Interview with the Digital Transgender Archive’s Boston Lab Lead, Faith Maldonado
Faith Maldonado is a second year PhD student in the English department on the literature track. She is also the Lab Lead for Boston’s Digital Transgender Archive lab. She is broadly interested in gender, and her research interests are in gender and sexuality within post-colonial and semi-colonial literature.
Faith spoke with Colleen Nugent McLean, CDS Coordinator, about her research, her work with the DTA, and how working for an archive has shaped her opinion on archives. Her comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Colleen: I think we should start with you introducing yourself and explaining your role at the DTA?
Faith: I started at the DTA over this summer. This is my second semester working on it, but this is also my first semester actually engaging with the undergraduate lab, which is the bread and butter of the DTA. I am currently the Lab Lead for Boston’s DTA lab. I provided the metadata training for the undergraduates working in the lab this semester and I maintain the day-to-day operations of the lab. I also do a final review of all of the metadata for new materials being uploaded to the archive.
Could you say a little bit more about what the undergraduate lab does?
The ethos of the DTA is that everything that is put onto the website was put there by the hands of undergraduate or graduate students—the lab is the vessel of doing that. We have three labs running in Boston, Oakland, and recently London. The students read through all of the new materials that are sent to the DTA through different institutions, archive contacts, and libraries. They process them, create metadata for them, upload them onto the DTA, and flag any privacy concerns. The undergraduates usually work in pairs, bouncing titles and potential subject tags off each other. My role is leading this work, especially if they have questions about potential issues in metadata since a lot of the metadata is very sensitive. We are really careful about the rhetoric we are making public.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’m wondering if you could explain to me how you think about and provide training to deal with sensitive materials?
We have a lot of conversations about the political and rhetorical context that we exist in. The words that we use today are not always the words they would have used back then. There are some words and descriptions that hit us differently today, and that students often feel uncomfortable using themselves and in the metadata. We talk a lot about positioning and how people position themselves in relation to terms differently over time. Words that were once a point of pride have become pejorative and words that were pejorative are now a point of pride. I think a lot of it is relating the way we are talking about materials to the way that people would have talked about themselves in their day. If there is a word that comes across to us as being demeaning and/or dated l, we will spend some time talking about why it does not feel resonant today and why it might have felt resonant at the time when a more limited vocabulary was available.
There are often times when we are dealing with racist or homophobic materials, as they are part and parcel of the archive. We have to recognize that putting these materials forward is a way of allowing them to be critiqued. If we shy away from everything that makes us uncomfortable, we cannot ever move forward. That is something important to keep in mind [when working at the DTA].
In terms of new materials, could you talk about what the acquisition process is like?
I think most of our acquisitions recently have been coming from our newer labs in Oakland and London. When new materials are found, they are scanned and put into a large shared Google Drive. I do a privacy audit on all new materials, redacting any personal information. After the privacy audit, these materials are assigned to specific labs.
Got it! I wonder if there are any boundaries in terms of materials you would not accept due to format. What material format do you accept for the DTA?
The DTA has very broad parameters for format. While we mostly deal with text, newsletters, images, magazines, and written documents, we have no real boundary on what we won’t accept. We have a t-shirt collection, we have a button collection. I recently processed a bunch of pictures of wigs and shoes that were used in various performances, which was cool to see. We also include oral histories in both audio and video format.
Do these multiple formats cause any complications with metadata? I imagine there are multiple metadata standards that you need to keep in your head at once.
Yeah, I suppose so. In the time that I have been leading the labs, we have really only dealt with photos or written documents. We are starting a collection of VHS tapes this week, actually, from a TV show called “Tranny Talk” which will be interesting. Because these are videos that are over an hour long, the metadata process is very different. Students need to watch the first few minutes and the last few minutes, before skipping through the video to identify subject coverage tags and any named contributors. There is just a lot more ambiguity in the longer format things.
That actually ties to another question I had. Do you provide transcripts for these AV materials? And a broader question: how does the DTA approach questions of digital accessibility?
Most of the videos or audio we have is linked off of our site, so other institutions have already provided transcripts. On our social media platforms, we are thinking a lot about alt text to describe the images of the collection better. That has been an interesting way to look at metadata that I’ve been doing on my own. It has been a process of getting more comfortable with describing things and having a sharper eye for things. I think being in the English discipline actually helps me a lot. I have a lot of fun describing objects.
People will also reach out in the comments and provide additional support. I was writing alt text for a picture of two diary entries, and I just described the image itself and a general description of what the entry talked about instead of providing a transcript. Someone in the comments took it upon themselves to provide a transcript, which was awesome to see how the archive is an interactive project of the people who use it. We like to remember that the DTA is built on labor coming from both ends.
Yeah, that sort of back and forth is really cool to see, especially with an archive that is dealing with such a living community. I would love to hear a little bit about your own personal research interests and how your own research has been affected by working at the DTA?
My research interests are broadly in gender and sexuality within post-colonial and semi-colonial literature. I read a lot of 20th-century Irish texts and consider the ways that gender is configured in a post-colonial state where race isn't a huge mediating factor. But I did not really have any experience in trans history at all. I think, honestly, working with the DTA has totally expanded my notion of gender. It has helped me see my work in a more critical way. It has helped me see my work in a more critical way and recognize how gender is actively constructed by any given society, while reminding me that those boundaries always have and always can be transgressed.
How much, if at all, is your personal research going to be putting you in archives? And do you feel that working for an archive better prepares you to navigate other archives?
I think more than anything, it’s made me aware of how archives are man-made. They are not these objective empirical sources of “true knowledge,” but rather they are sculpted by narratives and people’s positionality to what they are describing. There is a human fingerprint on everything that you are looking at. I kind of took that for granted before working for the DTA and actually putting my own fingerprints on the materials. I am now more aware of the personal dynamics that go into archives.
It has also made me more appreciative of archives. I used to think of archives as this ivory tower institution of knowledge, but a lot of archives are currently under attack. It’s made me more aware of the importance of keeping archives alive.
Definitely. My degrees are in history, so I think about archives a lot too. When I first started grad school, it was too easy to ignore the human role in archives. I feel like that's a really important thing to be able to break down. The last big thing that I wanted to hear about is if there is anything planned for the DTA for this year?
The 10th anniversary of the DTA is coming up in January 2026, so we have been brainstorming ways to celebrate that. We are hoping to embrace the interactive elements of the archive. We are hoping to embrace the interactive elements of the archive and directly acknowledge the people and communities who use it, whom our work strives to affirm and represent. We should have more information about our 10th anniversary celebration plans soon!