An Attempt at a Postmodern Visual Approach to LGBTQ Archival Data

This is the somewhat overdramatized story of how my research project failed. Not too many capstone papers start that way (though probably more should), but mine does because, if I’m honest, the project about which you will read didn’t work. I had originally proposed an archival research project bridging two arenas: data mining and visual art. First a collection would be digitized, then mined and the data converted to a collage. The purpose of the project was to illustrate an LGBTQ+ archive while coping with the influence and power of modern technology over the history of marginalized people. My focus was to be on the barriers for non-heterosexual people as enforced and subverted by technology.

To start this project, I developed a relationship with the archival materials, ultimately choosing to focus on the magazine Gay Life which ran monthly from 1977 to 1979 in Pittsburgh. These magazines are truly works of art—printed on glossy paper in black and white, with a blend of text that still had that old-timey print feel; photos that, I wasn’t alive so I can’t say for sure, but seemed textured even for the 70’s; and ads, some of which were so targeted that they made me laugh. It was a great magazine and if you don’t believe me (and especially if you do), I suggest you check out the archive yourself.

In order to narrow the scope of the project, I focused on the personal ads which ran on the second to last spread of each issue. The categories each month were business services, jobs offered, mail order, male matchmaker, miscellaneous, models, and occasionally real estate and female matchmaker. One of my favorite ads read, “Gay female looking for a lifetime companion or just a friend. Cannot tolerate phoniness, dishonesty, or liars. Would like to settle down to peace and harmony.” After the many hours I spent scanning these pages, it became easy to see where today’s forlorn cottagecore tiktoks come from, as well as Grindr’s predilections, and a myriad of other current trends. I was perhaps most surprised to see what hadn’t changed from the late seventies to now.

The journey began smoothly, sitting in the Hillman Library Digital Commons for hours, talking with a library specialist about moving to Pittsburgh and college life and the upcoming Valentine’s day. Unfortunately, the sailing was not quite so smooth in the next stage of the process: data analysis.

A computer is able to identify patterns by reading massive amounts of text—a process known as data mining. Viewed as “distant reading” because of the scale, it is able to see patterns that a human simply couldn’t if they were to read as many documents, though it is not dissimilar to how humans read and compare texts. I used the MALLET software which focuses on linguistic patterns. I also used Python to conduct topic modeling which focuses on underlying semantic relationships. These two tools were meant to reveal patterns in the data from both a statistical and literary point of view.

Unfortunately, because the run of the magazine was only over the course of two years, there weren’t many trends to identify. There was not a noteworthy amount of change over time for these analytic processes to find. My initial inklings as to what I would find proved all to be false and, much to my dismay, no new findings replaced them. There was no doubt a limitation on my findings brought on by my own lack of skill. Someone more knowledgeable than I could likely have run the materials through in different ways to produce something, anything at all, but I, despite having a great amount of support and mentorship from a number of incredible Pitt faculty and staff, never reached a meaningful conclusion.

This was merely a small obstacle in the road, I thought. This can be overcome, I reckoned. I will simply go back to the archive, scan another publication’s personal ads that were printed after the AIDs crisis, and do a comparative analysis, I announced. And that week the University shut down. A new pandemic was sweeping the nation and the archive was no longer accessible. This is where my project ends and not with a bang by any means. But, because I was so excited to see it to fruition, I would like to describe to you what I had planned to do in the hopes that some ambitious reader might pick up my torch.

The next step in the process was to convert the statistical and linguistic data into a collage. To better understand my visual approach, I would like to briefly explain the major influences on the project: absurdism, postmodernism, and neo-dadaism. Absurdism is the belief that humanity lives a purposeless, chaotic existence with the only meaning to life being that which is created by humanity; absurdist art operates under the scrutiny of subjectivity while being intentionally subversive to traditional beauty structures and ideals. Absurdist art says that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and then holds up something meant to contradict the idea of beauty and art itself. 

Postmodernism similarly acts contrary to established ideas and rejects the idea of an objective reality. As we move into the technology era, postmodernism’s lack of tether to time, place, and belief becomes an increasingly valid lens through which to view both art and reality. Large collections of data are in my eyes absurdist, especially in that they hold immense power over the individual and yet are poorly understood by the layman, interpreted as static and factual yet are entirely manipulated: postmodern in the duality that it is controlled yet controls us. I planned to use an absurdist approach to subvert this duality and challenge the powers that are doing the controlling, in the tradition of female and queer liberation. 

Neo dadaism is the 21st century resurgence of the dada “anti-art” movement that came about after World War I, now spurned by phenomena such as the foreboding of climate change and the ennui of the Iphone generation, it is a type of absurdist art similarly focused on defying traditional definitions of beauty and meaning. Collage offers a neo-dadaist approach, I would argue the most germane approach, to the representation of mass data. I expected to retain several anti-art principles in this project, such as using recycled and found imagery; rejecting traditional ideals of beauty and rationality; and purporting anti-war, anti-bourgeois sentiment, leaning towards anarchism though rather than being focused on the military complex, I would focus on reclaiming the power of technology. I had anticipated finding similar themes within the archive, particularly the rejection of traditional beauty and an anarchist slant. 

Using the results of the two forms of data mining, I had intended to produce a collage that would be primarily photo on canvas. The linguistic data would determine what images would be used and the statistical data would determine the frequency and size of the images. This would require the creation of a matrix through which to convert this data into images, a process rooted in archival discovery, which I would develop by working closely with both the original materials and the data outputs.

The project would then be taken one step further by adding an interactive element. The collage would be uploaded to a website, viewable in its entirety and every image, when clicked, accompanied by an explanation of why it was included and a link to the specific reference in the archive. By doing this, the art would escape both time and place, becoming multidimensional and dually postmodern in both technique and execution.

This project would have brought a new way to interact with Gay Life and with Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ history more generally. By viewing the archive not at face value, on a content level, but instead on a linguistic and statistical level and through the visual representation of collage, this project would offer an entirely new perspective to those who wish to interact with the archive. It was meant to find trends and patterns in the materials that go beyond simply reading the documents. It was to be the use of technology to provide a new angle through which to experience the collection while also examining technology itself’s influence on the collection.Grandiose as my philosophical underpinnings (yes, I did propose this project using the term philosophical underpinnings. Undergraduates are so idealistic, aren’t we?) may have been, this project was on the road to being something sincerely novel and, in my opinion, worthwhile, that could have spurred a new mode of thinking about archival research at Pitt. While things didn’t go according to plan, as an individual, I gained so many skills on this journey, such as learning Python and what an OCR machine is and why the 1970s gay community had so many ads offering oil paintings. This opportunity, despite not producing the tangible I had worked for, was not wasted. And I hope that any student reading this might consider continuing this work or starting whatever innovative archival work is stirring around in your head because doing archival work grants us the possibility to see not just where we’ve been but where we are and why and what’s next.