This project was in collaboration with the Museum of Transology (MoT) and their community curators (regular volunteers at the archive), to explore what trans archiving means to them and how it impacts self and community actualisation. I created cultural probes to gain intimate, nuanced and creative insights, ran a creative workshop and then dug into these further with NLP afterwards.

The project culminated into an exhibition presenting the different artifacts created by the group, for example trans archiving manifestos, postcards written to ‘home’ and photos taken on disposable cameras. ‘The Archive will Not be Silent’ ran from the 6th to the 24th May, with an opening celebration on the 9th. The research also formed a 6000 word mixed methods research paper.

This research took the form of an exploratory mixed methods study, with a quantitising form of integration - where some of the qualitative data was converted into quantitative data using NLP.

The qualitative strand of the study integrated cultural probes and a workshop to explore the impact of trans archiving on the understanding and development of ‘self’, for the community curators at MoT. These creative tasks activated reflection around the role of objects and collecting in the personal lives of the group, and what trans archiving means to them.

The quantitative element of this study explored the embodied experiences of materiality and objects within the MoT community curators – building on the archival embodiment explored through body mapping (figure 10). Written data in response to the cultural probes was quantitised using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, in order to investigate the bodily experience of transness in relation to archives. This process employed the Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms, a dataset of 40,000 English concepts/words rated across their ‘perceptual modalities’ – the senses they invoke (hearing, smell, taste, vision, touch and interoception) and where they are most associated with in the body (mouth/throat, hand/arm, foot/leg, head, and torso) (Lynott et al. 2019).

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The ‘output’ of this research was the exhibition ‘The Archive will Not be Silent’ - a co-construction site built in collaboration with the words and stories of the community curators at MoT.  Bringing together the thoughts, feelings, experiences and reflections of community curators at the MoT, the exhibition provided an opportunity for people to interact with the stories and objects of the community, and gain an appreciation for trans archiving.

The insights and material generated through the cultural probe and workshop processes was collated into the co-construction site to be explored, appreciated and reflected upon. Six trans archiving manifestos, created by the community curators, were boldly written across and around the walls in ‘Trans-scribe’ (2024) and postcards, photos and personal archives were brought together in the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities (deconstructed)’ (2024). Together we reflected on experiences of home, community, belonging and identity.

I was really proud to have worked with the community curators at MoT and felt incredibly honoured to have been let into their space and experienced their stories. It was a really special and fulfilling experience.