K. J. Rawson oral history interview, 2022.

Ways of Knowing Oral History Collection

Interviewee: K.J. Rawson, Chair of the Homosaurus Editorial Board, Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Northeastern University.

Interviewers: Emily Drabinski & Amanda Belantara

Date: Aug 1, 2022

Location: Virtual Interview; Northeastern University

Emily Drabinski: Today we're interviewing K.J. Rawson, Associate Professor of English and Women's Gender and Sexuality studies at Northeastern University and Chair of the Homosaurus Editorial Board. The interview was conducted for the Ways of Knowing Oral History Project. The interview took place virtually on August 1st, 2022, recorded locally by Kip Clark at K.J.'s office in Boston, Massachusetts. The interviewers are Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski based in New York City.

Drabinski: K.J., can you tell us a bit about your background and education?

K.J. Rawson: Sure. I guess the best place to start would be undergraduate. So I started to find my love of language, in particular, throughout my time in undergraduate. I was an English major at Cornell and what I especially loved about becoming an English major was the small classrooms, the falling in love with books alongside other people, and getting to chat with other folks about it, and really wrangle with language, and what was happening on the page, and how it made us feel, and the work that it was doing in the world. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I didn't want be done. I didn't have other really specific intentions beyond that, but I knew I didn't want finish these kinds of conversations. So I went to graduate school, got a master's in English literature, in part out of inertia, and loved having those continuing conversations. But I wanted to really find a space where I could look more at the way language was working in the world, the impacts that it was having in persuasive discourse, not just in aesthetic and literary forms. And so, that's how I found my way to rhetoric. And once I finished that master's degree, I went on to get my PhD in rhetoric. And at that point, I got a chance to really focus on how queer history and queer language was impacting people, so researchers, but also the general public and the ways that queer language was circulating in the world. And it was that background that brought me to the Homosaurus Project and also brought me to the Digital Transgender Archive, which is another project that I direct.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a bit about your professional position right now?

Rawson: So right now I am at Northeastern University. My home department is an English department here, and I also am jointly appointed in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. I also co-direct a digital humanities and social science and computational social science program and initiative here called the New Lab. Through all of these various channels, I get a chance to have colleagues and collaborators from different parts of the university, which has been a really perfect way of tapping into all of my interests and getting to meet with folks who do lots of similar work.

Drabinski: when did you first get involved with the Homosaurus Project?

Rawson: The Homosaurus, for me, started in 2015. I came across the Homosaurus because I had a problem. I was just starting the Digital Transgender Archive at the time, and I was having a really terrible time finding good subject terms to describe the materials we were starting to process for the Digital Trans Archive. And I was looking to the Library of Congress subject headings and really not finding what I needed. The Digital Trans Archive, as you can anticipate, is full of queer and trans materials and things that were not adequately described by existing controlled vocabularies. I think I read about the Homosaurus first on conference proceedings maybe from, I'm not even sure where, maybe one of the earliest GLBT ALMS Conferences. I think there was an early presentation on the Homosaurus then. And so, I tracked down Jack van der Wel's email address and just reached out cold and said, "Hey, this sounds cool." And so, at that point in 2015, he sent me a Word doc version of the Homosaurus, which is what it had been, from my understanding, for its first few decades. I got that and I said, "Oh, this is incredible." And it really gave me a lot of hope that there was a controlled vocabulary out there that could work within the Digital Trans Archive that I was trying to use it within.

Drabinski: In 2015, when you're encountering the Homosaurus, can you tell us a little bit about the social and political environment that you were in? What was happening around that time?

Rawson: Yeah, it's funny, it's seven years ago, so it, it both feels like a long time ago, but then also, it feels like we're in the same moment in many ways. What seems to have changed since then is that trans communities, in particular, have become far more of a political and legislative focus in not so great ways. At the time, it felt more like what we were doing was under the radar. So it felt like, especially with the Digital Trans Archive, it felt like a somewhat obscure project or at least niche project. And we knew that there would be great demand for it, but that that demand would be fairly specific and really tailored to trans communities themselves or ourselves, I should say. But that has really changed a lot and I think that even for the Homosaurus as well, there's so much, not only greater attention to LGBTQ+ resources and information landscapes, but I also think that we're seeing a lot of attention to activism around metadata and reparative descriptive practices. Projects like the Homosaurus are really starting to gain a lot of attention in a way that I don't think I saw as much promise for in 2015. And so, I actually see the difference as like, one of capacity building and really expansion from where we are and I think where we're heading in the next five to 10 years.

Drabinski: To zoom out a bit and talk about the Homosaurus, the initial vocabulary emerges in the 1980s at Homodok at the University of Amsterdam. How did this Dutch project come to the attention of information workers in the United States?

Rawson: I'm not sure if I'm the best person to answer that question. I know that Ellen Greenblatt was at the center of some of that work, but I don't know much beyond that. I know that Jack and Helen, in particular, directly collaborated on that project and it had been translated, I believe, either with Ellen's input or just before Ellen got involved. And then I know that Ellen worked a lot on expanding the vocabulary. And so, I think that was also the moment where it transformed from a sort of a flat listing to a hierarchical thesaurus. There was a pretty significant ontological shift at that point, as well. And I believe that was in the late 1990s, but I'm not quite sure when those conversations started or how they happened.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a bit more about that transition, what the difference is between the flat Word document that you received and what Ellen did with the project?

Rawson: Yeah, so actually the flat Word document was still in existence through the 2010s, so through 2015. But what happened with the vocabulary is that initially it was just a listing of terms that were not put in relation to one another. So, it was just an alphabetical list of terms in isolation from one another. And it was in the 1990s, again, to the best of my knowledge, that they were put into a hierarchy format. There were relationships that were built out. Some terms became broader terms, some were narrower and then others were put as related terms, which is more of a vertical. Sorry, so the broader and narrower are the vertical relationships, and then, related terms are the horizontal relationships.

Drabinski: Do you know when the Homosaurus was translated into English?

Rawson: That was in the 1990s, also to the best of my knowledge, but it has maintained an active Dutch and English exact translation since then. Jack has continued to translate every term that we have added since then.

Drabinski: Can you tell us who was involved in the translation to English initially?

Rawson: I wish I could, but again, Ellen's name is the only one who I know from the English side of things was contributing.

Drabinski: You talked a bit about your first encounter with the Homosaurus. Can you tell usin a little more detail about that initial encounter? A little more about what you're hoping to use the vocabulary for and some of your initial reactions?

