Last week, I started an internship at the Scholars’ Lab made possible by the PhD+ Program at UVA. This means that, during the Fall semester, I get to support the student programs, Lab initiatives, and labor of the folks that over the past four years have modeled for me how scholarship can be a liberating personal and professional practice, a genuine exercise at human connection.

The position involves a series of tasks with varying levels of depth that touch on curriculum development, pedagogical practice, documentation development, consultations, and institutional regulations. These topics speak directly to my professional goals to hone in skills and gain experience working in positions that support and develop scholarship within the realm of digital humanities, going beyond the space of academic departments. It is a tailored internship that was collaboratively conceived between my internship supervisor, Brandon Walsh, and me. Brandon is the Head of Student Programs at the Scholars’ Lab, and working closely with him in an official capacity has been a dream for a long time now. I could not ask for a better boss, mentor, and friend to guide and support my professionalization journey as I take steps to position myself as a young working professional about to enter the job market, rather than as a student.¹

Brandon’s ongoing commitment to critical digital pedagogy, as a philosophy and active practice, has profoundly changed my own relationship to learning and teaching. Through mentorship meetings, article discussions, workshop practices, and collaborative writing exercises, our collaborations were a catalyst I desperately needed to begin imagining and theorizing what I want in my personal relationship to pedagogy as well as the shape of the pedagogical spaces I envision fostering.

While this inaugural blog post highlights why this internship is meaningful to me, as a 6th-year PhD candidate, Brandon’s latest blog post reflects on the role of a supervisor and shares details about the main tasks I will tackle over the semester.

My main goals are to strengthen my ties to this community and make new friends, though I also anticipate making plenty of mistakes as I make my way to small wins and achievements. Grappling with failure and process are, after all, essential parts of digital humanities scholarship and labor due to their historical connection to coding, as Quinn Dombrowski has pointed out. I welcome the attention in DH to individual working experiences, especially when it addresses navigating failure and reflecting on labor processes, as a methodological sandbox to practice patience with myself. Within the internship, I plan to exercise this knowledge to continue unlearning the culture surrounding academic hierarchy that is based on degree, tenure, rank, or institutional influence. I want commitment, accountability, labor, skills, and consistent kindness, instead, to guide who I come to respect and whose respect I earn, regardless of ranks. Moreover, I want these to be the values I use to assign my own labor value.

At a time of uncertainty, fear, and massive funding cuts, I envision my PhD+ internship at the Scholars’ Lab to be a nurturing space of experimentation where I can shape the kind of laborer I want to become, post-PhD, in a crumbling social environment that desperately cries for sustainable practices of care.

This semester I’ve got former Praxis fellow Winnie Pérez Martínez working with me in the Scholars’ Lab as an intern through UVA’s PhD Plus Program. These internships are meant to be 10-hour-a-week hands-on gigs that replace a student’s teaching obligations for a semester. At the same time, the internship introduces students to the skills and experiences that they’ll need to pursue a variety of different kinds of careers—in and out of academia. I’ve never had someone report directly to me in this way, assisting with my day-to-day work instead of directly collaborating on research. So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what it might mean to be a responsible supervisor. I want this internship to be constructed in a way that provides Winnie with a positive and fulfilling experience at the same time that it assists with Lab tasks. Winnie and I developed a plan for the internship together to maximize the impact on her, so here are a few notes about what she’ll be doing with us from my perspective. Stay tuned for more from her on the blog in due time.

Bookend the week with check-ins

We’ve set up a structure that frames each week of the semester around a pair of opening and closing meetings. Each Monday morning, we have a 30-minute scrum in which we’ll discuss the week. During that time, we each share our responses to three questions (one minute max for the lot of them):

• What did I do?
• What’s next for me?
• What do I need from somebody else?

For the remainder of our time, we discuss our plans, upcoming meetings, and any other topics that need conversation. These meetings are brief, but they’re a way for us to practice accountability to each other. They are as much for me as for Winnie. I have a tendency to lean towards flexibility and independence with my students, so we co-created this system to make sure we don’t waste this opportunity to work together.

We end each week with a 30-minute bookend on Friday afternoon. During that time, we will debrief everything that went on the past several days. We’ll plan on a different set of questions for those meetings and have Winnie drive the conversation:

• What did I learn?
• What do I want to discuss?
• What would help me next week?

