Sometimes, when I’m in the mood to blog but don’t have any ideas, I’ll pull from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies deck. I’ve written before about how invigorating the deck can be for pushing through creative barriers. Nothing helps me when I’m feeling stuck quite like a cryptic saying. I found today’s oblique strategy especially provocative:

Decorate, decorate

Decoration is not something I usually pursue. In my personal life, I tend to leave picture frames leaning against the wall for months after moving. I envy people who populate their home with plants, but I’ve never been able to keep things alive long enough to cultivate a green space. I can’t imagine ever getting a tattoo, though I’m always fascinated by the choices of those who do. My professional life follows this same trend. My approach to web design tends to be minimal—with a better sense of what I don’t like than what I do, I typically strip as much away as I can. I am fascinated by minimalist pedagogy, where you try to teach digital humanities methods using as little as possible. And as an editor I tend to strip things away to find the kernel inside rather than add in more text.

But I’m also put in mind of recent social media trends featuring a video of a person indulging themselves alongside unapologetic captions like “just realized I am a full-ass adult and can have ice cream for dinner.” Part of the joy in such posts is the recognition that you don’t need to justify such actions. Indulgences aren’t exactly decorations, but there’s a similar spirit of fullness. I’m thinking of my colleague Amanda Visconti’s recent DH2025 poster, which they (in their own words) decorated as aggressively as possible. There’s a freedom in decoration, in deciding to take up space in a particular way, in making a space your own. Decoration can be a survival tactic. A thing to show that you were there.

This past year our lovely students wrote a series of suggestions on our white board for how to survive 2025. I’m going to add my own: decorate. No other justification needed. To that end, here’s a photo of our cat.

Claudia Berger is our Virtual Artist-in-Residence 2024-2025; register for their April 15th virtual talk and a local viewing of their data quilt in the Scholars’ Lab Common Room!

This year I am the Scholars’ Lab’s Virtual Artist-in-Residence, and I’m working on a data quilt about the Appalachian Trail. I spent most of last semester doing the background research for the quilt and this semester I get to actually start working on the quilt itself! Was this the best division of the project, maybe not. But it is what I could do, and I am doing everything I can to get my quilt to the Lab by the event in April. I do work best with a deadline, so let’s see how it goes. I will be documenting the major steps in this project here on the blog.

Data or Design first?

This is often my biggest question, where do I even start? I can’t start the design until I know what data I have. But I also don’t know how much data I need until I do the design. It is really easy to get trapped in this stage, which may be why I didn’t start actively working on this part of the project until January. It can be daunting.

N.B. For some making projects this may not apply because the project might be about a particular dataset or a particular design. I started with a question though, and needed to figure out both.

However, like many things in life, it is a false binary. You don’t have to fully get one settled before tackling the other, go figure. I came up with a design concept, a quilt made up of nine equally sized blocks in a 3x3 grid. Then I just needed to find enough data to go into nine visualizations. I made a list of the major themes I was drawn to in my research and went about finding some data that could fall into these categories.

What my initial planning looks like.

But what about the narrative?

So I got some data. It wasn’t necessarily nine datasets for each of the quilt blocks but it was enough to get started. I figured I could get started on the design and then see how much more I needed, especially since some of my themes were hard to quantify in data. But as I started thinking about the layout of the quilt itself I realized I didn’t know how I wanted people to “read” the quilt.

Would it be left to right and top down like how we read text (in English)?

Or in a more boustrophedon style, like how a river flows in a continuous line?

Or should I make it so it can be read in any order and so the narrative makes sense with all of its surrounding blocks? But that would make it hard to have a companion zine that was similarly free-flowing.

So instead, I started to think more about quilts and ways narrative could lend itself to some traditional layouts. I played with the idea of making a large log cabin quilt. Log cabin patterns create a sort of spiral, they are built starting with the center with pieces added to the outside. This is a pattern I’ve used in knitting and sewing before, but not in data physicalizations.

A template for making a log cabin quilt block by Nido Quilters

What I liked most about this idea is it has a set starting point in the center, and as the blocks continue around the spiral they get larger. Narratively this let me start with a simpler “seed” of the topic and keep expanding to more nuanced visualizations that needed more space to be fully realized. The narrative gets to build in a more natural way.

So while I had spent time fretting about starting with either data/the design of the visualizations, what I really needed to think through first was what is the story I am trying to tell? And how can I make the affordances of quilt design work with my narrative goals?