Rawson: Yeah, so I just remember working with students in a lab. This was when I was a faculty member at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. So even our conversations themselves, let's just say we always had a closed door. And so, we would be looking at these historical artifacts. So, some of the earliest materials we processed were program guides from Fantasia Fair from the 1970s and 1980s. We had a few runs of really fantastic community publications, so things like Transgender Tapestry, drag magazines, these always, these really fabulous and rich historical artifacts. And we would be seeking out language to add to that. And of course, my students who are digital natives were like, we'll just, you know, add our own tags to it. And I would say, "Well, wait a minute here. Though this is a joyfully queer project, I do think there is some benefit in having a controlled set of terms." And we would have these long conversations about the philosophy behind that and the sort of meeting of queer theory and the practice of digital archiving. And though I'm certainly committed to the endless proliferation of language as a reiteration, and also as someone who who loves language theory, I do think that there is a real practical value in having a set list of terms to apply in information environments so that people can better discover resources. And so, what happened was as soon as I found the Homosaurus, I saw this really rich and incredible potential and I thought, "Oh, this is great. We can start describing these materials much better." But then, of course, immediately I'm like, "Oh no, that's not good or that term is really out of date." And so, it was at once this this beautiful resource that wonderfully supplemented and pushed back, in some ways, against LCSH, but then on the other hand, was really imperfect and also needed some TLC. And so, it was maybe two months later after I had initially received the Word doc that I reached back out to Jack and sort of tentatively said, "Hey, what would you think about setting up an editorial board?" And of course, I was a bit timid about it because I had just found out about this project and here I am trying to basically elbow my way in and say, "Hey, let's make it better," to one of the people who had been around since the '80s and who had been working on it for more than 30 years at that point. But to Jack's credit, he was really game for it and was enthusiastic about the idea.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a bit about how you assembled that first Homosaurus editorial board?

Rawson: That first six months or so, it really was a lot of just Jack and I reaching out to anyone we knew who might be interested. We were hitting up anyone that we knew of that we thought could be interested. Emily, I'm surprised if we didn't reach out to you, actually as someone.

Drabinski: I think you did reach out to me, and I connected you to Billey.

Rawson: See, perfect. Yeah, so you are part of this history, as well. So, I'm curious. I really wanna look back now to see if that was the first time that I had met with Amber Billey, but I certainly knew Billey's name before that, in any case. I think the initial board was eight people and there was energy at that very first meeting. You know, it was just like, a group of folks who are passionate about queer information and we were all just like, I remember us giggling already in our first meeting and I just knew, I was like, this is gonna be a great group of folks. And in fact, almost all of the original board has remained to this day. We did lose Cat [Walter} Walker a few years back and he was one of our founding editorial board members, as well. But it's just been a really dynamic and energized group that has remained a dynamic and energized group to this day.

Drabinski: Where was the first meeting held?

Rawson: Virtually. We were doing Zoom meetings before it was the Zoom meeting landscape that we have now. And in fact, we tried out, I think every remote meeting platform that is in existence. We did every different kind, and it was almost a running joke because we could never find the right links because we would switch almost month to month when we were meeting to try out different platforms because they weren't working well for us. I'd say that more than half of the board, I have still never met in person, though we've been working together for six years now.

Drabinski: Can you tell us who is on the current editorial board and a bit about your goals?

Rawson: Sure, so, the current editorial board, I've already mentioned Amber Billey, who's still on the board. Marika Cifor, Jay Colbert, Janaya Kizzie, Claire Kronk, Chloe Noland, myself, Bri Watson, Jack van der Wel, who I've also talked a lot about, and Adrian Williams. So it's a good size board. We actually hear from folks really frequently who want to join the board and it's often a challenging position for us to be in because again, we want to support this project's growth and really make sure that we can make it into the best resource possible. But it's really hard to figure out the exact balance and the number of folks on any given board and organization. So we've tried to keep the number around 10. We've had a few folks who come on and off over the years, but that seems to be the sweet spot for us. But it's nice that we're now in a position where everyone keeps coming to us, rather than us having to try to beg folks to join onto this project that they had never heard about before.

Drabinski: And what are the goals of the board?

Rawson: Well, we call ourselves an editorial board and I think that's an apt title, although I think it under accounts for all the work that is happening by the board. Our primary job is to maintain the vocabulary and to review new changes to spearhead initiatives, to develop branches of the vocabulary that follow certain themes. We do a lot of cleanup work. We find terms in the vocabulary that we are like, how did that get there? How come no one ever noticed that before? Or how come this term doesn't have any relationships associated with it? So there's still a lot of what feels to me like basic maintenance of the vocabulary that we do. We've had a grant over the past year from Northeastern University and that has been a really incredible opportunity to support a graduate student who's been working on this project throughout the past year. And so, we've seen a tremendous amount of growth. We've had hundreds of new terms that have been added in the past 12 months. But the editorial board does a lot more than that. Some of our members do a lot of public speaking and really excel at hosting workshops for libraries who want to implement it, to reaching out to archives where this might be a benefit, and so forth. We also have some of our members who are really great at fostering collaborations with other organizations and so, they might reach out to another organization and try to get feedback on certain parts of the vocabulary. And these are really important for us because we recognize the limitations of who's on the board at any given time and how the vocabulary itself is reflecting our own areas of expertise. So we always want to be pushing out and really getting input and seeking collaborations to continue to enrich and extend the vocabulary.

Drabinski: How do you feel about the group's composition in terms of race, class, geographic location and how does that impact the thesaurus? You've written a bit about efforts to expand racial diversity on the board. Can you tell us how you're working toward that?