This weekly structure will offer a framework for our time together such that we consistently check in and adjust as we’re going.

The tasks

Winnie and I co-developed a series of different tasks for her to work on. When we first sat down to discuss the internship, I distinguished among a range of task categories:

• Things that are specifically useful for me and the Scholars’ Lab.
• Things that are enriching and fulfilling for Winnie.
• The broad area of overlap between the first two categories.

I told Winnie I was very uninterested in having her work on tasks that were solely of use to the Lab and not fulfilling at all for her. Instead, I wanted to prioritize the other two areas. We took to the whiteboard and drew up a range of jobs before we categorized them according to whom they helped.

We decided on a mix of different kinds of labor, some of which I’ll talk about in a later blog post. But I wanted to offer some broad buckets for the kind of work that Winnie will be doing.

Shadowing

Winnie will be sitting in on some meetings as appropriate. Most of my consultations tend to be with students interested in pursuing new research in DH or who want to learn more about the fellowships. I want Winnie to get a taste for that work, so she will be joining a conversation here and there and contributing her thoughts.

Blogging

Winnie will be writing for the site as a way to fill out her professional profile. Topics will be of her choosing, and she will decide how to shape the writing in a way that compliments the other work she does.

Curricular design

Winnie will be joining planning meetings for our fellowships to see how we go about putting together our programs from the backend. For example, I introduced her to my process for how I set things up for the new Praxis cohort every year. We started from basics, copying everything over and modifying dates. Then we discussed changes to make, why, and I went over how I communicate with staff and students about the new year. She will also run a few brainstorming sessions for us on redesigning our fellowships’ structures. Students always have unique perspectives on their experiences, and I don’t want to waste Winnie’s expertise.

Projects

And then there are the actual projects that I’m going to have Winnie work on. I have three in mind, and she’ll talk a little bit more about those in future blog posts. But here is a taste.

Project 1 - fellowship documentation

Winnie will be updating my “hit by a bus” documentation for our fellowship application committees. Two years ago, when I was on paternity leave, I put together an extensive document for Laura Miller that told her everything she needed to know to run one of our fellowship application committees in my absence. I shared everything from “the CFP goes out on this date to these people” to “if you get questions of this nature you should write to these contacts in the Graduate School.” I also shared a lot of template emails and gave suggestions for how to run meetings. Winnie is going to update this documentation and make parallel materials for our other fellowship committee. These documents are useful for others who might run a committee in my absence, but they’re also helpful for me. No matter how many times I’ve done this work, I always forget the sequence of communication for certain elements of the process.

Project 2 - alumni data

Our current set of data on alumni outcomes was started by Rennie Mapp and her RA years back. That spreadsheet collects information about all the different students that have come through our programs and where they wound up. We did some good work updating those materials, but that data hasn’t been touched in several years. Winnie is going to do a pass over the data to update it with our most recent students.

Project 3 - update development packet

In conjunction with her work on our alumni data, Winnie is going to be updating the packet that we give to our development office as they pursue long term stable funding for our fellowships. We have had several versions of this packet over the years, some directed for specific audiences. These materials typically describe our programs, discuss demographics and alumni data, offer sample projects and project links, and more. The packet is about five years out of date. I want Winnie to read through it, highlight everything that needs attention, and then work with me to update things.

So that’s where we’re going to start. You’ll be hearing more from us over the coming semester as we work together. My hope is that this post outlines a partnership in the spirit of the Collaborators Bill of Rights, the Student Collaborators Bill of Rights, the Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights, and more. I want to make sure that we’re designing a program, first and foremost, based around the values that we want to bring to the collaboration. This internship should be useful for her—not just for the Lab. Ultimately the Scholars’ Lab will benefit as well, but we will lead with experiences that serve both of us.

We’re in the back half of my data for the rest of us course right now. I’ve already written a bit about the beginning of the course and how it was framed around a kind of data pipeline that aimed to give students a baseline level of data literacy. My goal for the course was always that the second half would work through the pipeline again, building towards small group work as students created datasets around their own particular interests. These final products were largely based on the model of Responsible Datasets in Context and the Post45 Data Collective. I wanted my students to work together to gather data based on their interests and produce an essay that situates that data in the larger context from which it came, demonstrates what kinds of questions you can ask of it, and makes the processed data available for other people to use in a legible manner.

