#when you go from posting nothing on TAA in 5 months to posting twice in a weekend

[chrysocollatown]

This was cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.

The Homosaurus has an entry for asexuality! :O

So i just found this LGBT thesaurus last night via Twitter and, as per usual, i went to look up if they had something on asexuality. And they did.

But what’s a thesaurus?

Well, the Merriam-Webster says:

a : a book of words or of information about a particular field or set of concepts; especially : a book of words and their synonyms.

b : a list of subject headings or descriptors usually with a cross-reference system for use in the organization of a collection of documents for reference and retrieval.

They’re basically thematic lists of selected words used mainly by libraries and archives to describe and organize their material. Think of the canonical tags in AO3 and other systems that let you index and filter stuff. (In fact, you can think deeply about that checking this paper on fandom folksonomy. Anyway.)

Tell me more about this Homosaurus thing

Here’s what the front page of the site says:

This is an International Thesaurus of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Index Terms that is currently used by https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net.

This vocabulary was originally a project of the International Homo/Lesbian Informatiecentre & Archives and compiled by Jack van der Wel (with support of Ellen Greenblatt) in 2013. That offline document has been transcrabed [sic] into the Linked Data provider under development here.

The Digital Transgender Archive was launched in January 2016, so it makes sense that they updated their thesaurus by the end of the previous year, before putting it online. The DTA focus on materials created before the year 2000, so currently they don't seem to have any asexuality related document up, but when they do it should appear here.

Also, in the tweet mentioned above the folks at the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives (CLGA) say they have started to use this thesaurus, and as of now they have one (1) item in their digital collection tagged as such. (Anyone in Canada that can donate them some more?)

Ok, and why is this important?

Well, it means that libraries, archives and other institutions that work with documentation and specialize in sexual and gender diversity now have a reference work that justify the explicit acknowledgement of asexuality while cataloguing ace-related material.

Which... should be like, a bare minimum given the subject of their work. But you never know, especially in places without a strong ace activism or where ace groups haven’t established a relationship with other local LGBT+ organizations.

It also means that it may influence other thesaurus makers in social sciences and sexology and so on to include asexuality in their controlled vocabularies, as well as the folks in charge of other taxonomies and classification reference works... like the Dewey Decimal Classification System. More on that, soon-ish.

As a sidenote: Should i contact them to tell them that manga doesn’t have a plural? Or do people in North America say mangas enough for it to be considered the most common and appropriate use of the word?