Building The arqive as a digital interactive storytelling platform

This chapter describes The arqive – an LGBTQ storytelling map – and explores how it elicits vital questions about queer identities, histories, and communities. The arqive is an interactive platform that not only tells well-documented histories, but also enables anyone to tell their own not-so-straight stories as well. In recent years, LGBTQ individuals have increasingly turned to digital platforms and social media to seek community. Queer history itself has been largely dominated by voices that are cisgender, male, and white, but with the rise of the Internet, there is potential for lowered barriers to publishing and ease of sharing content to elevate marginalized voices of queer individuals of color, queer women, transgender people, and gender non-binary individuals, among many others. The initial incarnation of The arqive stagnated because building a platform for interactive storytelling was challenging to do alone. There were then three main components of the project: content, publicity, and development.