The plan was always there. First half of the course: me teaching. Second half: all hands-on working. The problem I ran into was that I had more students sign up for the course than I expected. I’m used to running group work for graduate students where the entire group is working on the same project, but the number of participants is quite small: typically four to six. I framed the course with that scale in mind, and I was not ready mentally for a course where I would have 15 to 25 students. That’s what happens when you’ve taught only off the books for years! When it came time to plan how the course would actually look on a day-to-day basis once we got to the group work phase, I wasn’t actually certain what to do. What would it even look like for 15 students to work on the same thing? If I broke them into groups, how would the course’s pipeline model impact the students’ experience? With a single group over the course of a semester or a year, students will typically fall into different roles. You might have one person serve as a developer, another as a project manager, still another as a designer. But I worried after a conversation with Mackenzie Brooks that roles delineated in this way would mean one person waiting around for weeks for a partner to finish before they could even start.

What I finally landed upon was a plan to break the class into small groups of four to five students. Rather than explicitly assign clear roles, I wanted each person to contribute to every stage of the project. That way, each person would be able to demonstrate facility with each stage of the data production process as opposed to explicit mastery of any one phase. For each week, students had two assignments: a group deliverable as well as an individual reflection. One week the groups produced their metadata schema. For another, they turned in their raw data. And as they moved through these milestones, students also shared back individual reflections where they described their individual contributions to the work.

Beyond the assignments, I also needed to develop a new way for managing class work time for multiple groups. In my library fellowships, it’s very common for us to pivot at a certain time to pure group work for a number of sessions. The students decide what we need to do on a day-to-day basis, and conversation is limited to setting an agenda and then executing that plan. We’ll typically have several weeks of the calendar that are empty. In trying to adapt this structure to the undergraduate context, I’ve implemented a series of strategies from agile project development I learned from Ronda Grizzle, our expert project management and software training specialist in the Scholars’ Lab. This framework provides both a structure for each class meeting as well as a tangible experience the students can take away. We’re building every class around a series of scrums and debriefs.

If you’re not familiar, the term scrum comes from rugby, and it refers to the moment when all the players lock arms over the ball, try to gain possession of it, and attempt to move it forward across the field. It also is a term from the agile development framework that typically refers to a moderated set of practices used to facilitate project updates and agenda setting. Typically, as I’ve seen them, a scrum is a daily practice with specific time constraints and particular questions meant to be answered. At the beginning of a meeting, each person will get one minute of time to answer three questions about their work. The practice allows you to get stuff on the table for your group without spending a lot of time falling into the weeds such that you preserve actual work time. This practice is especially helpful with humanities scholars, as they can easily talk about questions so long that you run out of time before ever working. The first time you scrum, it’s almost always the case that people will run out of time, but it teaches you to move very quickly through updates. You get a quick sense of what the next state of work will be as well as what needs larger discussion.

I settled upon a modified scrumming practice for my class that incorporated both individual and group scrums. We had the same setup every day:

• Start of class scrums (5-10 minutes):
  • Within small groups, 1 minute for each person to answer three questions:
    • What have I done?
    • What is next for me?
    • What do I need from somebody else?
  • As a class, 1 minute for a representative from each group to give a project update:
    • Where is your group at?
    • What problems are you running into?
• Bulk of class time (approximately 60 minutes)
  • Work time within groups
    • I float to answer questions and help troubleshoot
• End of session debrief (5 minutes)
  • As a class, 1 minute for a representative from each group to share:
    • What did you do?
    • What is next for your group?

I brought scrums into my class as a way to provide structure to the work. They offered a way to bring people into the room and establish a ritual to mark the beginning of class as serious work—not time that could be blown off. The practice also helped students determine how they would use their time with each other. But I also wanted to use a modified scrum process to make sure the groups knew what other groups were doing. What lessons were they learning? What problems were they were running into? In this way, hopefully, the back half of the course would come to be about more than just their own group’s work but also about the larger journey the class as a whole was taking through the material. The kinds of projects that groups are working on vary broadly: video games, food and recipes, museum collections, and macroeconomic data. The groups are all dealing with similar kinds of challenges, though, and scrums have offered a good way to update each other and share advice. The practice has worked well for my purposes, and I will use it to help facilitate group work in the future.

