history site? How to distinguish the site from an encyclopedia like GLBT, which has historical entries, but is not organized to stress history and time?

Part of the problem is creating ways to encourage users to see the content of OutHistory in specific historical contexts.

Part of the problem is how to present the available ways of searching and seeing the content as historical.

And part of our problem is categorizing more content by time categories to make it searchable that way.

Manually created timelines

The Timeline on the Age of Sodomitical Sin is the most developed. JNK also started a manually created Timeline on Transgender History. Wikipedia also has manually created timelines. Study them.

Is there any way that Timelines can be created by the software if proper coding is added to the content? See below. We are supposed to have that capacity already, I think.

Advanced search via "More"

(A) "Timeline search" <PROBLEM (not working properly>

(B) "Time era" search <PROBLEM (not working properly)>

Time content on OutHistory

The "Contents" page refers to "Time" content on OutHistory and points users to:

"Browse by Century" or "Browse by Decade".

If you Browse by Century or by Decade you get a list organized alphabetically by the title.

QUESTION: Is there any way to have these lists appear chronologically?

These searches are made possible by adding categories specifying centuries and decades. For examples:

(Note the categories should be listed in the Category lists at the end of the list after the alphabetical listings, in ascending order from earliest to latest.)

QUESTION: Do we need to code or categorize more entries so that they are listed when you Browse by Century or by Decade? If so, let’s make that a priority for an intern or us.

Wikipedia and Time and History

Wikipedia has additional ways of categorizing and searching by time that we can adopt and publicize on OutHistory. Let’s investigate and understand these.

Wikipedia:Timeline Main listing: List of timelines

Main categories: Category:Timelines, part of Category:Chronology

Main articles: Timeline and Chronology

Main article: Wikipedia:Timeline standards

For help with embedding EasyTimeline timelines in Wikipedia, see mw:Extension:EasyTimeline/syntax.

WikiProject Timeline Tracer is making an effort, as of January 2008, to seek out and standardize timeline and chronological references.

See also the Featured list criteria and Wikipedia:Lists as style guides, and relevant Featured lists such as Timeline of chemistry and Narnian timeline as examples.

Also: On Wikipedia see any month, day, year, decade:

For example, June 1

1930s

1952

1800

1900s

19th century

ALSO:

Category:Organizations established in 1969.

OutHistory slogans stressing time

Time is of the essence

It’s About Time!

It’s Timely!

Research other history websites

See what they do creatively to help people view their contents as temporal, historical. Create an annotated list of history website and other relevant websites.

Create a list of the best history websites.

Research what has been written and published about history websites or history on the we

Create a bibliography of that those writings.