Rawson: Yeah, I'm more than happy to talk about that. One of the things that we joke about a lot as a board is that we have a real over-representation of trans people. So, we laugh about that quite a bit, actually, because we will often find that some of our trans terms are some of the least developed in our vocabulary because we are really attuned to our own gaps and limitations. And so, some of the things that we have not built out as well for the vocabulary. Several years back, we looked around and realized that our board was overwhelmingly white, and we knew even from the start that that was a significant problem. And of course, we're contending with a library and information landscape where that is also largely the case. We made a decision, I think it was now three years back as a board, that we would not bring on any new board members who were white people. We just felt like it was unethical to continue building and sort of so dramatically misrepresenting the communities that we were purporting to try to support for information access, right? Since that time we have recruited several people of color who have joined the board, but I think that honestly, the people who are on the board are not necessarily working in areas that are aligned with their own identities. And I think that speaks back to the fact that some of our trans terms are not as well built out as other terms. I really think that the way that our vocabulary grows is through our collaborations. And so, one of the collaborations that we have worked on in the past year, is we've spent a lot of time with Krü Maekdo, who directs the Black Lesbian Archives, and have gotten a lot of feedback on building the vocabulary based on what would be supportive for use in a context like the Black Lesbian Archives. And so, we've tried to build and expand based on those kinds of collaborations. And in doing so, we've really found that there are so many areas that we are just not attuned to as a board. Someone, for example, pointed out that up until, I think it was a year and a half ago, we didn't even have gay marriage in the vocabulary. And again, that's one of those things that we chuckle about quite a bit just because it was just not a priority for anyone on the board. But of course, some of our users were like, "Excuse me, you don't have gay marriage." And it, again, we feel like we're always doing what feels like an impossible job of trying to capture this really complex and diverse language and linguistic diversity among queer communities. And we're trying to do the best job that we can, but we always are kind of, at least me personally, putting this project out there with a bit of a wince because I know that there's parts of it that are just so imperfect. But again, it's like any project, it's still worth putting it out there and continuing to put our effort and our love into it and to try to make it an improved resource.

Drabinski: The board also includes practicing librarians, as well as scholars in the field. Is that mix intentional? Can you tell us how those relationships shape the Homosaurus Project?

Rawson: Yes, I think that the relationship of the board members and their various backgrounds and expertise is the most important part of the board. So for example, when we lost Cat, he was the person who did the most cataloging, library cataloging of anyone on our board. And when we lost Cat, not only did we all feel such a tremendous loss of his friendship and his being a close colleague of ours, but we also realized we were missing a really important area of expertise. And maybe six months later, I reached out to Adrian Williams, who is a metadata librarian at the University of Kentucky, and they do cataloging every day. And it was really such a perfect opportunity to seek out someone who also has expertise similar to Cat's because Adrian so often will speak up at board meetings and be like, "No, nope, that's not how we're going to be using that in a library context." And of course, we have also folks who work in archives and the uses of the Homosaurus and archives are often slightly different in those contexts. And so, getting all of those voices together in our board has been indispensable to building the vocabulary so that it's a useful resource across these different contexts.

Drabinski: Can you tell us how you work together? How often do you meet? Do you ever meet in person or only online? And how do you stay motivated to continue working on the project?

Rawson: Yes, we've never met in person. And in fact, some of the folks on the editorial board, I have done even closer collaborations with. Writing grants, writing articles together and still haven't met all those folks. We are a board that works well remotely together. We just this past Friday had a board retreat, so we had a three hour long Zoom meeting together, and I can say that at the end of that retreat there were people who were still lingering at the end of our three hours. So we have found this great synergy, even in Zoom. I have to say, it's one of the most enjoyable Zoom meetings that I have. We meet monthly. These board retreats are a bit of an anomaly for us. So we were able to do these retreats with the sponsorship of Northeastern University's grant that we're on right now. Normally we just meet once a month for either an hour or an hour and a half. And then we do a lot of communication in between over email, predominantly. And when the board meets, we usually have a pretty light agenda in terms of like, we know we need to look at new terms, we usually will check in about ongoing projects, and then often there'll be either a problem or a proposal about a larger area that will come up. So we might tackle something like acronyms. Like, how are we gonna handle acronyms as a vocabulary? As you can imagine, that's one of those ones that can be really tough for us to figure out how to both normalize and support a widespread usage of various iterations of the LGBTQ+ acronym. So those are the kinds of things that we try to balance in every meeting, is both like, bigger picture things, but then also a specific term approvals. And just like at our very first meeting, we continue to laugh and often giggle just about every meeting. We also really work well together in shared documents and shared spreadsheets and synchronous collaboration. So, it is often the case that we will all be in a doc together and people will be editing the same sentence and there will be no stepping on toes, there's no hurt feelings. Like, people really seem to be quite generous with co-authorship and co-creation and that has always served the board really well.

Drabinski: Is there ever conflict on the board?

Rawson: We disagree, definitely. And I think that that's really important and really healthy. There are certainly times where we will have a different opinion on something and a couple different folks might go and research it and come back and say, "Oh, I think this would actually be best practice." And someone else will say, "Oh, actually based on my research, I think this is best practice." And we'll work to find a solution together. But there's really, to my knowledge anyway, and of course, I'd want to ask all of my fellow board members, but I don't think we've experienced many instances where people will end a meeting with hurt feelings or frustrations about how a decision went down. Usually, because we all share an equal passion and commitment to the project, we end up coming to a place of mutual understanding and there's so much opportunity to build in nuance and related terms if there's a term you really objected to or a scope note you didn't like or something, usually, most of the board members are like, "Okay, let's work on that until we're all comfortable with it." So there's very few opportunities for someone to really put their foot down and say like, "I'm unhappy with this approach," because I think that most of the time, someone will just say, "You know what, I don't see that collaboration or that venture as being as worthwhile as something else, but like, go ahead, you do it." You know? It's one of those cases where we will just splinter off and someone can do the work and then someone else will just step back and work on something else. So that's more often the case, is that there may be a difference of opinion with where we're heading or certain initiatives that we want to put our energies into, but it's never a problem because we can just sort of separate that out and people can do the work and then come back to the board and it will be supported at the board level.

Drabinski: Can you tell us how your work on Homosaurus is funded?

Rawson: This grant that we just received from Northeastern University was our first official funding. So, prior to that, this project has just been a labor of love and something that we've all done on a volunteer basis. It, it really is, it's not an expensive project. I've been able to host the Homosaurus through the Digital Trans Archive platform up until this past year. Part of what this grant allowed us to do was actually take the Homosaurus out from under the DTA and establish it on its own server space and its own administrative and hosting environment. And that was the first time that had been the case. Prior to that, it was just under the auspices of the DTA. Now, you don't really know that when you're accessing the vocabulary from the front end, so it didn't matter too much. But in terms of opportunities for future grants, that was a really important step for us to be able to make sure that the projects were disentangled. And also, it really wasn't a sustainable infrastructure for the long term. It was just the way that we could get it set up quickly to use in the DTA. And I must confess to you that I had absolutely no idea that it meant a lot that we were creating it as a link data vocabulary back in 2015 when we were doing it because our software developer, Steven Anderson, who's just phenomenal and has supported this project every step of the way, said, "Oh, well, if you're going to use it in the DTA, you can't just use it as a sort of internal and backend control vocabulary. Let's make it a linked data vocabulary and then others can access it." And I was just sort of blithely like, "Sure, whatever, as long as we can use it." And then we started to get contacted by people who also wanted to access it and I thought, "Oh, there might be something here." And the amount of usage that we've had since then has just skyrocketed. And so, our first set of funding has been really helpful and important in being able to really set up the scaffolding for future growth and future funding. So up until this point it's been, I wouldn't even call it shoestring. It's like, bare feet, I guess. There's not even a shoe apparatus. But then this past year having some grant support has given us the opportunity to really gear up for our future work.