At a consultation in the Lab a couple of weeks ago, the group we were chatting with had never heard the term “design jam” before, so I thought I’d get some ideas into a couple of blog posts, in case there are others who’ve never encountered this way of working before.

So what the heck is a design jam?

Design Jams, Part 1

or

So I’ve Got This Great Idea, But I Don’t Really Know Exactly What I Can Do With It or How To Get Started, and Other Sundry Considerations

or

The Big One

Design jams are group brainstorming and idea generation sessions that are intended to solve design problems by generating a wide set of possible interventions. So, think of it like getting about 1000 feet up above the research you want to do with a bunch of smart, experienced people, and just riffing on ideas for a while. By going broad before you try to go deep, you can help to insure that you’re asking the actual question you want to ask (aka, the one that actually interests you and pushes your research in the direction you most want it to go), that you’ve got the right data collection approach to get what you need in order to generate the answers you’re seeking, and that you can creatively approach presenting those answers to your intended audiences in ways that help them deepen their understanding of your research.

Hang on! Don’t run! Design jams are fun! I promise. Really.

So how do we do this kind of design jam in the Scholars’ Lab? I’m so glad you asked!

You take one or more scholars and/or researchers who have a project idea, add in several Scholars’ Lab staff members with varying education, training, and practical experience, sprinkle over subject specialist librarians from the appropriate disciplines, technical specialists from other units in the Library whose perspectives and input will be needed and valuable to the scholar/researcher, a large whiteboard with a variety of markers, and about 1-2 hours time.

Note: You remember the meeting facilitation for beginners post that Brandon and I posted a couple of years ago? Yeah, for a design jam, throw most of that out. The last thing you want for a “big” design jam is a really rigid agenda. You do want an agenda, but not one that’s timeboxed in the same way a regular staff or project meeting is timeboxed. That’s also why a design jam is generally longer than a regular project meeting, too.

So what do we need from someone who wants to do this kind of design jam with us? You have to have a project idea that’s got enough breadth and depth for the meeting to be generative. So if you’re refining ideas that you’ve already spent a lot of time researching and writing about, or if you want to use the results of an existing body of research to create a digital presentation of its data, it’s unlikely that this variety of design jam will be required. (More about this in the next post in this series. Coming soon to a Scholars’ Lab blog near you!)

But if you’re looking at new projects, projects that connect to your existing work in new ways or at new depth, it’s likely that a “big” design jam could be helpful in getting focused and aiming your work in the right direction.

How should you prepare? That’s another great question, I’m so glad you asked. You need to have done some basic research into the overall scholarly landscape in which your project will exist. Who else is out there doing work and asking questions that are similar? Whose project in their own discipline, or topics within your discipline, made you wonder how similar techniques would benefit your own research? What tools are being used to gather and process the data required, what technical skill sets are needed, and which of those do you already possess or want to acquire, or have available funds to pay someone to do?

Finally, you need to give some thoughts to the existing constraints on this research. What’s your timeframe for completing your project? What sort of budget are you looking at for doing the research and then producing the end results? (If you’re coming to us, there’s assuredly a digital component to the data gathering, and likely to those end results, and we can help you better understand how long processes are likely to take.)

Here’s the basic flow, which is the only agenda that we’re likely to use:

• Gathering
• Introductions all around
• Project idea summary from the scholar
• Questions from us about the landscape of scholarship, and tools and techniques, if known, any known constraints, and desired audience for the products of your research
• Open ended questions from us about the scope of your work and the vision you have for any end products
• Brainstorming and gathering ideas that the group comes up with about refinements to the research question, sources for data gathering, potential tools and techniques, analysis ideas, presentation opportunities

The overall goal of the jam is to come out of it with a project idea with which a first iteration could be built. What happens if you apply these data collection, data cleaning, and data analysis tools?¹ What research questions can you actually answer with those results? Is that actually the question you wanted to ask and answer? What can you build from those answers to communicate your scholarship to your intended audience?

So the product of the jam is an initial project plan, which can be refined after an initial small iteration into the final project plan that will allow you to do the scholarship you most want to do. Once that short iteration is complete, we can help you refine the workflows, evaluate the tools you tried out, and then write a new project plan.

The goal overall for the second pass at data gathering and analysis is to set you up to actually do the project you want to do, and hopefully, get to a place where you have proof of concept that will feed into a grant proposal, should you find you wish to pursue this scholarship further.

