I’ve a talk accepted to the 2026 Global DH conference, and share that proposal here both for its content and as another example of what a conference abstract can look like. I’ve added comments (in ‘'’code formatting’’’) highlighting how the abstract proposal is structured.

“Not having to ask: critical humanities making, zines, & analog tech for multilingual DH”

In “Having to Ask”, a doctoral colleague [2024-2025 Praxis Fellow Amna Irfan Tarar] writes about othering experiences in DH spaces, such as when staff weren’t sure if a web font used by a team project could correctly render her name in Urdu. I’m developing digital and analog letterpress resources as part of our DH center’s critical humanities makerspace studies. Letterpress moveable type is a pre-digital corollary to multilingual web fonts, and Tarar’s essay reinforced my priority of anyone printing with us being able to print their name—without singling out that name as needing special effort or research.

Motivation / underlying research question.

This lightning talk covers the DH work I’ve started toward this goal, and will be of interest to scholars curious about: zine creation for teaching, critical humanities making, multilingual DH, accessibility, book arts, and connections between historical/retro tech and current DH methods. I’ll share my first set of moveable non-English type, my forthcoming zine on how to inexpensively create similar type, and an overview of my research into historical and current strategies for fabricating non-Latin type (some of which cannot be segmented into easily interoperable rectangles the way Latin type can). I know there are too many languages for us to complete this goal; while slowly moving toward that vision language by language, I’m also developing some quick hacks to at least slightly improve type accessibility in the mean time, as well as working to replicate how such scripts were historically printed.

Specifics on what the talk will cover. Which scholars might want to attend it and why, including showing how that's not limited to e.g. "people who do letterpress" or "makerspace people". Quick note that I understand the most immediate likely challenges to this work.

I’ve wanted to contribute to a more multilingual DH, despite my monolingual ability restricting what I can do. My hope is to develop enough type design and fabrication competency to partner with colleagues who have greater language competency than me, and I’m eager to hear advice from session attendees toward this goal.

Where is this in-progress research headed, and how might that benefit others? What kind of Q&A might this talk elicit from its audience?

Direct link to some good culture, tech, and/or social justice zines you can print for free

Printing zines to read yourself

I use “free zine” to mean zines you don’t need to pay to access in some way—read online, print copies of to read on paper, and/or get a pre-printed copy of from someone else. Unfortunately, printing is not always free or affordable.

I’m not sure how many libraries offer any free printing these days, but a good library worker will want to help you access info and reading if they can. If you aren’t able to afford printing a zine on your own and your library posts writing saying it charges for printing, you might still ask your local library workers if they know of options, and let them know you’re trying to access zines for reading or learning purposes.

I am not aware of such options at UVA—where I currently work—but I would not necessarily know of any! If you’re near UVA Library—which serves anyone in the region, not just folks studying/working at UVA—consider asking folks at a front desk of one of the libraries, or using the UVA Library homepage’s “Ask a Librarian” chat for questions about community printing (or other topics, especially anything you may feel more comfortable asking online than in person).

Here’s the subset of all my Zine Bakery project’s catalogued zines allowing online or printable free access; and here’s the subset of all catalogued zines you can print for free. The difference between the two sets is a small number of zines are free to read online but cannot be downloaded; for example, some are on platforms like Issuu, where there’s some page-turning reading view but download is disabled by the creator.

Live in (or visiting) Charlottesville? Pt 1

Check out The Beautiful Idea! “A trans-owned antifascist bookstore, queer makers’ market, alternative event space, and radical community hub on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, VA… Come in today to find your new favorite read, the perfect gift, or just a safe, friendly place to relax!”.

In addition to selling zines (I bought so many zines there first time I went…), they often have free zines as well. And also frequent free community events prioritizing queer folks, community building, community safety and resistance (check their Instagram too).

Live in (or visiting) Charlottesville? Pt 2

I run a small, free public zine distro in my workplace (the Scholars’ Lab in the University of Virginia’s Shannon Library): Zine Bakery @ Scholars’ Lab. Anyone (no UVA affiliation needed) is welcome to take as many zines as they’d like, including multiple copies of the same zine to share with friends, students, etc. These are mostly zines that are free for anyone to print and share, plus some additional zines where the creators have generously allowed us to share copies we print for free from our one location (but you’d otherwise need to pay to access the zine).

We have nothing near to the entire ZB catalog available on our distro racks—these zines are all printed, folded, stapled, and shelved by me during meetings and in random bits of free time (i.e. isn’t my core job), so it’s always a small, rotating selection and can get scant when I’m on vacation, sick, or especially busy.

To make sure I maintain the ability to do this project with as much justice and care as I can manage, that distro is a subset of a larger project (“Zine Bakery @ Scholars’ Lab”, rather than Zine Bakery). That means that the kinds of neutral (is this zine likely of use to folks who tend to visit the library or work with Scholars’ Lab?) and negative (will including this zine in the public distro attract censorship, require closing the distro, imperil lab/library/job?) decisions I make curating that distro don’t impact what I do with the larger project. But do know there are some zines in my catalog the Scholars’ Lab distro does not offer copies of.

(We’re not able to print zines for folks by request, unfortunately.)