I make data physicalizations because it prioritizes narrative and interpretation more than the “truth” of the data, and I had lost that as I got bogged down in the details. For me, narrative is first. And I use the data and the design to support the narrative.

Time to sketch it out

This is my absolute favorite part of the whole process. I get to play with dot grid paper and all my markers, what’s not to love? Granted, I am a stationery addict at heart. So I really do look for any excuse to use all of the fun materials I have. But this is the step where I feel like I get to “play” the most. While I love sewing, once I get there I already have the design pretty settled. I am mostly following my own instructions. This is where I get to make decisions and be creative with how I approach the visualizations.

(I really find dot grid paper to be the best material to use at this stage. It gives you a structure to work with that ensures things are even, but it isn’t as dominating on a page as a full grid paper. Of course, this is just my opinion, and I love nothing more than doodling geometric patterns on dot grid paper. But using it really helps me translate dimensions to fabric and I can do my “measuring” here. For this project I am envisioning a 3 square foot quilt. The inner block. Block 1, is 12 x 12 inches, so each grid represents 3 inches.)

There is no one set way with how to approach this, this is just a documentation of how I like to do it. If this doesn’t resonate with how you like to think about your projects that is fine! Do it your own way. But I design the way I write, which is to say extremely linearly. I am not someone who can write by jumping around a document. I like to know the flow so I start in the beginning and work my way to the end.

Ultimately, for quilt design, my process looks like this:

1. Pick the block I am working on
2. Pick which of the data I have gathered is a good fit for the topic
3. Think about what is the most interesting part of the data, if I could only say one thing what would that be?
4. Are there any quilting techniques that would lend itself to the nature of the data or the topic? For example: applique, English Paper Piecing, half square triangles, or traditional quilt block designs, etc.
5. Once I have the primary point designed, are there other parts of the data that work well narratively? And is there a design way to layer it?

For example, this block on the demographics of people who complete thru-hikes of the trail using annual surveys since 2016. (Since they didn’t do the survey 2020 - and it was the center of the grid - I made that one an average of all of the reported years using a different color to differentiate it.)

I used the idea of the nine-patch block as my starting point, although I adapted it to be a base grid of 16 (4x4) patches to better fit with the dimensions of the visualization. I used the nine-patch idea to show the percentage of the gender (white being men and green being all other answers - such as women, nonbinary, etc). If it was a 50-50 split, 8 of the patches in each grid should be white, but that is never the case. I liked using the grid because it is easy to count the patches in each one, and by trying to make symmetrical or repetitive designs it is more obvious where it isn’t balanced.

But I also wanted to include the data on the reported race of thru-hikers. The challenge here is that it is a completely different scale. While the gender split on average is 60-40, the average percentage of non-white hikers is 6.26%. In order to not confuse the two, I decided to use a different technique to display the data, relying on stitching instead of fabric. I felt this let me use two different scales at the same time, that are related but different. I could still play with the grid to make it easy to count, and used one full line of stitching to represent 1%. Then I could easily round the data to the nearest .25% using the grid as a guide. So the more lines in each section, the more non-white thru-hikers there were.

My last step, once I have completed a draft of the design, is to ask myself, “is this too chart-y?” It is really hard sometimes to avoid the temptation to essentially make a bar chart in fabric, so I like to challenge myself to see if there is a way I can move away from more traditional chart styles. Now, one of my blocks is essentially a bar chart, but since it was the only one and it really successfully highlighted the point I was making I decided to keep it.

These are not the final colors that I will be using. They will probably all be changed once I dye the fabric and know what I am working with.

Next steps

Now, the design isn’t final. Choosing colors is a big part of the look of the quilt, so my next step is dyeing my fabric! I am hoping to have a blogpost about the process of dyeing raw silk with plant-based dyes by the end of February. (I need deadlines, this will force me to get that done…) Once I have all of those colors I can return to the design and decide which colors will go where. More on that later. In the meantime let me know if you have any questions about this process! Happy to do a follow-up post as needed.

I keep my running CV on my website for a few reasons. It keeps everything in one place. It’s handy to point students towards when they have questions about how to list things on their own CV. It lets me pull in some quick stats on my blog posts using Jekyll. But I’ve always run into problems when it comes time to submit my CV as an actual document. Copying the page over to Microsoft Word brings in all the detritus of my web styling and structure, and I have to dutifully edit those elements out before submission.

