The more I create categorical variables, the more the world reads like the preface to Foucault’s The Order of Things.

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k)

Data visualizations are fantastic stuff. Social network analysis, graphic analysis, video, spatial analysis, images, and on and on increasingly capture the imagination and inspire as a way to represent the oft mentioned big data. The failure of many of these new software and analyses in the hand of new, excited scholars and hackers and other excitable folks means that their meaning is often…opaque. Oh, let’s be honest, opaque is being polite. I am sharing these thoughts because while many of you are concerned with the data in big data, I want to turn your attention to the algorithms within and how they mask meanings in many ways.

To catch you up, I’m working on a sizeable dataset about lesbians and queer women’s lives, spaces, and experiences. I’ve stuck to actual categorical variables or regular counts of trends and produced some pretty exciting graphs so far all the while cleaning

This is the second in a series of posts on data visualizations I have created based on the complete records of all available lesbian-queer organizations at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. One of the key takeaways from my focus groups with lesbians and queer women who came out between 1983 and 2008 was the persistence experience of loss and mourning of key lesbian-queer places, namely neighborhoods and bars, as well as bookstores and other community spaces. At the same time, many women, especially those who had come out in the 1980s and 1990s generations, lived with an expectation that one just created the organization or space they required, often through activism or socializing. When we turn to the actual numbers of lesbian and queer organizations in terms of their totals and their patterns of opening and closing, there is more to these shifts.

The generational social and political shifts explain a

Over the span of a year, I surveyed the complete collection of 2,300+ organizational records at the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). This research was originally part of 2008-9 dissertation research and is now a part of the series of books I am writing on lesbian-queer spaces of in/justice in New York City from 1983 to 2008—from AIDS to “The L Word.” In a series of five posts over the next two weeks, I will share the first in a series of interactive data visualizations from my in depth reading of the 381 NYC-based records of lesbian and/or queer organizations spanning 25 years (1983-2008) whose records are available at the LHA. Throughout the summer and into next fall, I will produce even more data visualizations and statistical analyses from these data as well as publications from the same period.

What you see on the left is all 381 of those

Today we are launching the Our Queer Lives and Spaces (OQLS) Project! 

OQLS is a living archive that affords lgbtqtstsiq people a space to map and share their stories online through mobile devices, multimedia, & web and geospatial technologies. In other words, anyone can text, call, or type in her/his/zee’s own stories from anywhere in the world and it will geocode to one giant, queer map. Hashtag: #OQLS.

Anyone and everyone is invited to join!

To enroll: 

• Option A) Call (617) 286-5071. After a welcome, press 2 to create an acct & leave an audio story.
• Option B) Send an mms (picture message) or an sms (text message) to: [email protected] Include a description of the picture. Yes, you can send an mms or sms to an email account!

To post to OQLS:

• Option A) Send a sms or mms (text and/or picture message) from your phone to [email protected]
• Option

Our Queer Lives and Spaces (#OQLS) Project is a living queer archive that affords lgbtqtstsi a space to map & share their stories in their own words and images. Read more about & join the project here: http://jgieseking.org/CLAGSqNY/oqls/.

The CLAGS Seminar in the City that I am teaching, “Queer(ing) New York,” will begin this evening, May 1st. Since creating this course, a lot of activists have wondered why we would choose to begin on International Worker’s Day. I see May Day as not only the right to work but the right to learn and to know. Free, open, and accessible education–like Queer(ing) New York–must instead be made common and therefore part of our public commons.

Courses like this are the ways we can reimagine education, and also reimagine and enact equality. Lgbtq people live through and walk through absences everyday, ranging from issues of recognition to acceptance, from using bathrooms to using the subway, from the bar that used to be there but closed to the home that used to be there but doesn’t count you as family anymore. As a group that lives the marginalization

My chapter “Queering the Meaning of ‘Neighborhood’: Reinterpreting the Lesbian-Queer Experience of Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1983–2008” regarding lesbian experience of fragmented and fleeting neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City, is available for download today only at Parson’s Queer Urban Geographies (#queergeo) for conference-goers only. This chapter was recently released in Queer Presences & Absences (2013).