Drabinski: We're interested in the initial decisions you made when you took over the Homosaurus as an editorial board. How did you go about getting started with those revisions and do you remember any of the initial decisions you had to make?

Rawson: We actually have our minutes all the way back to the first meeting. So there, that's a fun little research project, if someone wanted to go through and read through all of our early conversations. I'd say for the first year, maybe year and a half, we sort of, if you imagine it, sort of a boat going in a circle in a lake, right? We were definitely revisiting the same conversations over and over again. And we were all happy to be out on the lake, but we were like, what is going on here? Like, what are we doing? And part of the grappling around that was that the original Homosaurus was meant to be a standalone vocabulary, meaning that an archivist could use it to fully describe all of their collections. And so, it included lots of LGBTQ+ terms, of course, but then also lots of other terms, broader terms that really weren't LGBTQ specific, but that were parent terms for LGBTQ terms. For example, a term like Performance or Family or Art. You know, so these really kind of broad subject headings. And so, we realized as we were trying to dissect the vocabulary for the first year, we knew we couldn't do a good job treating the Homosaurus like a standalone vocabulary because it was just so big. We kept adding all these new terms. And it's so, so often at a meeting someone would be like, "But how is that queer? Like, what does that have to do with queer people?" And then we'd say, "Oh, I don't know." And then we'd have these conversations. So it took us about a year or a year and a half to really settle on a scope. And in that process, we determined that we wanted to focus exclusively on queer language and terminology. And that was such a moment of clarity for us, because we could have kept going around in circles for a long time, but once we decided to do that, the next few meetings we just caught every term that was not sufficiently queer. So you could imagine the joy of all these like, queer librarians and academics just being like, "Nope, not queer enough, not queer enough." And just like, deleting, deleting, deleting. We must have deleted hundreds and hundreds of terms, maybe 800 terms we deleted. And it was like, whoa, okay, what are we going to have left when we're done with this? But it allowed us to get to the point where we could say, this is something we could do well, this is something that we can develop a niche in and an area of expertise in. We know we can't do all the other stuff really well, so let's just try to narrow it even further. And that decision has come to challenge us in some ways still over the years because we want to be able to group terms together. And so, we've sort of gone back against that scope in just a few moments when we are like, okay, we want it to still be readable to some users. But then at the same time, it has really narrowed our focus in such a helpful way, and it has allowed us to continue to say, no, that's not really in the vocabulary. You know, we can find that somewhere else. But it's also meant that often we will then compare a proposal for a new term to existing vocabularies. And if we're not finding it anywhere else, we will include it even if it's kind of on the periphery of LGBTQ specific. And so, we will really push our own scope and boundaries if we feel like we can use our link data environment to support other kinds of information discovery that aren't necessarily within our purview, but we think would be helpful to include.

Drabinski: Can you give an example of one of those terms?

Rawson: We for example, wanted to include critical race theory, intersectionality. Those are all terms, of course, that are very important to LGBTQ+ communities and discovery but wouldn't necessarily fall squarely under the umbrella of an LGBTQ+ vocabulary. But we were like, oh, those definitely need to be in there, right? These terms need to be made accessible to folks who are using the Homosaurus. Part of the problem is when we talk about the terms that are in the Homosaurus versus ones that aren't, the LCSH is changing rapidly as it always has, but it feels to me that it's changing quicker than it ever has. And again, since I'm not involved in proposing or evaluating new terms for LCHS, I'm completely ignorant of the process. My experience in the past, had been that terms were very slow to change, but it seems like there's an increase in speed, at least with queer related and trans related terminology. So some of the arguments that we have made in the past about these terms not being available in LCSH, that environment is shifting a bit, but I'm not always as invested in keeping up with it. So though we have a mapping between LCSH and the Homosaurus, I think that's only one data point and not necessarily the most interesting one anymore for the project.

Amanda Belantara: Okay, so as we continue talking a little bit about revisions, I just have another follow up question. Could you tell us about any new terms that were introduced via the revision process and were any of those terms particularly meaningful to you? And are discussions related to these changes documented along the way?

Rawson: I'll answer the last part first, which is that we haven't documented the discussions beyond our own minutes and sort of internal documentation, though we have started to produce more public facing works. So we have been participating more in public interviews and in having sort of recorded trainings and in some publications, some academic publications. And in those spaces, you're starting to see some of our conversations sort of seep out and you get more of a sense of what the back end of the project looks like. One of the things that I think has been really interesting about the changes that we've made over the past year is that we have not been shy about making really big changes. And that can be something that's really intimidating, especially with an all-volunteer project because you see a change or a proposal and you think, "Oh, that's a great idea, but gosh, who is going to do that work?" Like, you could just see the number of hours in front of you for how long it will take to implement a proposal. And so, the nice and beautiful thing about this past year is we've had a funded graduate student who has been able to support this project and that's Caitlin Roles. And they have not shied away from these big changes either. So for example, one of our conversations, I've already been talking about Krü Maekdo, and one of her proposals was that in the earlier, maybe a year ago in the Homosaurus, we had all of our race related terms as second within a string of a term. So for example, it would be like, Lesbian Black people. So it would always be the queer term, the race or ethnicity term, and then the person term. And what that did, was it prioritized the LGBTQ identity. And one of the first things that Krü said was like, "No, no, no. I would actually always include the race or ethnicity term first." And that was a proposal we brought back to the board. The board was immediately like, "Yep, that sounds great, let's do that." And so, that was a huge change. I mean, the number of terms that then had to change as a result of that was incredible, but it was a really important change for the project. And so, that's the kind of thing that we really have been able to take on and to face and to implement because we have grant funding in order to support those kind of changes. And there were dozens of hours of work that went into that, but also, the collaboration was a big part of the reason that that kind of change was implemented. And so, I really appreciate that kind of work. As much as I love the individual words where we're like, "Yes, let's add that," I also really appreciate the bigger structural changes, because I think that in those cases, we're really able to show how dynamic a vocabulary like ours can be and how much we can sort of adapt to use cases and to community need.

