Interviewing Thomas Rainbolt
- alexanderrpreston7
- Mar 14
- 5 min read
By Al Preston
It’s raining. Of course it’s raining. I hurry toward a friend’s apartment where I’m to meet Thomas Rainbolt. Thomas had written a thesis about the queer social and support network in the city during his time at Chatham University. A mutual friend of ours, the owner of the apartment, was using his thesis for a paper and got us in contact with each other.
This is probably the tenth interview I’ve done, but I’m still a bit nervous. This isn’t going to be like the other interviews I’ve done. I really enjoy podcasts where the host talks to experts about particular topics. I like the casual air in which they speak, the information that they share, and the whole presentation.
For the podcast for this website, I wanted to do a lot of the same. So, talking to Thomas was going to be the first interview of this kind. I know I struggle to communicate in effective ways without a script, especially when nervous. I also have never met Thomas before or been to this friend’s apartment.
And it’s raining.
Regardless, I get to my friend’s apartment alright and have plenty of time to get ready before Thomas arrives. Once he gets to the apartment, and I start the recording, I’m realizing that I need some kind of stand for my recorder. It sits beside me, and I know my fussiness is going to be picked up throughout this interview, but there’s nowhere else to put it.
And then I ask the first question.
Normally, I talk about the interview or the information I learned from the interview when I do these reflections, but this time I just want to talk about Thomas’s thesis. As the interview was mostly about the thesis but effectively talked about what it actually contains very little, I wanted to talk about the contents to give people some more context.
For those who have never seen a network analysis before, I know this can look like a lot of weird colorful maps, but it can tell us some really interesting things about how people, organizations, and institutions are interconnected.
Thomas’s goal with this thesis was to discover and present the community sustainability of Pittsburgh’s LGBT+ community. He explains in the introduction that he wanted to explore the support the community has and how sustainable that support can be. This could be seen in how many organizations or institutions provide particular services and if among those groups which ones are called back to more than others.
Additionally, the social network of locations, how much they rely on each other or what partnerships they have also factor into this discussion. While all organizations may be aware of each other, they may not link directly to each other. For example, if one healthcare location has a partnership or is at least friendly with a particular gym, then they are more likely to send clients to that gym than others, forming a deeper network bond.
This can tell us a lot about a community’s support system. It can reveal where there may be weaknesses or perhaps over saturation or under saturation of a particular type of service. For someone new to the city, this thesis can also serve as a guide to what kind of organizations and their network they may want to be involved in.
Which leads us to all of the cool, colorful diagrams within Thomas’s thesis. For those looking at the thesis while reading, I’ll provide the page numbers of the visuals I’m referencing. These aren’t fully accessible to those who have never interacted with these visuals or type of work before, so I’ll go through some interesting points just to give a general idea on how to read these things.
The very first visual (page 13) looks a bit scary, doesn’t it? There are dots with lines and lines with dots and they’re all a bunch of different colors. There’s text in there somewhere, but it’s hard to read. This isn’t how all of these images will look. It’s just all of the information Thomas found in one spot. The rest of these visuals will be small bits and pieces of this one big piece.
However, this image provides us as a good example of how these visuals work. Each dot is a point of interest. Be that a person, institution, or location. The lines coming from each dot connect it to another, that’s a relationship that exists between these two dots. In this case, Thomas found these connections from a website from one organization to another, thus creating a line between them.
You’ll notice that some lines are thicker than others, that means the relationship between those dots are stronger than others. Like that green line between COWC (Central Outreach Wellness Center) and CORRC (Central Outreach Resource and Referral Center). It’s the thickest line in this image. That just means those two groups are extremely interconnected but not so much so that they are the exact same entity. Instead they are two branches of one group with different functions and different connections.
Now there’s the colors. They actually just help the viewer differentiate between different networks. While all these dots could connect between the colors, those of the same colors show a unified network that is deeply connected to each other while also connecting to dots from other color groups.
That’s it! That’s all this image shows us. It can tell us some interesting things. When looking at this, you might see a connection between groups you had never seen before. There might even be groups you never knew had LGBT+ services. These webs allow us to see the community in a new way.
Thomas breaks this down into a couple of different groups who have their own interconnected relationships. Those groups are: healthcare, social services, universities, social spaces, locations, and organizations.
We’ll focus on the social space visualization (page 25). This is a much less intimidating web. These social spaces include bars, bathhouses, community centers, and social gatherings. From this visualization, we can see how these different types of social groups are interconnected.
That blue/purple color is the bars and cafes, orange is the community centers, and green is where social gatherings occur. Thomas learned a number of things from this web as well, mostly where there are gaps. There are few places for people under twenty-one to gather and socialize. All but two of these locations are places where alcohol is served or is for an adult only crowd.
This prevents new adults, those between the ages of 18 and 20, from feeling like they have a place to be, but also prevents young queer kids from gathering in more than a handful of places that may or may not be accessible to them.
You can check out the other visualizations in this thesis as they interest you. Thomas did some amazing work collecting this data and making it available like this. It may seem a bit daunting, but once you get into the nitty gritty of what these webs mean, you can see some interesting relationships.
As Thomas and I talked about in the podcast, he really wanted this to help people discover what is available to them in Pittsburgh. I found it really helpful to visualize the relationships between the groups I have been researching. The first time I saw these webs, my first through was that it was exactly as I expected.
I, however, am a strange person who has sought out these networks the moment I got here. For someone brand new and unsure where to begin, this kind of paper can be really helpful!
If you’re able, check out the whole of Thomas’s work and the conversation he and I had. Going a step further, check out these different organizations as well and consider places you have never heard of. It might just find what you’ve been looking for.
Comentarios