This paper presents California Queer History (CQH), a community-engaged digital humanities initiative and 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing queer histories across California, U.S. As founders and scholar-practitioners of CQH, we examine the organization’s methods and projects through the frameworks of feminist and critical digital humanities. Founded by scholars trained in American history, East Asian studies, and feminist digital humanities, CQH builds bridges between universities and communities to make queer memory public. The organization’s infrastructure integrates archival research, oral history, mapping, and exhibit design, operating at the intersection of public history, digital practice, and community engagement.

Rather than pursuing the large-scale data aggregation that dominates much of digital humanities, CQH adopts what we term queer small data—a methodology grounded in intimacy, collaboration, and ethical care. Working with localized archives, zines, personal collections, and oral histories, CQH centers interpretation and relational accountability over scale or computational output. In translating community memory into digital form, the project reframes data as cultural artifact and ethical relation, not as raw material for extraction.

Digital humanities scholarship has long celebrated pattern recognition and data-driven empiricism. Feminist and critical DH scholars have challenged these logics, urging attention to embodiment, opacity, and situated knowledge. Jessica Marie Johnson’s “Markup Bodies” (2018) demonstrates how Black feminist digital practices unsettle data’s presumed neutrality, while Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor (2016) call for radical empathy as a feminist archival ethic that foregrounds relational responsibility over detached objectivity. Building on these interventions, CQH enacts queer small data as both critique and practice: a mode of digital engagement that privileges local knowledge, collaborative annotation, and interpretive multiplicity.

Methodologically, CQH functions as a co-creative digital hub that collaborates with community organizations, colleges, and cultural institutions. Through projects like the Orange County Queer History Project (OCQHP), CQH digitizes photographs, zines, and ephemera; conducts oral histories; and develops digital mapping and timeline tools (including ArcGIS and Tableau). To date, CQH has developed five community archive projects spanning multiple California counties, each comprising dozens of digitized primary sources, oral histories, and annotated metadata records. The term “small data” here is deliberate: drawing on Kitchin and Lauriault’s (2014) framework, we use it to name a practice of bounded, interpretive, and ethically situated data collection that resists the scalability imperatives of big data. Each project follows what we describe as annotative engagement—participants collaboratively interpret archival materials, generate descriptive metadata, and reflect on how categories such as gender, sexuality, race, disability, and language shape archival visibility. This process transforms metadata from a technical afterthought into a site of critical and cultural labor, guided by feminist data ethics (D’Ignazio / Klein 2020) and community accountability.

Translation lies at the core of CQH’s work—across languages, media, and memory practices. Many of our collections traverse English and Spanish, reflecting California’s linguistic diversity and the multilingual nature of queer storytelling. Yet translation here also extends beyond language: it includes the transformation of embodied and affective memory into digital form, of local experience into public interface, and of community storytelling into enduring historical record. In this sense, CQH expands DH2026’s Translating / Translinguality theme to encompass the ethical and cultural translation of community archives themselves.

This paper draws on two representative case studies from CQH’s archive to illustrate the queer small data approach in practice. The first, “Gay Bars in Orange County, 1970s–1990s,” created by University of California, Irvine undergraduate intern Savannah Gonzalez, maps the social and spatial networks that sustained queer community life amid pervasive conservatism. Drawing on newspaper clippings, flyers, and oral-history excerpts, the exhibit visualizes bars as infrastructures of safety and activism. Through small-scale but deeply annotated datasets, it demonstrates how queer geographies resist erasure by inscribing memory onto digital maps.

The second case, the UCI LGBTRC History Project, is an ongoing collaboration between CQH and the LGBT Resource Center at UC Irvine, developed by UCI undergraduate intern Emily De La Torre and CSULB undergraduate intern Kass Malcor. The project digitizes the LGBTRC’s physical archive—photographs, ephemera, and organizational records—while building toward an oral history collection. Its immediate deliverable is a public exhibit for UCI’s Lavender Celebration, curated from newly scanned archival materials and accompanied by student-authored interpretive text. Notably, the interns’ research surfaced documentation of what appears to be the earliest Lavender Graduation at UCI, held in 1997—a discovery now orienting the project toward that event’s upcoming 30th anniversary, including planned alumni oral history outreach. Both cases exemplify CQH’s model of student-community co-production: archival research as collaborative pedagogy, and digital exhibits as acts of care. Throughout both projects, participants engaged in ethical protocols around informed consent and disclosure, particularly for individuals whose sexual or gender identity was not publicly known, ensuring community accountability guided every stage of the archival process.

These examples highlight how small-data methods enable interpretive nuance and reflexivity that large-scale computational analyses often elide. Rather than seeking generalizable patterns, CQH’s work sustains ambiguity, embraces relational knowledge, and foregrounds the politics of archival visibility.

In conversation with debates on AI, translation, and archival ethics, this paper contributes to DH 2026’s theme of Engagement by asking: How can digital humanities engage communities whose histories have been marginalized or erased? CQH’s experience suggests that engagement is not outreach but an iterative practice of translation, ethical listening, and shared custodianship of cultural memory.

By reframing data as memory, translation as relation, and archives as co-creators, California Queer History offers a model of digital humanities rooted in care, justice, and humility. This queer small data framework challenges extractive paradigms of scale and efficiency, proposing instead a digital practice built upon collaboration, critical reflection, and the radical potential of the small.