Publication OA: Size Matters to Lesbians Too in Forthcoming _Professional Geographer_

My. Best. Journal article title. Ever. Is finally ready to share. It’s also my favorite publication to date and I’ve loaded it in pre-print form to make it accessible now and posted the full cite at the end. Enjoy the likes of….

Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data

Abstract: How can we recognize those whose lives and data become attached to the far-from-groundbreaking framework of “small data”? Specifically, how can marginalized people who do not have the resources to produce, self-categorize, analyze, or store “big data” claim their place in the big data debates? I examine the place of lesbians and queer women in the big data debates through the Lesbian Herstory Archive’s not “big” enough lgbtq organizing history dataset—perhaps the largest dataset known to exist on lgbtq activist history—as one such alternative. A contribution to critical data studies, I take a queer feminist approach to the scale of big data by reading for the imbricated scales and situated knowledge of data.

I’ve written about my devotion to the open access movement before and it’s essential role as a project to disseminate knowledge developed in the academy to the public. I have been considering uploading to a pre-print server for years now but found them confusing. After a recent conversation with geography colleagues who have share pre-prints of their work Ryan Burns, Jim Thatcher, Rob Kitchin, and David O’Sullivan on Twitter, I was dismayed to discover the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) has been sold to Elsevier. Elsevier is the corporation most known for exploiting the labor of and then overcharging the ranks of the academy for access to our own research publications.

My fabulous co-critical GIS / geobigdata thinkers–perhaps unsurprisingly–already were discussing the rise of SocArXiv Preprints, part of the Open Science Foundation. I then decided to take the leap and post in both. SSRN/Elsevier can use my one paper of data for their analysis while I see how downloads and accessibility work in both. Besides posting both papers in both locations as a sort of experiment to track use and, more importantly, give you the reader the ability to control where you get your knowledge from, I’m also storing all of my preprints on my college digital repository, so that you can also download from there.

Gieseking, J. 2017 (forthcoming). “Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data.” Professional Geographer.