Belantara: A little earlier in the interview you talked about the kind of joy that the board felt going in and removing a bunch of terms that seemed like you could remove them from what this new idea of what the Homosaurus should focus on. Could you tell us some of the terms that you removed during that time?

Rawson: Yeah, I mean, a lot of them were not terribly interesting. So, a lot of them were just the sort of broader terms that were the broadest terms in the vocabulary. So you know, things like arts or literature, performance. So, the really top level terms. Some of the other terms that we took out with a more political bent were things related to pedophilia, for example. We looked at that and said, "Why do we have terms for pedophilia in this vocabulary?" What is it doing here and how are we perpetuating already inaccurate stereotypes of gay communities by making any kind of relationship to pedophilia visible in this space?" So that was one term that was actually not taken out until much later. So, there's things like that that sometimes surprise us when they still remain in the vocabulary. We forgot to take them out or we didn't really think through what the implications of it would be to have certain terms within it. Another term that we've struggled with, and I'm not quite even sure how to talk about it because there's often, you know, slurs in some of our terminology, but people who are attracted to trans people. How do we account for those folks in the vocabulary? Is there a way of doing so that is not disrespectful to trans people? And so that's, for example, a set of terms that we have often grappled with and we are still in the process of revising.

Belantara: A little while ago, again, during that same conversation, you mentioned the joy, but you've also written about the process of revision as joyful and cathartic. Can you tell us more about the feelings generated in your stages of revision?

Rawson: Well, one of my favorite earlier memories of the project before everyone started working from home, is that we would have a number of our board members who were in cubicle settings and tried to talk about these terms and they felt like they couldn't say the words out loud. And so, you'd hear someone either like whispering, like, "butt plug," you know? Or something like that. Or when it was too racy, they would actually just call out the column and row number of a spreadsheet. And it was just this beautifully charming moment where we were all in on it together. You know, we were like, talking about something that we knew the straight world around us was not in on and we would just like, laugh and giggle and just like, you know, and some of the terms that we have in the vocabulary are just funny. Like, especially when you say them aloud in a group of queer and trans folks who don't get to talk about these things aloud very often. It's just been a really fun process. And I also think that some of us have appreciated what we talk about as the world building opportunities with the Homosaurus. So a lot of our terms that have an LGBTQ+ prefix, we then build out those terms as having narrower terms under that. So, for example, this is the one we talk about all the time, we have LGBTQ+ beaches, and then under that we have Gay beaches, Lesbian beaches, both of those are a thing, but Bisexual beaches, at least to my knowledge, not really a thing. But it's in the Homosaurus. And so, we kind of joke about the bisexual beaches problem, because it's one of those instances where we don't know that there's any literary warrant for it. But that's never been the reason why we have terms in our vocabulary. So in some cases, we don't say, we have to see sufficient usage before we will include a term. We will say, "Yep, that term may not be a thing, but maybe it will be one day." And then, of course, invariably we say, "Oh, we just need a transgender beach and like, maybe our next Homosaurus board meeting should be at a beach and then we can just start calling that the transgender beach." Or you know, we kind of joke around about the ways that we might actually use the vocabulary to advance queer and trans community building, not just retroactively describe it.

Belantara: Following along the same kind of train of thought, traditional library cataloging uses literary warrant as a basis for including new terms. Can you talk about the ways queer world making, as you've described it, shapes the Homosaurus vocabulary?

Rawson: Well, as we've seen with other vocabularies, literary warrant can be a mechanism of power that excludes queer and trans people and queer and trans information and communities and lives and really limits the visibility that we can have in information context. And so, for us, literary warrant was never the basis for the vocabulary, because who gets to make that decision and what are the politics involved and what counts as a literary source and how do you decide how many need to be included? And it just seems like there's so many opportunities in that process for it to be rife with privilege and decisions about term impacts and significance. And I say all that, but at the same time, I will confess that we have had people who have suggested terms to us that we have decided shouldn't be in the vocabulary because they're not used widely enough. And sometimes it might be that a person will just email and say, "Oh, my friends and I have been starting to use this term for ourselves." And we'll say, "Yes, that's awesome, that's great." But the Homosaurus isn't necessarily the place to make a new term more popularized. I think. I don't know. I mean, this is what's really interesting about this project is that I, I don't know that there's any definitive answer on whether what the project is meant to do is, is what the project is doing. So it may be doing things that we're not aware of yet. It may be opening up linguistic possibilities that we haven't forecasted and maybe that's a great thing. But it also leads me often back to this moment where just as I am critical of those who have kept queer and trans terms out of broader vocabularies, I see that now I'm in the position of doing that with the Homosaurus, and so are all of our board members. And we are sitting in those positions of power to decide what term should be in and what term should be out. And it's, it's complicated and it's sometimes problematic and you know, that's just, you know, part of the water we're swimming in with it.

Belantara: What role does hierarchy play in the Homosaurus? How has the editorial board approached those aspects of the vocabulary?

Rawson: Ah, so as a rhetoric scholar, this is one of my favorite things to think about and talk about in the vocabulary. And in particular, my interest in trans studies and trans history, you can see how messy this gets really quickly. Because, for example, a term like Transsexual, is that under the Transgender umbrella or is it separate from the Transgender umbrella? And again, humanities scholars, we are often able to dodge these kinds of questions, right? And we use all kinds of qualifiers and verbal gymnastics to be able to preserve the complexity of language. But in a thesaurus, you actually have to put these terms in relation to each other. And so, there are hierarchies of terms that people would certainly object to, that people would really think is problematic or think is a limiting reading of a term, and so forth. And I think that in many cases, I would absolutely agree with them. But the thing I appreciate about it, is that you're also putting terms in dynamic relationship to each other. So you can really see how, you know, for example, if we look at slurs, what it does to use a term like, like slurs and bring together these slurs that often cut across time and context and bring them together side by side in a hierarchical relationship to each other, because it shows you the ways that language has been used for harmful effects. And so, these hierarchies can often bring together groupings that are not brought together in other ways. I think that what that then does is it really coheres this language around the theme of LGBTQ+ topics. That is always our ontological orientation, like, that is where we come back to. And that then allows us to refract all of that terminology through that lens. And when does that happen? Like, when else is that happening? And again, that's just why I've taken so much joy and pride in this project is because, and sorry, to use the word pride, but is that I see all of this opportunity for queer world making through this vocabulary building and queer communities have done this, you know, throughout time. But to see it in this really direct way in information context, I just think is so powerful.

