I had the positive experience of publishing a paper titled “Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia” in Academic Medicine, which is the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Their conference was in Seattle Saturday 12 November to 15 November, and as an author I could present the paper at the conference. I wanted to go, and also two of the other authors Amin Azzam and Kingsley Otoide were going, and I wanted to check in with them. I decided to go to the formal conference only one day, because the routine proceedings of this conference were not an ideal fit for me. To be efficient Amin organized some meetings outside the conference schedule for more direct Wikipedia conversation with other conference attendees.
I left NYC Saturday 12 November directly from the Women in Science Wikipedia Editathon at the New York Academy of Science. From there I arrived in Seattle late and night and visited Lee and Attila the hamster, whom I missed since last visiting a few months ago. On arrival Lee told me that my housemate Pat was in town only for a couple of days. She had been on a roadtrip following her retirement the month before. I am not sure how we neglected to exchange schedules, because I knew she was going to Seattle, but we had not planned to be there at the same time. As it happened our schedules matched and Lee and I planned to take her for a tour.
Sunday morning Lee and I went out for coffee. The weather was lovely overcast skies and rain that I missed so much. Over coffee I started collecting some information about Lee’s personal history and typing some stories that he had told me many times before. I wanted to do this because back in NYC, I had joined a project to research the history of HIV/AIDS in New York City. Lee had a certain kind of lifestyle experience which was common for its time but not possible now, and I wanted to try to capture his story because it is representative for Seattle in that era. In summary, Lee was kicked out of his home at age 14 for being gay, and had to make entirely new social connections with a total break from his family and everyone he knew before that point. He made his way as a regular at gay nightclubs from then. In the 1980s he worked at various gay bars and clubs, and because of the advent of HIV, perhaps 80%+ of his gay friends died by around 1990. Since integration between the gay community and the general population was much less socially acceptable in this region before about 2000-2005, his social network in 1990 mostly disappeared including his closest friends and people whom he dated. Now, he is the rare survivor among people who were part of gay entertainment in Seattle in the 1980s and 1990s. Looking around at present, my perspective is that most of the history of HIV/AIDS is going to be forgotten soon, and that mostly HIV/AIDS is not a concern to the contemporary LGBT+ community as it was in the past. The publication landscape mostly remembers HIV from the perspective of just a few places, like NYC and San Francisco in the United States, when in fact there was a gay rights movement in every major city and many minor ones. Every city had its own story but most cities, even relatively large ones like Seattle, hardly have any good compilation or record of how the advent of HIV affected their gay community or the general culture of the time. I imagined that if I took Lee’s story then that would be a good perspective to preserve of that time.
Lee and I met with Pat one day. She was staying with a friend in a Westlake houseboat. We took her on a tour of nearby Fremont to the tourist attractions there and for chats. Pat had heard me talking about all these Seattle places in the past and I enjoyed being able to actually show her these places in person.
At the medical conference among other events Osmosis hosted a wiki-focused event talking about how they had integrated medical videos which they produced into Wikipedia. They had identified friends of wiki and invited them to the event. This was great for me, because it meant that everyone was already primed to talk about Wikipedia.
Lee and I did touring. We went to the Museum of History and Industry and the Wing Luke Museum. Since moving to NYC and seeing the museums here, and since working with so many museums through Wikipedia, and since my Wikipedia job has given me the opportunity to visit some major museums in many major cities, I have become more conscious of how different museums are able to curate their exhibitions. With these two museums and many other museums I am so often surprised at the museum curators’ intentions to prevent people from sharing information from the museum online. Practices which strike me as being in opposition to the contemporary culture of sharing information online include overly cautious restrictions on photography in the museum, investing in text publication which is accessible in the museum but not available through the website, investing to showcase artifacts without providing much explanation of their significance, and developing weird in-house priority pseudo-social media interaction tools which do something odd, like allow people to make temporary posts to the museum’s own online publication place but discouraging sharing in the social media channels which people already use. Everywhere I go I see information professionals who are challenged and threatened by online publishing.
Lee and I went on a tour of about 10 cannabis shops in Seattle. I wrote about that experience in a separate post, Tour of cannabis shops in Seattle, November 2016.
I visited my friend Evan, whose upcoming book The PreP Diaries is due in print in a few months. This book is his own personal history of contemporary culture around HIV, which for him, includes using pre-exposure prophylaxis. I am excited for the book to come out because again, I think that there is an important cultural shift happening here where a few people are making big decisions which have an impact on global thought and culture. I want good published perspectives circulating in the international conversation so that people can be informed about the issues in play, and I already know that Evan’s book will advance the conversation.