Sound interesting? Did you just realize that you’ve got just this kind of idea kicking around, but didn’t know where to start planning? Please contact us! We’d love to chat with you about your ideas!

I recently published the third in a series of excerpts on my ongoing book project. This third piece closes out the first section of the first chapter, which introduces the principle argument of the book: institutions have pedagogies embedded within them that we can work to change in our teaching and administration. This first section also introduces the structure of the book, which draws upon what I see as the five components of the institutional narratives neoliberal universities tell about themselves. Universities aspire to be:

• Knowable
• Neutral
• Intellectual
• Prestigious
• Forward-looking

Each chapter takes one of these values, critiques its relationship to teaching and learning, and offers pedagogical and administrative ways to push back from the stance of the digital humanities practitioner. The material so far comes from the first chapter on knowability. Normally, I would push ahead and post the next excerpt from the project, but that material has actually already been published as “The Pedagogy of Digital Humanities Budgets” by The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. So please check out that article if you want to see what comes next in the project. You can find a full listing of current material from the book here. Since what would otherwise be the next pieces are already out there, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the process so far, what it’s been like to blog the book in public and what comes next.

Structure - Thinking about the book as a thing that would live online first has helped the drafting process feel a lot more doable. The structure of the completed project unfolded fairly naturally out of its component parts. The book has five chapters. Each of these chapters has three sections. And each section has three subsections. These subsections are roughly the length and shape of blog posts. I can write a blog post. And, if I can write a lot of them, I can write a book. While things will undoubtedly change, this framing makes things feel possible for now.

Continuity - One challenge in presenting this work online in this particular way, piecemeal over many months, is that the sections appear to the public in disconnected ways. At the end of the day, the book is not the only thing I am working on. I started teaching a new course this semester, and people immediately wrote to me asking for reflections on it as I went. I have other general reflections on DH that I want to share. I could really only focus on the one project if I wanted to keep the conversation here consistent, and I opted not to do so. This meant that some weeks on my blog I talked about my course while others I wrote about my book project. Connecting these various threads and managing these conversations is a challenge, but I am happy with the choice I made because it encouraged me to keep writing. After all, the main person reading all this is…me. It’s got to serve this audience first before it reaches anyone else. And this plan is consistent with my general approach to blogging, which recognizes my writing here as primarily about building out the things I needed to read during the previous months and years. Letters to the past, as it were.

Tempo - Instead of a consistent topic, I aimed to prioritize the mere fact of writing. At all. In some form. About whatever felt the most doable that day. I sacrificed a steady subject in favor of weekly posts, and I think this has been a worthwhile exchange. Writing is a muscle. Blogging, similarly, becomes easier the more you do it. It’s like cross-training. Words will come a bit easier to the book project when I turn back to it if I am regularly practicing writing on a range of topics, genres, and contexts. A steady stream of writing is the thing for me, even if not always going in the same direction.

Blogging as editing - I’ve found blogging to be helpful as a final stage in the preliminary drafting process. I wrote the whole first chapter at once before the fall semester, and various circumstances pulled me away from it in the following months. Returning to blogging has meant revisiting material with fresh eyes what I haven’t looked at in a while. It’s been a welcome opportunity to polish pieces up for readers in a way that I would not otherwise do while working on a larger project. Even if no one reads them the blog posts are still worth sharing. They’re a sign to myself that the project is moving forward. Personal accountability.

What Will Change - Now that I’m several posts in I’ve started thinking about how the material will need to be changed and reframed as part of a larger project instead of as a series of posts. Most immediately, I’m struck by how different the section published in JITP on budget pedagogy feels. It was polished into—and feels like—a standalone piece of work. At the very least, I will need to do some thinking about how to make the structure of that section feel in keeping with the rest of the material in other chapters. That’s good work to do, but it is still labor. Something that I can only do later when the whole thing is in view.

That’s it for now. Thanks to folks who have offered feedback thus far—always happy to hear what people have to say. I’m looking forward to sharing more of the book as it comes together in the coming weeks and to having more time for writing this summer.

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.

