Queering the Web Crawler: Algorithms, Automation, and the Politics of Archives

• In Event: Queer Media Mobilities

Abstract

This paper considers “queer mobilities” in the wake of “the archival turn” that signaled broad shifts in the status of the archive. From a static repository of facts to a partial, biased, and dynamic practice of knowledge production, the conceptual framework of archiving has transformed from a storage model to one emphasizing process, movement, and temporality. Web archives are particularly evocative because they do not contain digital copies of websites but “snapshots” generated by automated crawlers, robots that traverse public hyperlinks and download files along the way. In queer studies, the gaps surrounding archival traces of queer lives has become a site of radical struggles over historical knowledge (Halberstam 2005; Cvetkovich 2003; Rodríguez 2014) but the politics of digital platforms, including the particular logics of inclusion and exclusion designed into collaborative filtering algorithms, have yet to figure in these debates. Although engineering discourse frames the movement of web crawlers as “automatic,” and hence free of traditional institutional power dynamics, these programs operationalize narrow definitions of popularity that prioritize some users web histories over others. Drawing on early trans community web archives, “queer mobilities” is proposed as a critical device to read against the grain of algorithmic logics of automation.

Author

• Megan Sapnar Ankerson, U of Michigan