Techniques and Data

Research Matter

In my own initial browsing of Tumblr, We realized that there is a rather active, available, and vocal LGBTQIA community that challenged even my personal notions of sex and sexuality. Therefore, whenever conceptualizing this research, we was most enthusiastic about the ways Tumblr bloggers openly build their identities—often through labeling practices—and the implications for this construction that is open of identities. Consequently, we sought to resolve the following directing question: “In exactly what ways do LGBTQIA Tumblr bloggers build and discuss their sex and intimate orientation identities? ”

Test Selection

So that you can examine identification construction on Tumblr, We selected an example of Tumblr bloggers by selecting 10 hashtags that are community-defined of this LGBTQIA spectrum: free gay male videos #gay, #girlswholikegirls, #bi, #ace, #queer, #lgbtq, #nonbinary, #gender fluid, #genderqueer, and #trans. These hashtags were plumped for because they’re commonly discovered whenever searching LGBTQIA content on Tumblr. Although we decided tags in line with the LGBTQIA acronym, there’s no label for “lesbian” but alternatively “girlswholikegirls. ” I noted that, since Tumblr has an active Not Safe/Suitable for Work (NSFW) community (Tiidenberg, 2012, 2013, 2014a, 2014b), this search returned primarily pornography rather than posts generated by users who identified as lesbian when I first attempted to collect data under the #lesbian hashtag. Probably in response to the, posts published by people who recognized as lesbian used#girlswholikegirls to rather tag posts than #lesbian. Additionally, in my opinion that it’s crucial to make use of community-defined hashtags and terminology since this knowledge regarding sex and sex, particularly on SNSs, is socially built, defined, and developed, and, frequently, these self-identified hashtags are another as a type of sex and intimate orientation labeling practiced by bloggers. It’s also well worth noting that keywords in English primarily discovered English-speaking united states of america bloggers, though there have been some English-speaking bloggers situated in other nations such as for instance Japan, holland, and Ireland. As all given information gathered from the blog sites is voluntary, it absolutely was usually the situation that the blogger’s location wasn’t disclosed.

Finally, considering that the item of the research is always to examine identity that is individual, I created exclusionary requirements to be able to garner an example of individual LGBTQIA blog sites: as an example, blog sites moderated by a number of individuals usually do not well express an individual’s NBG&SO identity construction. Exclusionary requirements are the following:

The blogger is beneath the chronilogical age of 18.

Tags on search engine results that included #lovewins or #love victories. These articles had been excluded considering that the United states Supreme Court ruled that bans on same-sex wedding are unconstitutional during information collection (Obergefell et al. V Hodges, 2015), and bloggers from outside the LGBTQIA community frequently utilized LGBTQIA tags in party of the ruling together with #lovewins or #love victories.

Duplicate blog sites (the blogs that are same turned up under various search phrases).

It absolutely was perhaps not just a blog that is personal for instance, your blog was run by a number of moderators, this content of this web log ended up being mainly submissions of pictures along with other LGBTQIA content, or had been a marketing web log ( e.g., for films or clothes lines).

Your blog content is mainly pornography or other intimately explicit product. Note: This would not exclude blog sites with occasional sexually explicit content or nudity.

Under each term search, 1st 20 blog sites that failed to meet up with the exclusionary criteria had been gathered. Since Tumblr doesn’t consist of a formal description, plus some Tumblr themes usually do not consist of timestamps on articles, it is hard to state if serp’s are shown chronologically or if an algorithm impacts the outcomes. In any event, the blog sites one of them scholarly research had been active during the time the information had been gathered. These information had been collected through the months of and July in 2015 june. These procedures triggered a preliminary total of 200 blogs gathered. An additional 14 blogs met the exclusionary criteria for a total sample of 186 blogs upon closer inspection.