Here it is. I finally changed the format to something I like better. I ultimately chose to anonymize myself by way of not showing my name on the page, but the authorship is still locate-able. This was a good middle ground for me; being able to speak my mind with my name attached giving me some freedom, but also the direct anonymity insulating me from immediate attack. I turned off comments as well, which was a difficult decision to make; DH is so collaborative, however I think that personal safety is the most important thing here. I might make a few more posts to talk about my experience if I feel the need to rant, and I might upload some of the content I’ve seen digitally related to NYC. But for now, this is what I’ve got. I did mention in class I was unfortunately inspired by the TERF’s archive of women’s spaces that I presented on earlier in the semester… I think my site is actually quite like hers; I have rants and pictures and anonymity on a blog site with a design that just works good enough (but mine is definitely better than hers). At least I don’t copy/paste posts from other users like she does. I was also influenced by the idea of a trigger warning of sorts at the top; like, for Jews we know going into something like this that we’ll get upset, but man, I dunno, maybe this upsets other people, too. Adding a warning doesn’t hurt anybody, and may help someone. I think mine in particular really helps set the tone, too. Another big inspiration was the 858 archive; I’ve seen it prior to this, and it’s always been a goal of mine to have an archive with like, little images in a grid view with a brief caption. In the case of 858, I wanted my archive to look a little bit less like iTunes in 2011, but hey, this is an older archive. I did specifically want to stay away from the format that Lynching in America took, because I feel like it’s sort of clunky. I get needing to take people through a narrative but it really makes me not want to use it because it makes you wait. I’m unfortunately quite impatient, and I know a lot of internet users are too. So that’s a summary of the choices I made. Now, in terms of the actual literature I will admit that the articles themselves that we read didn’t necessarily influence my decisions, rather mostly the presentations by and comments from my peers is what influenced me. Furthermore, this was a sort of passion project that happens to be directly connected to politics which are unfortunately constantly shoved in my face whenever I leave the house, so not a lot of research was really necessary for me–it was mostly making careful choices for building the site itself.

In terms of assessment, I also wanna say sorry to everyone who sent me wonderful comments on my posts that I never got around to replying to! Everything has been absolutely insane the last two semesters for me, but I have read them all and really appreciate all of you. I realize now is not the time to be humble, so I won’t be (even though it makes me want to tear my skin off). I counted, I have all my posts done. I put literal blood sweat and tears (yes, blood) into my project, that’s an A+ from me, seriously. Lightning talk, great, done. Facilitation and note taking, done, awesome. And participation? Please make me shut up, we had great discussions. That’s an A, in my opinion.

So, to everyone in this class, and Prof Brandle, this was awesome. I’m very happy with the work we did here together and how collaboratively we worked. Cheers to everyone, and see you on the flipside. 🙂