We were given 3 project prompts – Language, Data, and Bots. I chose data.
I’m making 1 serious project and 1 unserious project. This post is going to be about my serious project covering the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR) database.
Firstly, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a couple of weeks hence the late post, but in the course resources I found a website called Get Well Soon by Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain. It’s a website compiling comments posted on GoFundMe’s medical fundraisers – A database that should not exist, and only exists due to America’s healthcare system.
The website also encompasses a revolutionary political text provided with the archive. I will include an excerpt but the rest of the text by Johanna Hedva is available on the website.
Those of us for whom sickness is an everyday reality have long known about its revolutionary potential. We’ve known that a revolution can look like a horizontal body in a bed, unable to go to work. We’ve known that it might look like hundreds of thousands of bodies in bed, organizing a rent strike, separating life’s value from capitalist productivity. We’ve known that a revolution can look like the labor of a single nurse, keeping the patients in her ward alive, or the labor of a single friend, helping you buy groceries. We’ve known that it can look like the labor of nursing and care expanded exponentially, all of us reaching out to everyone we know, everyone we know reaching out to theirs. We’ve known that a revolution can look like a community pitching in $5 per person for someone’s medical treatment—we’ve wondered when that community would notice just how revolutionary the act of communal care is.
Johanna Hedva
This website made me very fascinated with the concept of creating political art from databases and especially presenting data as both art and as campaining tools. Therefore, I decided to use the TDoR database to achieve the same effect.
I have been following this database and their work for a number of years now but was reminded of it through the death of my friend Claire. To this day I don’t think i’m even close to writing an entry on her but I still want to appreciate the database during this difficult time for me.
So my general idea is that I make a similar website based on this!