OutHistory.org Seminar in the City

Creating LGBTQ History with OutHistory.org

Time: 6-8pm

Dates: October 7 and 21, November 11, December 9.

Place: CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue, Room C 196.02

Do you want to contribute to sexuality history? Do you want to learn how to use MediaWiki software? Would you like to create your own online exhibit about the LGBTQ past? You will accomplish these goals and more in this unusual CLAGS Seminar in the City. Held in a computer lab at the CUNY Graduate Center, this hands-on crash-course will help you use OutHistory.org--CLAGS's new website on LGBTQ U.S. history--to make your addition to sexuality history!

OutHistory.org is a MediaWiki website to which any user can contribute. OutHistory.org includes a variety of collaboratively- created Wikipedia-style entries on LGBTQ history and showcases many unchanging, authored exhibits as well. For example, the website features collector Marshall Weeks' postcards from the early twentieth century depicting cartoon drawings of gay men and lesbians, and anthropologist Todd White's exhibit on activism and popular culture in the "pre-gay" era of the 1950s and 1960s. Pauline Park, co-chair of New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, has posted about the recent campaign for a transgender rights law in New York City, and doctoral candidate Tristan Cabello created a comprehensive exhibit on queer life since the 1930s in Bronzeville, a predominantly African American neighborhood in Chicago.

The possible exhibits that could be added to OutHistory.org are endless, and purpose of this course is to teach you how to share your writing, personal stories, documents or images with a broad audience by contributing to OutHistory.org. MediaWiki software makes it easy for people without computer programming skills to add and edit content on the Internet. In this course you will learn how to create an exhibit on OutHistory.org by adding new pages, editing existing pages, uploading images, audio and video files. We will also study examples of other community-created LGBTQ histories, and we will do some light reading about digital history and public history as well. By the end of this course, you will have the skills to create your own original LGBTQ history exhibit on OutHistory.org or contribute to any other MediaWiki website.

Course Leaders: Jonathan Ned Katz, is an independent scholar and gay historian. Katz is the author of several classic books on sexuality history including Gay American History and The Invention of Heterosexuality. Katz is OutHistory.org's Founder and Co-Director.

Lauren Gutterman is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at New York University studying the history of gender and sexuality in the U.S. Gutterman has been the Project Coordinator of OutHistory.org since June 2008. <comments />