I described this problem to Jeremy Boggs, our Head of R&D, and he immediately suggested that I look into making a print stylesheet for my CV page. I knew you could use CSS to style the ways your web page gets printed, but I’d never actually played around with it before. Now I’ve got things going such that I have far less to do when I go to submit my CV. This post documents that process.

The first thing I needed to do was get a way to preview what I was looking at. By default, your developer environment won’t render your print styles unless you go to print a page and look at the preview that pops up. I followed this set of instructions for getting Google Chrome to emulate my print styles in the browser as I worked.

Now that I can see my work, my first real step is to make a new print stylesheet and link it to my site in the head of my default template. This print stylesheet is fairly specialized to a single page, so I wrap the reference in an if statement so that it is only included on that particular page.

_includes/head.html

{% if page.title == "CV" %}
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ site.baseurl }}/styles/print.css">
{% endif %}

Now that the stylesheet is included, I start to build up a styles/print.css file one piece at a time based on the things I want to change. First off was hiding web-only materials like the nav bar and the masthead.

styles/print.css

  /* Hide web-only content  */
  header, nav, h1.page-title, #web-title{
    display: none;
  }

But I actually do want some material as a masthead. I implement this by actually having some content on the web that is only rendered to the browser if it is printed. This becomes a part of the masthead, contained in my default layout for my jekyll site.

_layouts/default.html

<div class="print-only" id="print-title">Brandon Walsh | walsh.brandon.michael@gmail.com | @walshbr</div>

And then it only appears when printed by specifying a print-only class for those elements that I only want when printing.

styles/print.css

  .print-only{
    /* Display print-only content */
    display: block;
  }

The web version of my CV does not span the whole width of the page, which is good for readability on the web but a problem when printing. So these settings create a more typical one-inch margin for the document. Another interesting issue I ran into was that some printers by default will include metadata - date, page number, time - on the page for printing. The margin settings below cut that off.

styles/print.css

  div.container.content {
    /* normalize content sizing for printing */
    max-width: none !important;
  }

  @page {
    /* hide printer-specific information that would otherwise get added */
    margin:0;
    padding: 1in;
  }

And then finally I got down to the actual task of setting up some basic stylings that make it a little less web and a little more print. I switch fonts, change the text size, and revert to default URL text decorations for the sake of the genre. In the past I’ve found that my link styles, especially, look very strange when copied over to a print document.

styles/print.css

  html, h2, h3, #print-title{
    /* set print-ready font and text size */
      font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; 
      font-size: 12px;
  }

  a{
    /* Normalize URL colors */
      text-decoration: underline;
      color: blue;
  }

One stretch goal that I haven’t fully implemented: I commonly need a quick way to cut my CV down. There’s no good way to do it programmatically with any real level of precision, but Jeremy showed me how to do a rough cut that works well in a pinch. I’m using Jekyll by default, which will give ID’s to all of my headers that match the titles. Jeremy showed me how to use CSS selectors to selectively hide whole batches of content based on those ID’s. The following CSS would hide all of my service commitments. Not really super useful to do a lot of, but maybe helpful to know about!

styles/print.css

/* example for how to hide specific sections */
/* 
h2#professional-service-and-affiliations,
h2#professional-service-and-affiliations+ul,
h3#local-service-washington-and-lee,
h3#local-service-washington-and-lee+ul,
h3#local-service-university-of-virginia+ul{
  display:none;
} */

That’s it for now. Much more that I could do, but this serves my needs nicely. And here’s a quick side-by-side of the first printed page to see how the new print.css sheet stacks up.

First the original print, which is a pretty close copy of the web version:

And now the new one with a print stylesheet incorporated. Much more usable as a CV! I could save it as a PDF to submit.

I’ve pasted the full contents of all the relevant files as they stand in case you’re interested in replicating.