Belantara: As you've mentioned before, the Homosaurus is hosted online now in its own space separate from the DTA. I just have a quick question, actually, about the homepage. Who actually designed the homepage, the logo, the rainbow with the Brontosaurus? Could you talk a little bit about what went into making that first page people see and who was behind it?

Rawson: Sure, that logo, and we do call it a logo, was designed by these two great artists out of Kentucky. They have a shop called Cricket Press. I'm a big fan of their art. It's the same artist who created the Digital Trans Archive logo and some of our artwork. So you can see some resonance there. But essentially, we had the name Homosaurus. We already kind of knew we were headed towards a dinosaur theme. And it was really funny, because we got a number of different mock-ups for it and a few members of the board, this was actually a moment where there was a little bit of disagreement where you could just sort of see eyebrows raised of like, do we want to go this whimsical? Is this really the tone we're trying to strike, with like, rainbow dinosaurs. And some of them, one of the early designs had a Stegosaurus with like, rainbow things on its back, right? You can kind of imagine that one, which is also quite cute. Maybe we'll give the Brontosaurus a companion one day. But since then, it's been one of the touchstones of the project. People really love the logo and we have a Threadless shop, and I'm always surprised by how much traffic it gets and how much people are buying on the Threadless shop. We actually take any proceeds from that and put them right into our collaborations. But people just love the logo. And so, I think that's also been a really successful part of the project, is having a visualization to go along with it. I will say too, candidly, I think our website really has been a bit neglected in terms of its a visual appeal, 'cause so much of our focus is on the vocabulary and we really haven't put a lot of energy and effort into a splashy website. It just has not been our priority. So if you go to visit the website, you know, it will be a very straightforward and functional site, but I think it does its job right now and on the docket in the next few years will definitely be a bit of a makeover. But the logo is not going anywhere.

Belantara: Yeah, don't let that logo go. It's beautiful. And so, you've described the Homosaurus as a linked data vocabulary hosted online. What does it mean that the vocabulary is linked data and how is that different from a print thesaurus?

Rawson: So often people think a link data vocabulary is just a digital or online version of a printed thesaurus, for example. And it's not, it's a bit different than that. And this is actually something that is really helpful for us for our future growth, as well. So, a linked data vocabulary, in its essence, provides each concept with a URI. So I'm trying to try not to get to too techy here, but a Uniform Resource Indicator so that anyone can access that term through the URI. So even if the term were to change slightly, or something were to shift a bit, the URI would remain stable. And so, that's a really helpful thing for information context because it means that the vocabulary can be pretty dynamic, whereas the URIs remain stable and those URIs then can connect to other information environments. And so, it really allows linking across different databases and other sites that are linking back to that same concept. Now, again, this is me being really theoretical and getting excited as a rhetoric scholar, but one thing that's really helpful to remember in a linked data vocabulary is that the URI is separate from the expression of that concept. So you can have the concept at the URI level and then you can have the expression of that in a particular term. So in our case, almost all of our terms are in English, but as we're looking ahead and thinking about translations into other languages, that space gives us a tremendous opportunity to not only map terms into multiple languages that can share a singular URI and then just be expressed in different languages. But it really then allows us to make sure that English is not the basis for which all other terms are then translated from. And so, we can then create this multi-language LGBTQ+ thesaurus that is really meant to be dynamic and non-hierarchical in the sense of its language expressions. And it, to me, that just is such a really powerful way of being able to connect resources globally. Again, I've kind of given you a bit of a preview of where we're thinking about going in the next few years, but link data will allow us to do that really pathbreaking work.

Belantara: And as linked data online vocabulary, the Homosaurus is free to be used by anyone on the open web who uses the vocabulary. Have there been any uses that have surprised or dismayed you?

Rawson: Well, this is one of the interesting things, is we're not always aware of who's using it. So in a lot of cases, because we have lots of different formats where you can download the vocabulary, people will download it and then be using it through their own local databases or in catalogs and we're not necessarily aware of how they're using it or the terms that they're implementing. We do hear about it from users when they have trouble, when they have recommendations for new terms, when they're just really excited about it and want to shout about it from the rooftops. And so, we recently started a user community and it's just a really simple like, Google group where we are able to bring people together and they can email and post to each other. And from what we've seen from that group, we have predominantly US and Canadian institutions, lots of institutions of higher ed. There's a lot of public libraries that have also been using it. We've also seen some museum usage, some archives usage. I didn't anticipate fully, and this is because I'm not in the library world, but I didn't realize how many library vendors would really want to use it. And that has been interesting for the board to sort of figure out where we might have lines around that. You know, for example, if a for profit company approaches us and wants to use our logo, especially in June when they are talking about implementing Homosaurus terms in their packages that they're selling to libraries. And we've, you know, as a board kind of come down on the side of not being super comfortable with for profit companies making profit off of our volunteer labor. And so again, because I'm not in the library world, that surprised me. And I guess I was kind of naive to all the machinery involved around libraries, and there's certainly a lot of it, and it's far more complicated than I have any awareness of. But that was one use case that was a bit surprising. And I also have been surprised by the number of people who have reached out about it who are not in libraries and archives. And I've just sort of been like, how did you find this, and what is your interest in it? And they're just like, language wonks who are just like, super excited about queer terminology and who might just reach out and say, "What about this term?" And I'd say, "Well, what's your interest in it?" "Well, I just found the vocabulary and I want to contribute." And so, that's also been kind of fun to see.

Belantara: In a 2022 article written by you and Marika, who's also on the board, you mentioned her before, you discussed the tensions between correcting and expanding descriptive language for queer materials and the impossibility of ever getting it right. Can you tell us more about that dynamic and how does it shape the work that the board does together?

