NYC Trans Oral History Project Review
Reviewers: Allison Elliott and Art Kopischke
Review Began: 5th March 2022
Review Ended: 8th March 2022
Project Links
- https://nyctransoralhistory.org/
- https://wayback.archive-it.org/14173/20200910174503/http://oralhistory.nypl.org/neighborhoods/trans-history
Data and Sources
- Audio
- Interviews
- Transcripts
- Handbook
Processes
- Network of peer to peer interviewers
- NYPL interviewer training
- Handbook with interview instructions
- User generated tags and content warnings
- Transcribed audio interviews
Presentation
Project Website – description of project, list of interviewees with accompanying pictures linking to soundcloud audio recordings, links to downloadable handbook and transcripts, and a list of programs and events
- NYPL Website (archived using Archive-It) – landing page with list of interviewees with accompanying pictures linking to audio recordings, user identified tags, and interview data
- Interviews are accessible via major listening platforms such as Spotify, Stitcher, and Apple Podcasts
Digital Tools Used to Build It
- Wappalyzer: Wordpress, Google Workspace, PHP, Apache, Yoast SEO, Remarketing Tag, Twitter Emoji, Google Analytics
- NYPL Archive-It
- Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud
Languages
English and Spanish
Review
The NYC Trans Oral History Project (NYCTOHP) came to fruition in 2014 through community collaboration and conversation. The website has the digitization of oral histories, however, these histories and stories wouldn’t necessarily exist cohesively without this project, their interviewer instructions and training, and the subsequent digitization. The project partnered with the Digital Transgender Archive and received fudning from the Trans Justice Funding Project. They worked with the New York Public Library (NYPL), which houses a website through Archive-It, although this website does not appear to be updated in the same way as the project’s home website. It’s unclear what the collaboration with the New York Public Library gave the project outside of giving it a larger platform and potential interviewer training:
NYPL's Community Oral History Project is teaming up with the NYC Trans Oral History Project to collect, preserve, and share oral histories from our city's transgender and gender non-conforming communities. We'll be training a community corps of interviewers to collect these largely undocumented oral histories in order to build a lasting and expansive archive on NYC transgender experiences. (NYPL)
The NYCTOHP aims to documents transgender resistance and resillience in NYC and counter erasure of trans lives by recording the compounding lives of trans people in terms of race, class, ability, age, housing migration, sexism and HIV/AIDS status. The project meets its goals well as it holds a vast interview collection touching on issues of race, housing, age, sexuality, gender, class and more. Further, these interviews focus on people’s activism and politics, highlighting the contributions the NYC trans community has made towards liberation as a whole. By partnering with the New York Public Library, the NYCTOHP has pushed this radical history into a major cultural institution, thus countering the erasure of trans history at large. In terms of documentation and preservation, the NYPL offers institutional support for housing these interviews in addition to the project’s website.
Having the platform of the New York Public Library helps this project reach a wider audience, as well as hosting the interviews on major podcasting platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The transcriptions and content warning tags help make this project more accessible. However, the broken links and varied information between the two major websites make it hard to navigate
This project utilizes the community by giving the community the chance to lead their own interviews, make their own tags and content warnings, and give them the tools to do so. This small tactic solidifies the project as truly community-based and helps it continue on organically.
Their website also includes the project’s handbook, which outlines their goals, philosophy, values, and interview guidelines. Not only does this provide transparency around the making of this project, but it also serves as a resource to community archivists. Further, having a free guide and tools, it allows people to contribute to the project by easily conducting their own interviews. This resource embodies the values of creating an open-access, community-embedded project.
All in all, the NYCTOHP reaches its goals of documenting trans resistance and resilience in NYC, has contributed to the growing trans history, and has the infrastructure to be an ongoing, accessible, community-based project.