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For Warner, counterpublics are discursive and self-organizing imaginaries whose terms of existence are not pre-public but are formed and transformed through participation on the margins of a wider public. Counterpublics are poetic and “world making,” bringing together strangers in new modes of sociality that are outside the critical-rational discourse of publics proper.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney

Indexers perhaps best exemplify the term “information activist” because they work most explicitly with “raw” information that awaits processing to be meaningful. The writing these women did to introduce their projects to readers frames the indexes they worked on as indispensable interfaces that would mediate between a public and the information they both desired and couldn’t do without. Dispersed users needed this information to be intelligible as a “public” in the first place. Potter explains that lesbian newsletters needed systematic indexing because “They provided a means of expression for a community in the process of creating itself.”

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney (42% - 43%)

Because indexes and bibliographies select, organize, and rationalize information, the paths they generate are inevitably normative to some extent. These tools stake out a lesbian-feminist field: its major actors, texts, and themes. An index’s path is generative but leaves others untaken, by design.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney (38% - 39%)

The Circle of Lesbian Indexers was not merely “documenting” experience but necessarily “organizing it,” a process that required ongoing choices about what to include and exclude, what words to assign to subjects and their politics, and ultimately what mattered enough to constitute a high-level subject heading for the lesbian public this index imagined.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney (37% - 38%)

Rather than rely on "print" and "digital" as stable categories that represent a temporal progression -- paper is scanned and "put online" -- this book takes a more archaeological approach, considering complex transitions between media and listening for the unexpected echoes of the digital in the past: how for example lesbian-feminist indexers sifted through mountains of paper index cards while dreaming of computer databases.

— Information Activism by Cait McKinney (3% - 4%)

All of the verbs for public agency are verbs for private reading, transposed upward to the aggregate of readers. Readers may scrutinize, ask, reject, opine, decide, judge, and so on. Publics can do exactly these things. And nothing else.

— Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner (36%)