Free zines vs paying for zines

Art is work, and workers deserve to benefit from their labor. (Everyone deserves a thriving wage regardless of if they “work”, but that’s a tangent I’ll save for elsewhere, other than to ask you if you had a kneejerk response to that, to sit with the large number of jobs that are actively harmful and disrespectful to workers for no reason—e.g. so many retail jobs—and think about what makes forcing people to work in such situations the qualification for deserving and getting a good life.)

I’ve prioritized cataloguing free zines for a number of reasons, including to be able to make them a visible, free part of my library work that anyone can take away to keep. I haven’t yet been able to find or successfully propose a pool of funding to use how I want: toward working with authors of non-free zines around a paid license to distribute physical zines from just our location. If anyone knows of models for that, please do let me know!

Wanting to pay authors/creators, and also wanting to help anyone access information and reading without needing to pay or prove they’re a member of a university, are both important to me. The Zine Bakery distro at Scholars’ Lab is the way I’ve found to balance those goals, using my ability to print some zines as an employe, as well as putting work time and work space toward supporting a distro.

I include direct links to where authors host their zines, rather than rehost them myself—both as an ethical and legal requirement, but also because collecting has historically been (and still is) often extractive work. I want to amplify zines and point people to their authors and websites. I’m hoping to pull out these sites into one webpage in the future that just links to zine authors’ webpages and stores, to amplify those further. I’m hoping to work on more design approaches like that; e.g. a small one is I recently added a bit of code to the top paragraph on my homepage that rotates through names of specific catalogued authors, to try to make it more obvious these zines are not mine.

Two months into this fellowship, I have prayed in the following places:

• The Grad lounge
• Brandon’s office
• Shane’s office
• Amanda’s office

The first time, it felt strange. I had barely known everyone for a week. I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I didn’t want to seem like I was putting on a show of religiosity. I didn’t want to be stereotyped and put into a box.

Each time I asked if I could pray in the Scholars’ Lab space, those around me were extremely accommodating, offering to leave the room to give me privacy. That made it feel like even more of an imposition. I felt too conspicuous, too seen. The kinder everyone was, the more uncomfortable I felt. I couldn’t make sense of it. Why did this kindness make me feel like an outsider?

Soon enough, the afternoon prayer started eliciting other uncomfortable thoughts. Once, as I unfurled my prayer mat, I wondered if the DH tools we discovered would ever support Punjabi or Urdu (my research languages). Shane and I had spent an entire morning trying Tesseract’s OCR software on images with Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi text, but the invariable result was gibberish. A few weeks later, when I wanted my name in both English and Urdu on our Charter website, Jeremy said he’d figure out if and how that was possible. I nearly told him to forget I mentioned it. I remember noticing how brown my skin was as I prayed that day.

The experience of double consciousness each time I pray in the Scholars’ Lab is a stark reminder that I don’t fully belong in the ‘Digital’ Humanities. I have to be accommodated for, adjusted to, and worked around. It doesn’t matter how sincerely the Scholars’ Lab staff welcome me into their physical space. As soon as we face a laptop screen, I am stripped down to an anglicized, areligious, apolitical version of myself. For the computer only recognizes these fragments. Here, too, it has become the job of the SLab folks to stretch themselves in unexpected ways to make me whole again: by trying to find digital platforms and tools with Right-To-Left (RTL) language support; by hunting down essays on Global DH and Minimal Computing; by dredging up their own insecurities and limitations in conversations to assure me of my place in DH.

The message is clear: It takes the kindness and effort of individual DH scholars to make space for me within systems that were not designed for people like me. Grateful as I am, it is not kindness I want, but the chance to be an equal collaborator. To create and share knowledge across the linguistic communities I belong to.

In a recent paper, Masoud Ghorbaninejad, Nathan P. Gibson and David Joseph Wrisley have discussed the Anglocentric nature of current DH infrastructures that largely ignore the “digital habitus”¹ of RTL language users. They state that “knowledge is not just cultural content embedded in language; it is also infrastructure that allows that content to be represented, circulated, and preserved for the concerned communities.” Of the many tools I have discovered these past few months – Omeka, Voyant tools, MALLET, Tesseract, to name a few – not a single one supports Urdu or Punjabi in any meaningful way. As a multilingual South Asian and a student of Muslim literatures, each interaction with these tools involves two things: (1) silencing the very voices within me that have already undergone violence at the hands of the English language, and (2) a fervent hope for alternatives.

(Thank you Brandon for the title!)

A DWRL Practicum Online Module by Abby Burns. As a hard-of-hearing instructor who struggles intermittently with listening fatigue, there are days when keeping up with class discussion eats away at all of my energy (or requires more energy than I have), diminishing my capacity to respond in real time. One tool I have come stand by for negotiating this problem is collaborative annotation platforms like Perusall or Hypothes.is. These platforms allow students to connect on the (digital) margins of a shared PDF, taking collaborative notes directly on assigned readings.

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Are you reading this blog post from computer screen or an screen reader? Did you need to adjust the font or text size, screen brightness, or filter the interface through a browser extension or rely on an app like Accessibility to access this information? In her entry on “Access” in Keywords for Disability Studies, Bess Williamson […]

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