The University of Toronto Bonham Centre’s Sexual Representation Collection (SRC) is one of the few archives that specializes in adult film history. It also specializes in the history of sex work, sex education, and obscenity in Canada. This past year, in the midst of a global pandemic, the SRC has undertaken the enormous task of digitizing its collections for long-term preservation and to make them freely accessible to scholars, filmmakers, and sex industry professionals worldwide. Challenges to the preservation and study of adult film history are well known. Less known are challenges to the digitization of pornographic materials, and questions it raises about historiography, the materiality of media, archival practices, digitality, and the limits of digitization. In this workshop, we draw on the experiences of faculty and graduate students working in the Sexual Representation Collection’s digitization efforts and its sister archive across town, the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, to learn about the process of digitizing porn, and what these practices enable and foreclose in the study of adult film history, sex, media, and art. Discussants include Patrick Keilty (University of Toronto), Cait McKinney (Simon Fraser University), Maggie MacDonald (University of Toronto), and Ferrin Evans (University of Toronto).