Rawson: It's actually funny because we used a lot of Emily's theoretical work to support that article. But one of the ways that we've thought about the purpose of the Homosaurus is just to provide more terminology, make more words available to be used to enhance discoverability. And sometimes that's just making things legible and possible, right? So that when a user comes into an information environment and they start doing searches, they can find themselves reflected and they can, they can find the experiences that they're looking for, the information that they're seeking in that space where it might not have been searchable or discoverable before. And so on the one hand, part of our job is to really just like, get more terms out there. Like, we need to have more terms so that there is more opportunity for description. So especially in link data and digital environments, the proliferation of terminology is incredibly important. Just add more terms, right? Just give more opportunities, more points of access to folks. But the other part of it is kind of hearkening back to the world making conversation we were having earlier, which is also thinking about what it means to include the kinds of complexity and relationships and the kind of dynamics that we are trying to capture in the vocabulary. And that hits a bit more of a theoretical register. And I think a few of us on the board are especially inclined to think about the vocabulary in those ways and to think about what we can do with these terms, even if we're anticipating future usage, rather than reflecting on past usages. Because we're in this, you know, in a cataloging environment, you're in this kind of like, weird temporality where you're trying to account for things that have already been produced, and you're anticipating future users, but you're describing in the present. And especially with LGBTQ+ terms, where you know that things are going to be out of date like, 10 seconds from now. How do you try to navigate that temporality? And it's for me, it's a fun moment. But I will say, as someone who directs a digital archive, I look back and I'm like, "Oh, that was a bad decision and now I want to go back and do some, you know, changes to our earlier metadata." And of course, who has the time or resources for that kind of work? But that's, I think, precisely what a queer vocabulary does, is it really helps us to think about the dynamic nature of language in these spaces and how those of us who are working within these information environments are impacting the language and then impacting not only current and future users, but the ways that those earlier materials are considered and thought of and framed, right? Like, what is, how are we anticipating and shaping future uses based on how we are describing those materials in the present?

Drabinski: Can you tell us a bit about how you think about Homosaurus and its capacity to describe queer identity across culture and time? Is there a way that Homosaurus can account for that movement in language that you've been talking about?

Rawson: There's a way that I hope it can account for it, but I don't know that it always does. And so, we've spent a lot of energy investing in our scope notes, for example. And for those of you who aren't super into thesaurus terminology, a scope note is kind of like a definition, except that it's advice on how to implement a term. So it's distinct from a definition, in that it's not trying to set out all of the meaning of a term, but it's trying to guide end users and how they should be implementing that term. The problem is that scope notes, like some of the deeper description that we do in any information environment, sometimes get lost. And so, people see the higher level term and they just apply that term. And one example of that might be the term Transvestite, which is a very specific, historical term. It's still used in some contemporary contexts, but it's generally fallen out of favor. And so, the scope note for that term says something to that effect, used in historical context. But we have certainly seen use cases where that has not been the case, where it has been used as if it is synonymous with, for example, transgender. And those are the moments where I'm thinking, all right, how do we convey this better? How do we help to keep the complexity of the terms at play when sometimes they are attached in a simplified way? And part of that is because lots of folks who are using the vocabulary are not in queer and trans communities. And so, they are not able to have that language available to them. And I think it's our job to support those users and to figure out how we can, you know, better help to inform the terms that they choose and the context in which they apply them. But it is a tremendous challenge, again, especially as we're thinking about how this is an international vocabulary and it will be continuing to be created in multiple languages. And so, just thinking about then, all of the not only historical, but cultural and contextual dynamic forces that are at work for all of these terms. It's mind boggling then, how to help support nuanced uses and applications of those terms. But there's definitely been a lot of places in which I've seen terms not quite matching up with our scope notes as we've tried to support particular uses of them.

Drabinski: You described in this article that we've referenced a couple of times, that the Homosaurus is a project that is destined to fail. Can you tell us more about how you think about failure in the context of the Homosaurus?

Rawson: I appreciate that prompting, especially after that quote because it may sound like, oh, such a pessimistic approach to the project. But I always say it with a smile on my face because I think of failure in a queer theoretical framing where failure can sometimes be a really great and productive and helpful and important thing, particularly within a broader cultural framework that dictates certain norms of success and normalcy that queer and trans folks have vested interests in pushing back against and issuing. So if you think about the Homosaurus as ever getting to a point where we comprehensively and accurately capture LGBTQ+ language practices, we're never going to do that. And so, in that case, we're happy to fail because I think that part of the beauty of queer and trans language is that it's always pushing back against norms and normalcy and standardization. And part of what we're doing with the Homosaurus, of course, is codifying queer and trans language practices. And sometimes I think, well, maybe we shouldn't include that term because like, let's let it be totally counter-cultural for a while. Like, let's not let it be reflected here. But then I think, wow, but then, you know, you're going to have someone coming into a library and searching for that term and how mind blowing when they actually then can find materials related to that term, right? So, we're in this really precarious position of, in some ways, institutionalizing the very languages that we love so dearly because they refuse institutionalization or they refuse to be normed and structured. It's a, it's a funny position to be in. So, when the vocabulary fails or when we see parts of it that are kind of messy, I actually appreciate that because I think it speaks to the impossibility of the whole project and not just the impossibility, but the undesirability of making it perfect, of ever making it static and comprehensive and 100% accurate.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a bit about how you document your own work? Thinking about the Homosaurus and its history, how are your board documents archived and what do you think is most important to document about the group's work?

Rawson: I'm chuckling because just like with the DTA, I don't think the Homosaurus does a good enough job of documenting ourselves and telling our own story. And I appreciate opportunities like this because I think this will be a really helpful contribution to that story and that narrative of the work that we're doing. So, I mean we, we are dutiful in keeping our notes and keeping proposals and you know, keeping digital history of all of our conversations to the extent that we account for them in our notes. But beyond that, a lot of it comes down to the vocabulary itself and the versioning. What we're trying to roll out in the next few months is more access to earlier versions so you can kind of toggle between different versions of the vocabulary. And I think that more than anything else, is a really important reflection of our work. It would be great if we kind of rolled out some data visualization where you can look at the terms that have come on board and the terms that were deleted over time. And again, there's these lovely little research projects that could spin off of the Homosaurus and that's certainly one of them. But I think that on the whole, we have not been focused on documenting the work that we're doing because we're so focused on the work that we're doing. And again, I think that is a common experience for most oppressed groups and organizations representing oppressed people, is that we are often just like in it. You know, we're like, we have our sleeves rolled up, we're like, doing the work. And then at some point someone looks around and is like, "Oh yeah, shouldn't we be keeping better track of this?" So I appreciate this reminder that we might attend more to that for the future, as well.

