on documenting
I’ve been thinking a lot about documentation.
There’s, of course, an obvious sense here. It’s not a small matter for trans people. Some friends have struggled to get sex markers corrected on passports (even after judges lifted the Trump administration’s limits on sex marker changes). Others have canceled international travel to avoid excess scrutiny of their genders, immigration statuses, or both amidst the government’s mass deportations. Journalist M. Gessen has written about how these efforts to denationalize trans people bolster a larger project to redefine who is — or can be — “American.”
But increasingly, I think about the act of documenting.
Journalists who are covering authoritarian regimes have written extensively about documentation. Journalists plod along, doing what we can. On the Arrest of an Autocrat by Sheila Coronel details how this played out in the Philippines. In the face of a foe who seemed immune to all forms of justice, “smaller, feistier news organizations persisted,” she writes. “None of that seemed to matter. Until it did.” One of the main reasons we know that the German public did, in fact, know at least somewhat about Hitler’s plans for Jewish communities is because of journalistic documentation: the Munich Post published excerpts — in 1931 — of a Nazi document that outlined stripping Jews of citizenship and enslaving them.
Kenyan journalist John-Allen Namu, founder of Africa Uncensored and a fellow John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford this year, had half the room taking notes when he said: “Sometimes journalism is a spark, and sometimes it is an archive. If nothing is catching fire, we may as well build the library.”
So whose archive are we building?
Documentation efforts
One of my most significant recent projects has involved documenting media patterns through the Trans Journalists Association's Trans News Initiative. Sometimes that feels depressingly obvious. Take, for instance, months of work to produce a study confirming what many of us already knew: national news outlets do not quote trans people the majority of the time. But the act of quantifying and proving this? Does help. (An entirely separate issue from “how do we meaningfully quantify ‘bias’ when our industry baseline for understanding ‘objectivity’ fails to capture the root of a story?” Which I’ve written on for The Objective.)
I talk a bit about the Trans News project for Columbia Journalism Review, the Data Journalism Podcast, Windy City Times, and Equal Access Public Media. I also had the pleasure of demo-ing it as a keynote speaker at Computation+Journalism, which this year focused on Data Journalism Under Autocracy. I argued in this speech that understanding gender and its enforced definitions is key to understanding social control, and I challenged listeners to pay more attention to the untold story and data gaps.
Big picture, the Trans News Initiative is an archive that looks at the inverse of that: our most-common narratives. It depicts journalism and its trends (at least among 200 or so national U.S. publications). It prompts users to explore, to think about what they’re seeing — and what they’re not seeing. This project in part came from a series of conversations with other journalists where I pointed out trends I’ve personally observed, and they went, “who says?”
Eventually, I hope it supports research and accountability work that changes the view. I’m still mulling how to meld open source ethos with civic media tactics, to help communities use data like this more directly. (More on that soon, I hope.)
Late last year, I also spoke on an online panel about narrative change. Multiple journalists, including myself, named as an inspiration Ida B. Wells, one of the earliest investigative data journalists in the U.S. Data — and documentation — were core to her work, which ultimately led to laws outlawing lynching. To prove the problem, she had to layer additional information over counts of lynchings — to incontrovertibly quantify that lynchings did not mete out neutral justice but instead targeted Black men — even when they were accused of no crime.
It’s not lost on me that much of the current journalism about both queer people and immigrants arrested (or killed) in the U.S. investigates whether or not they may have committed a crime, but stops there — without always asking questions about the environment, circumstances, and systems that drive these detentions and set these rules.
Whose archive, again, are we building?
Links list
We Name Ourselves by Gillian Branstetter
The Hidden Motives Behind Trump’s Attack on Trans People by M. Gessen
On the Arrest of an Autocrat by Sheila Coronel
Visible, yet vulnerable: What journalists can learn from how we covered the attack on trans rights in Trump’s first 100 days by the Trans Journalists Association (including me)
A Visual Look Back at the Trans Media Convening by The Objective
Exposing the “Thread-Bare Lie”: How Ida B. Wells Used Investigative Journalism to Uncover the Truth About Lynching by WTTW (PBS Chicago)