Travis Wagner (they/them)

Excited to announce my new article titled 'In A Way I’m Coming Out to All of You Tonight'": Activist Media, Digital Curation Pedagogy, and the future of Queer Archives' in the most recent issue of Synoptique focused on "Teaching Media Archives"

Wait the preferred viewing format isn’t 200+ one minute segments of the film uploaded to TikTok?

Found this incredible set of cels out of a 90s issue Excalibur (a spin off of X-Men) and fully intend to use it as the cover photo next time I teach Digital Preservation

Turns out the easiest way to turn off the perpetually useless AI overview on Google is to switch browsers. Time to live the Duck Duck Go life, I guess.

For most of undergrad/grad school, I stopped playing video games. The joy of returning was being able to play a decade of indie/AAA games in a row. To a lesser extent, I am doing this with anime, but have the benefit of expedient access to older stuff without needing to use extralegal means.

New article with a former doc student from UMD. We examine how ChatGPT interprets the creation of queer fanfiction across fandoms that feature openly queer and/or "shipped" queer characters. It took time to publish, but I think the findings hold up:

journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/tw...

New obsession is tracking down and playing a copy of the board game Dragon Strike which includes a corresponding VHS tape of footage corresponding to the game

“The finding aid is the first thing that people see, we don’t want to put anyone off viewing the collection”: how practitioners navigate queerness in finding aids - Archival Science This paper reports on findings from semi-structured interviews with 29 archival practitioners who work on the creation and maintenance of finding aids related to LGBTQIA+ archival materials. The paper...

New publication in Archival Science focused on how archival practitioners working with queer collections construct and manage finding aids. This work was done in collaboration with a set of MLIS students, one who joined our PhD program yesterday

Read it here:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Nothing prepares you for the chaos of students returning to U of I. We’re talking “Master Blaster Runs Campustown” levels of chaos.

There are a lot of weird and wacky things about Urbana-Champaign, but one of the weirdest and wackiest is Emoji Cream, which is an ice cream truck run out of a van that cranks trap-infused versions of classic ice cream jingles.

Associate Professor Maria Bonn, Teaching Assistant Professor Haileleol Tibebu, and Assistant Professor Travis L. Wagner

Congratulations to #iSchoolUI Associate Professor Maria Bonn, Teaching Assistant Professor Haileleol Tibebu, and Assistant Professor Travis L. Wagner on being selected for this year’s cohort of the Public Voices Fellowship! ▶️ bit.ly/419ThZK

A bit belated but my favorite thing about presenting at the Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium is always the setup which involves theater style projection. My second favorite thing is using that setup to sneak in absurd videos which this year involved Leroy Jenkins

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

New article drop titled "I Like the Narrative of Curating What We Watch": The Curatorial Worlds of Retroconversion Artists, which talks to artists who take contemporary, often digital media, and revert it to older formats such as VHS tapes. Check it out here:

journals.sagepub.com/eprint/GEB7V...

Screen grab of Guess The Game with a correct first guess for the game Facade

I was messing around with the Guess the Game and am ashamed that I was able to instantly guess Facade based on one small corner of the room, but also reminded about the one week where me and @ashleyblewer.com became fixated on "winning" the game.

YouTube video by Conan Fanatic Cactus Chef - 1/23/2004

For some reason, this bit from Conan popped into my head, and it truly is one of the best running gags on a show full of them:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9b9...

This would have been my dream car circa 2002

My favorite thing about collaborating with @ashleyblewer.com on research is that we always end up gathering resources that routinely break citation guidelines (this time APA). So far for this paper, we have had to cite a Sega Dreamcast manual, an old GameFaqs forum, and a 3D printing schematic 😎

Only in Union Station (Chicago) can you see someone in full Ghostbusters cosplay explaining said cosplay to an Amish person

Thrilled to share my new article with Sangha Kang-Le, titled "Understanding the Value of a Digital Equity Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration Using Participatory Action Research" just published in the Journal of Participatory Research Methods. #digitalequity jprm.scholasticahq.com/article/1290...

Knowledge Organization in a Dangerous Time | CAIS2025 Knowledge organization (KO) work is both critical and risky in the context of rising fascism, creating tools that support both discovery and censorship. Contemporary approaches require knowing how our...

For CAIS 2025, I'll be hosting a panel next Wednesday morning on "Knowledge Organization in a Dangerous Time." Come to hear my very smart colleagues discuss what metadata has to do with fascism; stay for the free virtual registration to the whole wonderful conference!
cais2025.ca/talk/1931-bu...

I finally got around to watching Grand Theft Hamlet and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it! I'm not sure if it is a testament to how wonderfully odd and participatory virtual spaces like Grand Theft Auto Online can be or because some Shakespeare truly is timeless. Perhaps a bit of both?

Doing some research that involves perusing early 90s technology magazines, and am reminded about how valuable a certain archive of the internet is to this work, but also reminded how that same place would benefit from even the most minimal of metadata quality control

I know a lot of us are confounded by how folks could shift to tech solutions for very easy tasks, but as someone who just tried to do subtraction by hand for the first time in some time and lurched through the process it is starting to make more and more sense

Also aware of the footage in question and invested in helping find an answer! Maybe we can add it to our growing list of projects?

Another student in their digital preservation video essay on preserving a UMD copy of Ghost Rider may have come up with a visual and mantra that I will share far and wide

A highlight from a student video essay for my digital prez class. In it they tracked down obsolete hardware and software to preserve an N64 Memory Pack labeled "Sports," only to discover corrupted files. A fun, albeit disconcerting, example of the need for digital preservation work to be proactive.

Honestly, if MrBeast's next gimmick was IRL Myst, I might come around on him as a content creator.

As it turns out, @florencesn.bsky.social and @mtrc.bsky.social's ArchaeOS is pretty much a solo tabletop RPG about inscrutable artifacts and our relationship to a digital past that's actively eroding beneath our fingertips.

And it gives you printable zine!

It’s so sleek relative to the one I posted and obviously pirate ships win out over all else! 🏴‍☠️

Listen there has been a lot beautiful tech in the world but my personal favorite might be this Pioneer Laserdisc controller