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.