At time of writing, my project is known as Exalted (subject to change, even at this stage, simply due to a concern I had about a certain copyright), and it’s meant to serve as a collection of oral histories from transgender and non-binary artists and creators. Its website will, by necessity, require updating each time I complete an interview, and to keep the site from being dormant and inert, I will need to continue to conduct interviews regularly. It’s a format that’s been done many times before, such as with the Archive of Lesbian Oral Testimony. But it’s the combination of the two key aspects of the project – the content and the website, along with their respective nature – that I’m hoping will perpetuate its existence.

An interesting aspect of my final project is the fact that it’s neither the first time I’ve created a website, nor the first time that I’ve performed interviews to obtain oral testimony, but it’s the first time I’ve been involved with either on any sort of meaningful level or scale, and the first time I’ve combined them. While I was still in college, I began a personal project where I interviewed vendors from a local farmer’s market in my hometown, but it was very disorganized and informal, and the fact of the matter is that if memory serves, it’s very possible that only one interview ever reached the point of being even remotely presentable. Before that, during my high school career, I made a website using Weebly that was meant to serve as a sort of a personal website, but it’s been lost to the ages. Even when I still had access to the site, I never bothered to update or add anything new to it.

Something that gives me (possibly unrealistic) hope for the project’s future and success is the project I did my flash presentation on, Rhizcomics. On the project website, Jason Helms discusses the fact that comics exist at the intersection between image and writing. To be sure, comics are certainly a significant part of the art world, and are largely responsible for the excessive boom in popularity of superhero-themed media in the mainstream. While many people won’t look at Exalted and remark “oh, this project exists firmly at the intersection of oral testimony and digital presentation,” the same way people don’t regularly remark on comics as some grand entity that exists between prose and painting, I like to believe there’s some degree of upward mobility for the project.

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