Probably like a lot of grad students, my mom will often ask me how my work is going. And normally, it’s not so much that she wants to know what I’m doing; she just wants to know that I’m happy doing whatever it is that I’m doing. But all last year, I was running around visiting about 40 medieval manuscripts located in more than a dozen special collections libraries across Europe and the UK, and she needed to be able to explain my behavior to others. She finally asked: But like… what are you doing? When you visit a manuscript, and you’re there all day, what do you do?

Fair question.

When we say “manuscript studies” what does that even mean? When you spend hours with a manuscript, what are you actually doing there besides marveling at centuries old pigments and that sweet sweet old-book smell?

When I’m in the room with, say, a thirteenth-century tome of saints’ Lives, the first thing I usually have to do is collect myself because how cool?? I often think about the hundreds of people who have flipped through these exact pages for hundreds of years. Unnamed scribes, rich patrons, naive children, greedy sellers, trusted librarians, and many of my own scholarly idols. Manuscripts are these sorts of nodes linking countless people together for countless reasons, and I get to touch them.

So, after I finish freaking out internally for a minute, I get to work documenting as many details as I can. This rich metadata informs my ongoing dissertation work and prompts new questions and new avenues for future research.

But to answer my mom’s question (what are you doing?) and for anyone else who’s curious, I thought I might provide a brief how-to-visit-a-medieval-manuscript guide based on my experiences:

1. Plan Ahead
   • Figure out what you need to see: If digitized images of the manuscript you’re interested in are available online, study these thoroughly first. Not only will this save you time later when you’re on-site, but any evidence you can collect at this stage will also strengthen your case for why seeing the physical manuscript is necessary in the first place. If no digitization is available, all the more reason to see the real thing!
   • Who’s gonna pay for that?: Unless you’re uber-wealthy or something, funding applications will need to happen well in advance, so budget your time for this stage as well.
   • Get your papers in order: Most institutions will require a formal letter of support from your advisor and proof of your status as a student or researcher. Keep these documents handy both in digital and hard copy.
   • Make contact: Don’t be scared. Get a hold of the appropriate library staff, explain your research project, and request access. At this stage, you’ll of course schedule your visit, but you should also make sure that you and the librarians are on the same page about your research plans. Are photos permitted? What documents are required? etc. I once had a Welsh lady scold me because of a misunderstanding over email, and nobody wants that.
2. Come Prepared
   • Register: When you arrive, you’ll typically need to register for a library card, so bring the necessary identification and any other documentation the library requires. This too can take some time, so budget for this step in your schedule. Soon, you’ll have a little collection of library cards :)
   • Pack your bag: Normally, you are not permitted to bring a bag into the room — because you might be a dirty little thief — so be prepared to pull your essential items out of your bag. I like to carry a clear plastic envelope folder with all the essentials:
     • extra pencils with a sharpener
     • a clear ruler and retractable tape measure
     • a pocket magnifying glass
     • and extra paper copies of all required documents
3. Be Kind
   • Support the codex: Despite popular images of researchers wearing white gloves, handling parchment manuscripts with clean, dry, uncovered hands is actually the generally recommended method. Wearing gloves can make your movements clumsier, leaving you more likely to potentially damage the material. Always use the proper supports to minimize strain on the manuscript’s binding, and adjust these supports as needed while you work.
   • Support the staff: BE COOL. Librarians and library staff are the guardians of these precious objects. Do as they say, be patient, and be kind. Their first priority is to protect the manuscript, not to cater to the whims of over-eager researchers. I recommend not wearing headphones at all during your visit as these will make you less responsive to staff instructions.
4. Document Everything
   • Use your time wisely: Give yourself a comfy window of time to do your work — ideally about 2 hours per manuscript. Establish a procedure for yourself to follow in advance, and be sure to prioritize focusing on the essentials first in case you’re short on time. You’ll kick yourself later if you run out of time to document the one dang thing you were there to see.
   • Record, record, record: Take detailed measurements, including the dimensions of the manuscript, the area of the writing space, the average height of the ruled lines, all in millimeters! Count the average number of lines per column and the number of columns per page. Note any unique features like characteristics of the scribe’s hand, any added glosses and marginalia, and other decorative elements.
   • Take pics: If permitted, take as many photos as possible to minimize your reliance on memory or hurried notes later. Be aware of the library’s restrictions beforehand, and always ask again in-person for further guidance. When taking photos, include in your frame a little slip of paper identifying what you’re photographing. This will save you headaches down the road when you’re up late at night trying to recall if that was folio 351 recto or folio 357 recto…
   • Turn every page: After you’ve collected all the essentials, if there’s time left, savor the moment. Turn every page. Take your time. Let yourself meditate on it. Let yourself notice what you didn’t expect to see. And take notes, lots and lots of notes.
5. Follow Up
   • Tidy your notes: Read back over your data and make sure everything will be intelligible to you six months from now. If you took photos, name each of them with a consistent file naming convention (ex: CITY_LIBRARY_COLLECTION_MS#_FOLIO#_recto/verso), and back them up in one (or two) other places besides your phone.
   • Transcribe your photos: When doing your own transcriptions, finding a guiding text for comparison, even if it is not an exact match for your manuscript copy can be extremely helpful, particularly if you’re a beginner to medieval scribal hands. We’re on the cusp of having more reliable OCR for medieval manuscripts through platforms like Transkribus, but as I write this blog, we aren’t quite there yet. This stage takes a significant amount of time, but it also gives you the opportunity to really get close to the text, working letter by letter. You’ll really come to sympathize with medieval scribes. I totally get now why so many scribes left colophons complaining about how arduous the work of copying is and how maddening it can be to make a mistake despite all of your careful attention over many hours and many days.
   • Thank your librarians. Thank your advisors. Thank your funders. Thank everyone who made your research possible.