_includes/head.html

{% if page.title == "CV" %}
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ site.baseurl }}/styles/print.css">
{% endif %}

_layouts/default.html

<div class="print-only" id="print-title">Brandon Walsh | walsh.brandon.michael@gmail.com | @walshbr</div>

styles/print.css

@media print {
  
  /* Hide web-only content  */
  header, nav, h1.page-title, #web-title{
    display: none;
  }

  .print-only{
    /* Display print-only content */
    display: block;
  }

  div.container.content {
    /* normalize content sizing for printing */
    max-width: none !important;
  }

  @page {
    /* hide printer-specific information that would otherwise get added */
    margin:0;
    padding: 1in;
  }

  html, h2, h3, #print-title{
    /* set print-ready font and text size */
      font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; 
      font-size: 12px;
  }

  a{
    /* Normalize URL colors */
      text-decoration: underline;
      color: blue;
  }

/* example for how to hide specific sections */
/* 
h2#professional-service-and-affiliations,
h2#professional-service-and-affiliations+ul,
h3#local-service-washington-and-lee,
h3#local-service-washington-and-lee+ul,
h3#local-service-university-of-virginia+ul{
  display:none;
} */

}

This is a very practical post describing how I’m trying to improve a public space zine display! My current zine rack in the Scholars’ Lab Common Room currently looks okay—the metal rack allows you to see there are zines hanging on the other two of its three sides, and the rainbow of clothespin colors makes me smile.

Photo of the current Scholars’ Lab public space Zine Bakery free zine rack

The rack isn’t ideal, though: the clothespins are plastic and come apart easily, bend the zine covers, and make adding multiples of one zine difficult (you have to start at the bottom of your intended column of zines and layer them upwards, given the clothespin needs to attach to the top of each zine). We’ve also got some clear acrylic wall ledges I’d intended to use for zines, but we want to save the little wall space we have (we’re lucky to have a ton of windows, looking out both onto UVA’s chapel and Rotunda, and into the new skylight atrium in the center of the library building). The whole thing is a little wobbly—I had to reinforce it with metal cable ties (an amazing tool, highly recommend having some on hand) and the whole rack pieces easily unseats from the shallow wheeled base.

I’d like something where it’s easy to place stacks of zines rather than needing to pin them one at a time, since I already have limited time to re-impose, print, fold, and staple all the zines myself. (Colleagues have offered to help, but I need to finish getting the imposition/print instructions correct and documented for each zine first). I also think it’s more inviting to folks who are unused to getting to take a bunch of things for free, to not need to unpin a zine first before being able to flip through it. I’m imaging a combination of a lare flat surface where I can keep a large percent of the SLab-relevant zines in stock, plus a smaller table display where I can place new-to-us zines, or gather small thematic collections of zines.

Jeremy helped me out by creating a Pinterest board of DIY zine options, which helped me build my own Pinterest board with a combination of his pins and some researching those inspired. Ultimately, I want something requiring as little cutting and attaching as possible, so that I actually finish it this fall; and it needs to be free-standing (given lack of wall space) but not take up a huge footprint. Finally, it needs to have some kind of rail around “waist height” (halfway up) standard zine height, so that the zines don’t fall forward and off the ledge.

I think I want to do something like this rack with a solid rectangle leaned on an A-frame, except make the back part more like this rack that uses less total wood so we don’t have to mess with hinging crossbars.

I think that means we’ll need to source:

• for the front, finished (or paintable) flat board with a frame around it
• shallow L-shaped ledges for zines to sit on
• dowel rods, or wires shaped like [_], to keep middle of zines from falling forward (if dowel rods, need the wood rectangle to have a frame around the edge the dowels can be attached to)
• 2 hinges attaching the back frame to front rectangle
• back frame (3 boards)

And I’ll need to figure out:

• Width/spacing of ledges and dowel rods (and size of the large, front flat piece the zines lean back against; this may depend on what the hardware store has on hand)

The two zine rack inspiration images are below. I’ll update if I manage to build this (quite possible I’ll just decide we need to buy something ready-made instead, but I wasn’t finding anything reasonably priced doing what I want, and I really just need a few basic features).

Source.

Source.

“I am not a woman,” says Megwind, “I am a spirit, although the form of the thing is misleading I will admit.[..] You are taken with my form which I admit is beautiful,” says the girl, “but know that this form you see is not necessary but contingent, sometimes I am a fine brown-speckled egg and sometimes I am an escape of steam from a hole in the ground and sometimes I am an armadillo.”

“That is amazing,” says my grandfather, “a shape-shifter are you.”

“That is a thing I could do,” says Megwind, “if I choose.”

“Tell me,” says my grandfather, “could you change yourself into one million board feet of one-by-ten of the very poorest quality neatly stacked in railroad cars on a siding outside of Fort Riley, Kansas?”

“That is a thing I could do,” says the girl, “but I do not see the beauty of it.”

“The beauty of it,” says my grandfather, “is two cents a board foot.”

