Sarah McTavish | West Hollywood Goes Global: Exploring Queer Identity on GeoCities скачать в хорошем качестве

Sarah McTavish | West Hollywood Goes Global: Exploring Queer Identity on GeoCities

Sarah McTavish | University of Waterloo In 1995, fledgling web hosting and development company GeoCities created “West Hollywood” as one of their first six thematically-organized “neighbourhoods.” This neighbourhood was designed to offer users, referred to as “Homesteaders,” a place for gay, lesbian, and transgendered (LGBTQ) people to create personal webpages. It would be one of the first large-scale LGBTQ-focused spaces on the World Wide Web. Closed in 2009 by Yahoo!, GeoCities lives on today in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. This paper explores the ways that this new platform for LGBTQ expression transcended its implicitly geographical “West Hollywood” designation, to become a global queer space. Users from all over the world situated themselves within the virtual neighbourhood, and interacted with each other through webrings, guest books, and reciprocal hyperlinking practices. Despite a number of national studies on LGBTQ identity and community on the internet, particularly in North America and Europe, there has been little historical scholarship on the effects of this large-scale convergence of new users on the Web. How did these Homesteaders navigate the cross-cultural interactions in order to mediate new identity labels and categories, both as individuals and as a community? Using the West Hollywood neighbourhood as a case study, this paper employs network graphing using Gephi in order to visualize global interaction patterns, along with content-level analysis of language and self-narrative, based on topic classification and keyword frequency. I argue that, through a combination of distant and close reading techniques, we can see the impact of global virtual community on queer identity. This paper builds on the historiography of global sexuality and identity studies, as well as contributes to digital history methodology for performing research at multiple scales of analysis. For more information about the 2018 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org.