By leveraging TEI (the XML markup language of the Text Encoding Initiative) semantic web technology, and graph databases (the type of database that powers social networking sites like Facebook), the LGLC illuminates connections between the people, the organizations, the periodicals and the demonstrations that defined the gay liberation movement as it moved from city to city, offering new insights into the political action, art, and lobbying that led to historic legal reforms in Canada. The LGLC project is supplementing the archival research that informs McLeod’s base text with new information about people, periodicals, and places, allowing users to generate custom maps and timelines in response to their searches. In addition to reproducing the text, the project will let researchers trace the events of the gay liberation movement using maps and timelines; model the shifting identities of the actors within the text; and critically evaluate the relationship between the text and the bibliographic material that underpins it. The project provides a foundation for our research on modeling identity and representing time at the level of code.