Belantara: Just want to ask a quick follow up question. When you mention that you're keeping notes and your minutes and things, what do you use to store those and where are they accessible?

Rawson: Right now they're all Google Docs and in Google Sheets and things in the Googleverse. We could have a longer conversation about the benefits and limitations of that. I also do keep backup copies of things, so I have things saved. But right now, yeah, we use the Googleverse to facilitate collaborations.

Drabinski: Speaking of collaborations, how do you sustain the collaborative nature of the editorial board and do you have any succession plans in place?

Rawson: I think that the best way that we have maintained our collaborative nature is really just continuing to enjoy one another. Like, I think that like, honestly, mutual respect and interdependence for us, has always come back to queer joy, you know, to really like, enjoying being around each other, caring where each other is at right now and what's happening in lives. And I think that for us, that has really sustained the energy behind the project. It has certainly also helped to see how widely it's being used and how much energy and excitement there is for it. And I think we're just at the beginning of seeing the uptake for the project. I just think that it's about to explode even more than it already has, which is kind of an exciting place to be in. We don't have any succession plans right now, aside from the fact that we just have a lot of board members with a lot of energy. So, there's just a ton of goodwill and enthusiasm behind the project. We just talked about our board structure a few days ago and in that conversation, you know, we were sort of like, do we even need a Chair? Like, why do we need a leadership structure? Like, let's really have a queer organization. And then we were like, well, but for grants and other things, you know, there needs to be some sort of legibility, which is how I landed back on the title of Chair. But I think that, you know, as a group, there's just so much commitment to this work that thus far, we have not really had to be overly concerned with like, what happens if all the board members kind of fade out. We've had the opposite problem of having too many people who want to join the board and we are not able to bring many new folks on because no one wants to leave. So, we also talked about like, should there be term limits or, and everyone's like, "But this work is so much fun." So we're finding other opportunities for folks to collaborate and we're really thinking about working group structures and other ways that we can create, you know, formal opportunities for other people to get more deeply involved in the project.

Drabinski: Can you tell us what's next for the Homosaurus? What do you see as the most important next directions?

Rawson: I'm hoping that we are able to secure some funding for this project of creating the Homosaurus in other languages. And I always have to hold myself back from saying translations, because I think that's the wrong approach to think about it. We really want to build the administrative environment that will allow for other versions of the Homosaurus to be built and then mapped across to English, but obviously, not in all term cases. And so, what that looks like and how we bring together collaborators, is a big next step for us. Folks who are working on translations into several different languages. Sorry, again, I've called it translations, in part because some of our collaborators call it that because I think they start with the English version and go from there. But we also want to figure out how to support the development of LGBTQ+ terms in other language contexts and cultural contexts that are not mappable to English. And so, we want to think about like, how do we create those, those conversations? How do we support these like, working groups? And it's a really interesting sort of organizational set of questions too, especially when you get to language considerations when not everyone speaks English in these contexts. And so then, how do you communicate, how do you really connect with folks and how do we, you know, continue to have that, that joy that we've been able to build on the editorial board and bring that into other spaces related to the Homosaurus. And I think that's a lot of where our attention might go in the next few years.

Belantara: Just a quick follow up about incorporating terms that do not have the same terminology in English. In those situations, will you be adding the scope notes in that language, and then where in fact, or how will the translation take place for people who might be wanting to incorporate that term with English language materials?

Drabinski: It's funny, when we first started scoping out this work, we didn't even think about all of the other fields, like scope notes, like, history notes. And I think that just shows you how easy it is to get tunnel vision or even just think on the theoretical level rather than the practical level on a project like this. And so, the short answer is, of course we have to have everything available in whatever language the vocabulary is being built in. But then if you're mapping it across, then the mappings also need to be in multiple languages. We're trying to think about how to make sure that we are not creating these moments. And so, really trying to upend the logic of having just like, an English based project then be circulating, and instead think about what it might mean to create a different kind of multilingual digital environment. And I think again, because we are in a moment where that is very doable, it's just the limitations of our own thinking, rather than any technological limitations.

Drabinski: Do you think the Homosaurus will ever be done?

Rawson: Never. And in fact, it's funny you asked that because some of the terms we worked on as a board very closely several years ago have already surfaced as some terms that need more attention. And so, there are things that I remember spending multiple meetings on and now we're like, "Oh, that needs some more work." I think even if we don't travel too far down the road of multi-language Homosauruses, I think we have a lot of work to continue doing with the English based version. And there's so many more terms that we can add and refine and the relationships that we can build among terms. So I don't think our work will ever be done.

Belantara: What would be some of your advice for anybody else who might be wanting to undertake a similar project?

Rawson: A number of different projects have reached out to say, "How can we create something like the Homosaurus?" And I think there's the software answer, where you can sort of share our platform and share, you know, the backend and the development work we've done. And we post things on GitHub, so we try to be as open and accessible as possible. But then there's also more of like, the organizational and leadership questions. And I think, for me, that's been one of the more interesting parts of the project. It's how do you create a resource that's based around a community and get sufficient community input beyond the individual people working on a project. And I've had some great conversations with folks who are trying to start vocabularies and are really grappling with that question. And I think it's an ongoing question that we are working on, too. And that's one that I think can only benefit from more projects like this, continuing to do this kind of work and then collaborate with each other. And so, I've been really excited to hear about other projects that are trying to create their own vocabularies and then what they're doing with those vocabularies and then how the Homosaurus team can learn from what they're up to, as well. So I think, yeah, I've been pleased that there's folks who are reaching out to me about that and I'm excited to see what they're up to and how we can all support each other's work.

Belantara: And so, Emily and I have come to the end of our interview guide, but now we'd just like to leave some space for you, K.J., to add any closing thoughts or if, perhaps, we should have asked you something and we didn't ask you about it. This is your space to add anything that we might have missed.

Rawson: I can't think of anything offhand that we've missed. I feel like this has been a really great conversation, that it's covered a lot of ground and also covered a lot of depth at the same time. So I feel like this is probably the best opportunity I've had to kind of reflect back and to share more about the board's practices. I would say, the only thing that's been hard is that I'm the only voice representing a group that is very much a group in all senses of the term. I wish I was able to sort of tap on the shoulder of several of board members throughout this conversation and say, "Oh hey, you'd be best equipped to answer that question." Or like, "I'd really love your perspective on this," because I think that's the only thing that our conversation has failed to capture, just being my voice, speaking on behalf of the board.