Watson "names & naming in an evolving humanities ecosystem"

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good evening, good afternoon, wherever you are or however you are. Before even beginning: I am speaking you from Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish, all of whom had traditional, ancestral, and unceeded land occupied and taken—often violently—by the so-called settler nation of Canada on Turtle Island. I am a descendant of Scots-Irish and English settlers, and I am an uninvited guest on this land, and, as such, am a beneficiary of colonialism and genocide. Canada & the United States continue this genocide today through pollution, criminal neglect, cultural extermination, and murder. I aim to learn and do what I am able to support the nations and peoples upon whose land I work upon and live with. I invite you to to learn and reflect, and take action. Feel free to share where you are joining from. If you are unfamiliar, Native-land.ca is a good resource for this.
• #3: First, a big thanks to NISO for organizing this, and for Todd and Jill’s and everyone else’s labor in making it run as smooth as possible. Thanks also to all of my other panelists for the things they hav the organizers
• #4: Hi everyone. my name is Bri, although I publish under Brian M. Watson so you might have seen me under that name as well. I am a second year phd student at University of British Columbia iSchool I am neurodivergent, disabled, queer and nonbinary and can claim additional romantic and sexual minoritizations. Resultantly I am very, very aware of the systems that mislabel people and their communities. Yet, I've had a lot of privilege. As I've already said I'm a beneficiary of colonialism, but I was raised as a lower middle class cishet white boy who was taught ways to hide their disabilities and oddities in order to "pass." And that privilege has protected me others would not have been—my whiteness especially. The ways I was raised placed me at the center of systems designed to uphold me But as I grew older and changed and learned I began to fall further and further from the center. But If you have any experience with library catalogs, I don’t think you need to see an extensive bibliography to understand the subject headings have been and are problematic – racist, sexist, classist, colonialist, and ableist. I just have one question:
• #5: Whose and what stories are we telling? Usually, this conversation now turns to one about ethics, how we can ethically describe and catalog. and we have a lot of those articles in library and information science. The overwhelming majority of this literature is rooted in (and dependent upon) the Western European and American philosophical tradition of ethics. This tradition is descended from the Ancient Greek Aristotelian “virtue” ethics and according to one philosopher “almost any modern version still shows” its neo-Aristotelian nature.
• #6: So really, whose & what histories are we describing? Usually, now this conversation turns to one about ethics, how we can ethically describe and catalog. We have a ton of this in the library and information science literature. The overwhelming majority of this literature is rooted in (and dependent upon) the Western European and American philosophical tradition of ethics. This tradition is descended from the Ancient Greek Aristotelian “virtue” ethics and according to one philosopher “almost any modern version still shows” its neo-Aristotelian nature. Why does this matter? Well
• #7: Why does this matter? SLIDE ADVANCE. knowledge organization rooted wholly in a philosophy advocated, promulgated & sponsored by WEB3CH2A2MS is not desirable, possible, or sustainable. We as a profession are great at gathering information, planning, analyzing, talking—but talking action
• #8: If you are not familiar with WEB3CH2A2MS, it is a term descended from Hope Olson’s work to describe the default and assumed universal center of cataloging and classification systems: White European Bourgeois Christian Cisgender Citizen Heterosexual Able-bodied Allosexual Monogamous Men Settlers This is a deliberate flipping of the usual acronyms like LGBTQ or DEIA that describe the margins from the center—it flips the margins to the center and the center to the margin
• #9: Anyhow, as I said, there is a lot of literature covering this topic. I know because I spent a year reading and organizing it all, and have made that available to everyone
• #10: But in doing this work we must privilege the language of communities whose stuff we have. To be clear, stolen stuff should be returned; but if it not or cannot be, then we should approach them with the respect possible to it. We should question the subjects, both the subjects applied and the communities subjected to description. When we apply a label to someone is it right? Is it accurate? Personal identity terms are not neutral, bias-free scientific terminology. They describe our innermost desires and highest outward goals.