- Donald Barthelme, “Departures” (emphasis added)

Jeremy Boggs’ Scholars’ Lab Praxis Program DesignLab class today had fellows sharing quotes that resonated with them, from Frank Chimero’s Shape of Design. Many of their choices focused on the importance of beauty, creativity, magic in design choices/work, sitting alongside function (or being a part of functionality). This conversation added to my thinking on how I divide scholarly values, from specific current instantiations of those values. For example: the point of a dissertation isn’t a proto-monograph; it’s practicing building and sharing knowledge as an active member of a specific community.

Or, another example: during my dissertation research, I tried to separate foundational textual scholarship field values (e.g. around authority, methodology, documentation), from how traditional Scholarly Editions usually look. It’s useful to have Scholarly Edition as term of art; and it’s useful to imagine additional ways we can realize those same scholarly field values, that look very different (like my participatory digital Ulysses edition).

I’ve shorthanded for myself this kind of parsing what we’re trying to do with scholarship from how we most often go about that, this values vs. the popular form of those values we’ve settled on, as “values vs. their instantiations”. That last word is an awkward choice! but it’s where my brain settled. (In a forthcoming-imminently journal article, I talk more about this kind of comparison of motivating scholarly values vs. how scholars including me—for good reasons, often!—default to time-tested specific forms and methods for pursuing those values.)

Scholarly values can be realized via many many methods, forms. What I’m getting from Jeremy’s session today, and my Praxis Fellow colleagues’ interpretations of Chimero’s design book, is: how I often pursue creative rereads of scholarly values—using different methods/forms than norms—isn’t just about the best way I can reach the “functional” values of my scholarly fields. (I’d thought it was!)

What I’m doing is also adding to those values (at least how I frame them to myself), trying to include joy, experimentation, justice, community (and Chimero’s “magic”?) as equivalent scholarly values, fully alongside the more widely agreed on Values of a Given Scholarly Field (e.g. clearly communicating the methodology of digital edition interface design choices, is one such Field Value).

(Thanks to my colleagues Jeremy Boggs, Oriane Guiziou-Lamour, Kristin Hauge, Gramond McPherson, Emmy Monaghan, Amna Tarar, and Brandon Walsh for teaching me via today’s conversation!

This post is an expanded version of some Bluesky tweets I posted 9/26/2024 during the session.)

A catalog is also a dataset, which means because of my Zine Bakery project’s zine catalog, I’ve got a hand built, richly described, tidily organized dataset I know well. Seeing my zine catalog as a dataset opens it to my data science and digital humanities skillset, including data viz, coding, and data-based making. Below, I share some of the data-driven scholarship I’ve pursued as part of my Zine Bakery project.

Giving a talk on data-driven making for the DH 2024 conference

A peek under the hood

Screenshot of just a small portion of my thematic tagging. I’ve got 134 different tags used on catalog zines (as of 9/16/2024):

Below, a zoomed-out screenshot of my tagging table, which does not capture the whole thing (which is about twice as wide and twice as a tall as what’s shown); and a zoomed-in view:

The tags are just one of many fields (78 total fields per zine, as of 9/16/2024) in my database:

I’m able to easily pull out stats from the catalog, such as the average zine length in my collection being 27 pages (and shortest, longest zine lengths):

Data-driven making research

My Spring 2024 peer-reviewed article “Book Adjacent: Database & Makerspace Prototypes Repairing Book-Centric Citation Bias in DH Working Libraries” discusses the relational database I built underlying the Zine Bakery project, as well as 3 makerspace prototypes I’ve built or am building based on this data.

One of those projects was a card deck and case of themed zine reads, with each card displaying a zine title, creators, and QR code linking to free reading of the zine online:

My online zine quilt dataviz will eventually be an offline actual quilt, printed on fabric with additional sewn features that visualize some of the collection’s data:

The dataset is also fueling design plans for a public interactive exhibit, with a reading preferences quiz that results in a receipt-style printout zine reading list:

I’m also experimenting with ways to put digital-only zines visibly on physical shelves:

Some future work I’m planning for my Zine Bakery project researching, collecting, and amplifying zines at the intersections of tech, social justice, and culture.

Critical collecting

• Ethical practices charter: how do I collect and research?
  • Finish drafting my post on ethics-related choices in my project, such as
    • not re-hosting zines without creator informed, explicit consent, so that catalogue users use zine creator’s versions and see their website; and
    • taking extra care around whether zines created for classes gave consent outside of any implicit pressures related to grades or the teacher serving as a future job reference
  • Read the Zine Librarians Code of Ethics in full, and modify my charter wit citations to their excellent project.

