“Social Media Has Been Helpful in Learning About Myself and Finding My Community”: The Affordances and Constraints of ICT-Based Queer History Content Creation

This paper reports on findings from 31 semi-structured interviews with North American Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)-based content creators who focus on LGBTQIA+ history. While the research broadly explored the information practices and digital preservation strategies of these content creators, this paper highlights how the participants navigated their respective ICT choices (ranging from personal blogs to Instagram accounts) and what affordances and constraints emerged from these choices. The paper highlights how such potentialities and pitfalls across varied social media and web-based platforms informed the sociotechnical practices of queer historical knowledge production and how the participants leveraged the features of various ICTs to expand the visibility of queer-affirming content and resources. The paper concludes by exploring these practices and their theoretical and practical implications for practitioners at the intersection of digital curation and archiving marginalized histories with an explicit emphasis on collaborative rather than extractive opportunities for collaboration between such content creators and cultural heritage institutions.