• #11: Drawing from the amazing presentations of Treshani Pierra who could not be here with us today, I want to ask: what are you and your organization doing to support marginalized (his)stories? I have some ideas where your work and organization can support initiatives towards change
• #12: We need to revise, revisit, and redescribe both our collections, but also the vocabulary we use to label things within it. That’s nothing new. The work of critical cataloguers today originates out of the work of early 20th century librarians such as Frances Lydia Yocom and Dorothy B Porter - both fascinating and really impactful women. If you don’t know about them, I really recommend reading more into them. But we should also draw on all of the vocabularies available to us as well as the whole new world of linked data technology that allows us to describe stuff in different ways at the same time. But when we do this work, we must privilege the language of communities whose stuff we have. To be clearer, stolen stuff should be returned, but if it’s not stolen or cannot be returned, then we should approach the communities with the respect possible to it – and we should also describe the things that we have of theirs with the respect due to it. We should question the subjects - both subjects applied and to the community subjected to description. When we apply a label to someone, it is not – is it right? Is it accurate? Personal identity terms are not neutral bias-free terminology
• #13: the use of multiple or alternative vocabularies or classifications, where available
• #14: The Homosaurus was originally created in 1997 by IHLIA LGBT Heritage as a Dutch and English gay and lesbian thesaurus that was used as a standalone vocabulary to describe their collections. Over time, terms relating to bisexuality, trans, gender, and intersex concepts were added, but not methodically. This original version of the vocabulary (which we refer to as version 0) had an overly flat structure and, due to the lack of connections, terms were too isolated from one another and therefore easily missed. But, it became apparent that a vocabulary developed by an LGBTQ archives to describe LGBTQ resources could be a powerful tool. In 2013, Jack van der Wel, with the help of Ellen Greenblatt, transformed the original Homosaurus into a more inclusive and hierarchical thesaurus (version 1). Hundreds of terms were added and each term was put in relation to others in a hierarchical structure. At this point, the vocabulary only existed as an offline document that was circulated as a Word document or PDF. The results of this major editing project were presented at numerous LGBTQ ALMS Conferences and the vocabulary began to be used by other LGBTQ archives, libraries, and documentation centres throughout the world. In 2015, the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) became one of the handful of LGBTQ archives using version 1 of the Homosaurus to describe resources in their collections. When it became apparent to the DTA’s Director, K.J. Rawson, how useful the vocabulary was and how many institutions could benefit from using it, he collaborated with Jack van der Wel to transform version 1 into an online linked data vocabulary. This dramatically increased the accessibility of the vocabulary and allowed cultural institutions from around the world to link to a common vocabulary. In 2016, Rawson and van der Wel then established an Editorial Board to oversee a second major revision of the Homosaurus. The board ultimately decided to transform the Homosaurus from a broader, standalone vocabulary (which included hundreds of non-LGBTQ terms, e.g., “advertising” and “literature”) to a narrower, LGBTQ-specific vocabulary that was intended to supplement existing thesauri (primarily the Library of Congress Subject Headings). This was a major conceptual shift and this revision resulted in version 2, which is the current version of the vocabulary. In May, 2019, version 2 of the Homosaurus was released at www.homosaurus.org as a linked data vocabulary. The Editorial Board is now focused on publicizing the project and making ongoing edits to the vocabulary
• #15: Just a couple of additional informational points here about the growing use of Homosaurus: preliminary data shows HomoIT in the cataloging, classification, or description of (at minimum) 7.7 million items in 33 institutions across 11 countries. It is also one of the thesauri approved for use in MARC and is easy to use in linked data environments. Just as an example of this
• #16: In my own project, HistSex.org we use the Homosaurus as a way HistSex an interdisciplinary, interinstitutional, and international resource for information on the history of sexuality. HistSex, a common abbreviation for ‘History of Sexuality,’ was founded by Brian M. Watson in 2020. 50 Years On, Many Years Past: Nonfictions of Sexuality is the first resource published for the public. It was funded by a generous Carnegie-Whitney Grant from the American Library Association. 
• #17: The bibliography is the focus and largest section of HistSex, and contains a bibliography of books tagged and searchable by research interest, reading level, topic, and more.
• #18: Second recommendation: consultation with described subjects Here I will focus on the work of Name Change Policy Working Group, which I think and hope will be relevant to many of the folks here
• #19: The NCMWG was founded to encourage the amendment or updating of publisher name change policies for transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming authors who have been harmed from publisher policies around names and naming. These policies have also harmed people who change their names due to marriage or divorce, indigenous authors with name changes, or foreign authors with misspellings. Some things that also help: ORCIDS/PID’s like Liz talked about, things that separate publication name from civic name
• #23: The NCMWG was founded to encourage the amendment or updating of publisher name change policies for transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming authors who have been harmed from publisher policies around names and naming. These policies have also harmed people who change their names due to marriage or divorce, indigenous authors with name changes, or foreign authors with misspellings.