Partially supported by a NULab Community Collaboration Grant.
As a new initiative of the Centers for Digital Scholarship and the NULab’s Critical Making working group, “Margins & Methods: Zine-Making as Critical DH Practice” focuses on using zines as a particularly fruitful conjunction between community co-creation and story-telling, informationality, and materiality. Initial explorations have focused on the relationship between different forms of “code” and procedural language ranging from cookbooks to technical instructions to formal program code.
The goals for this project are to provide a focal point for the activities of the critical making working group through a program of workshops and collaborative activities centered on making and theorizing zines as digital humanities research and community praxis. NULab funding for this project supports the effort of a student who will be “in residence” in the CDS lab for open experimentation and discussion sessions, and will also support the creation of materials such as handouts, templates, event plans, and discussion prompts which could be used over and over.
As a tangible outcome, this project will establish both a digital and physical library of zines focused on digital humanities processes, projects, and knowledge-sharing, including, but not limited to, explanations of specific concepts or skills, narrations about personal learning pathways, documentation of particular tools, and sharing of personal “recipes” (for food, and for digital processes). These materials would be represented both as material artifacts in the CDS and also as downloadable and remixable digital templates from which community members could assemble and embellish their own personal collections.
“Margins & Methods” explores zine creation as an approachable and highly adaptable catalyst for theorization and knowledge-sharing on digital tools and methods within the CDS community.
Project Team:
- Julia Flanders (Co-Principal Investigator)
- Meg Palmer (Co-Principal Investigator)