Click here for download. The password is available at the end of the Jack’s presentation.

My co-authored paper with the fabulous Susan Opotow, “Foreground and Background: Environment as Site and Social Issue,” in the 75th anniversary issue in 2011 of the Journal of Social Issues is now available here for free download in pre-print form. Susan and I were curious about how the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) considered the role of environment in their work. We decided to use the complete published works of the Journal of Social Issues and key social psychology methods texts as a dataset for the shifting constructs and understanding of environment in critical social psychological work. Please note that only the final print version may be cited. Here’s the final citation:

I had a riveting weekend helping to coordinate and preside over a session at Theorizing the Web 2013 (#TtW13). I massively enjoyed presiding over the “Bodies and Bits” panel. These papers tackled those questions close to my heart and always in my mind. How do we invoke the body in the digital? Where does the cyborg begin and end? I have another post forthcoming on my thoughts connecting this fantastic work of the presenters to my own work. In the meantime, you can watch a recording of the livestream from our room–we kicked off at the 2hr40min mark.

Bodies and Bits | Room B | #b3

Presider:   Jen Jack Gieseking   @jgieseking

Hashtag Moderator:   Donald W. Taylor II   @donaldtaylorii

Panelists:

Christina Dunbar-Hester   ‘The Internet Is A Series Of (Fallopian) Tubes’: “Diversity” Activism in Hacker and Software Projects

Gina Neff & co-authored by Brittany Fiore-Silfvast   @ginasue   What We Talk About

Every year, the students of the environmental psychology program of the CUNY Graduate Center have put together an amazing conference on the ways nature, ecology, and society are co-produced. This year’s topic is Sandy.

Superstorm Sandy: Before, During and After

The Gender, Sexuality, & Space Bibliography has a genesis through my own personal and work history. When I was an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College in the late 1990s, I told a visiting professor that I had what was then a  ‘wild’ idea to do geographic research on–gasp!–gender, sexuality, and space. Without saying a word, she led me up to her office and produced the edited volume Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (Bell & Valentine, 1995) and slid it into my hands in absolute, reverent silence with an eye-to-eye piercing gaze. I did not understand that the magic of this book yet. I had no idea what it would have meant to not have this book exist when I posed this idea. I am still studying the generational shifts on lgbtq identities, culture, and spaces as the positive, affirming, and non-pathologizing work on gender, sexuality, and space continues to grow.

How can we bring the issues and aches of Sandy into the classroom to help work through what has taken place? Here’s my take for the Environmental Methods course in the masters program in Sustainable Interior Environments program at the Fashion Institute of Technology SUNY that I am teaching.

In order to grapple with Sandy and confront the effects of increasing natural disasters at home and abroad, my next class in will use our next class meeting to discuss the inequalities that Sandy re-revealed in the city, the politics of a “natural” disaster, and designing for what lies ahead. As I asked my students: These are all short pieces so please read them all. Think about how each piece–all from different interests, fields, and groups–fits into the next and how the design examples in the last NYT piece fall short or support these larger issues, from fish to tech, from politics to

For those arriving from Feministing and/or Salon, welcome! I encourage you to wander around the site. You might especially be interested in a Gender, Sexuality, and Space Bibliography I have building for some time. I am also the webcaptain for the Gender & Geography Bibliography, a project begun over twenty years ago and still growing. Lastly, do wander over to outhistory.org which hosts tons of exciting content, both new and archival, on lgbtq experiences over time and throughout the world.

Do check back! Over time I will create specific lists of readings for undergraduate students and teaching undergraduates, and graduate students and teaching graduate students, as well as readings by subjectivity and identity (lesbian, trans, etc.) and environment (rural, urban, suburban)

The Lesbian-Queer Space Mapping Project will relaunch next year.