• Collecting rationale: why do I collect, and what do I/don’t I collect?

• ID areas I need to collect more actively, for Zine Bakery @ Scholars’ Lab goals of a welcoming, diverse collection reflecting SLab’s values and our audience

• Contact zine creators: I already don’t display, link, etc. zines creators don’t positively indicate they want people to. But I could also contact creators to see if they want something added/edited in the catalogue, or if their preferences on replication have changed since they published the zine; and just to let them know about the project as an example of something citing their work.

• Accessibility:
  • Improve zine cover image alt text, so rather than title and creators, it also includes a description of important visual aspects of the cover such as color, typography, illustration, general effect. Retry Google Vision AI, write manually, or look at existing efforts to markup (e.g. comics TEI) and/or extrapolate image descriptions.
  • Look into screen-reading experience of catalogue. Can I make a version (even if it requires scheduled manual exports that I can format and display on my website) that is more browsable?
  • Run website checks for visual, navigational, etc. accessibility

Data, website, coding

• Better reader view:
  • Create a more catalogue-page-like interface for items
  • Make them directly linkable so when I post or tweet about a zine, I can link people directly to its metadata page

• Self-hosted data and interface: explore getting off AirTable, or keeping it as a backend and doing regular exports to reader and personal collecting interfaces I host myself, using data formats + Jekyll

• Make metadata more wieldly for my editing:
  • I wish there were a way to collapse or style multiple fields/columns into sections/sets.
  • I might be able to hackily do this (all-caps for umbrella field for a section? emojis?); or
  • Using an extension allowing styling view (unsure if these are friendly for bulk-editing);
  • the self-hosted options mentioned above might let me better handle this (use or make my own, better viewing interface)

• Crosswalk my metadata to xZINECOREx metadata?: so is interoperable with the Zine Union Catalogue and other metadata schema users

• File renaming:
  • I started with a filename scheme using the first two words of a zine title, followed by a hyphen, then the first creator’s name (and “EtAl” if other creators exist)
    • I quickly switched to full titles, as this lets me convert them into alt text for my zine quilt
    • I need to go back and regularize this for PDFs, full-size cover images, and quilt-sized cover images.
• Link cover images to zine metadata (or free e-reading link, if any?) from zine quilt vis

Metadata & cataloguing

• Create personal blurbs for all zines that don’t have one written by me yet

• Further research collected zines so I can fill in blank fields, such as publication date and location for all zines

Community

• Explore setting up for better availability to the Zine Union Catalogue, if my project fits their goals

• Further refine logo/graphics:
  • finish design work
  • create stickers to hand out, make myself some tshirts :D
• Learn more about and/or get involved with some of the
  • cool zine librarian (Code of Ethics, ZLUC, visit zine library collections & archives) and
  • zine fest (e.g. Charlottesville Zine Fest, WTJU zine library) efforts

Research & publication

• Publication:
  • In addition to
    • multiple blog posts and
    • my Zine Bakery site and
    • public zine catalogue,
  • I’ve published
    • one peer-reviewed article and
    • given one conference talk about my zines research
  • I’ll be giving another public talk this fall.
  • I’d like to explore ways to further publish and receive peer review, such as submitting a project statement to Reviews in DH.
• More visualization or analysis of metadata fields, e.g.
  • timeline of publication
  • heatmap of publication locations
  • comparison of fonts or serif vs. sans serif fonts in zines
• Digital zine quilt: play with look of the zine quilt further:
  • Add way to filter/sort covers?
  • Add CSS to make it look more quilt-like, e.g. color stiching between covers?

Making

• Thermal mini-receipt printer:
  • Complete reads/zines recommendation digital quiz and mini-receipt recommendation printout kiosk.
  • Possibly make a version where the paper spools out of the bread holes of a vintage toaster, to go with the Zine Bakery theme?
  • Thanks to Shane Lin for suggesting a followup: possibly create version that allows printing subset of zines (those allowing it, and with print and post-print settings that are congenial to some kind of push-button, zine-gets-printed setup.

• Real-quilt zine quilt: Print a SLab-friendly subset of zine covers as a physical quilt (on posterboard; then on actual fabric, adding quilt backing and stitching between covers?)

• More zine card decks: create a few more themed subsets of the collection, and print more card decks like my initial zine card deck