And by the way, you don’t have to travel to far flung libraries to encounter these beauties. Just last week, I put together a visit for UVA students to see some of Rare Book School’s medieval materials, and not only did the staff at RBS generously open their doors, but we even had the great Barbara Shailor (gasp) and Consuelo Dutschke (double gasp) there to lead the session. It was such a treat organizing this opportunity for students to get curious about manuscript studies and ask: but like… what are you doing?

(Part 3 of a 3-part series: see also the 1st post on email practices and some caveats about my particular academic job context, and the 2nd post on Slack, task management, meeting notes.)

My previous two blog posts shared some of the ways I approach “work chores” (email, Slack, tasks) to keep them more sustainable. In this third post, I wanted to share a bit about how I try to do things as a manager/director re:similar expectations-impacted work-chore practices, so that my colleagues in the lab can also try or use the approaches to work that work best for them.

Not just asking about work sustainability; offering to act

As a manager, I try to regularly check in: Do you have time blocked out for focus, work-chores, time off? But I try to not only ask “are you doing these theoretically useful approaches”; I also want to discuss if the person needs those or wants something different; what is making it difficult to use these or other work-management approaches; what can we do to make this all more sustainable. Do you need actions from me/other colleagues to support that, e.g. changing deadlines, moving or cancelling meetings, changing communication formats (emails, Slack, meetings), notes from a meeting you can’t make? If you’re going to ask if people have time blocked out for needed things like focus and time off, being prepared with possible ways to help if they don’t makes sense.

Where expectations are needed, make them as loose as possible

As a manager, I try to make space for others to figure out the what, when, how of the practices that work best for them. To do this, I try to communally discuss and set agreements on what outcomes are critical (e.g. impact colleagues and people we support) and which are nice to have; and to let folks know they can question and advocate for something different these expectations, which are often ultimately somewhat arbitrary (e.g. why answer most emails within 2 workdays rather than 3 or 4?). I try to keep expectations as high-level and brief as possible—setting these as what’s fine for us to generally at least meet, rather than what’s ideal (but not required to happen all the time—or at all, if doing so impedes other work/focus/non-work time). And I try to talk about my reasoning for expectations, since that can often be useful context (e.g. something that isn’t a big issue if 1 person does it, but I ask for because I have not 1 but 10 full-time staff reporting through me, so effect of approach x multiple people may be a big issue) or allow my colleague to suggest alternatives that still meet my goals while also meeting theirs.

For example, when responding to our lab’s consult listserv, we want people to feel welcomed and know they’ve contacted folks who will get them to the right place, even if that isn’t ultimately the lab. We do also balance a lot of consultations against longer projects, teaching, fieldwork, events, etc., and try to set public expectations of our availability for consultations as usually 2-3 weeks out from original email date (though we can meet faster when there’s an urgent need). So our expectation is that we try to have someone on staff reply to any initial message requesting a consultation with us, to us within two workdays if possible; but that reply can simply be “thanks for your message; we’re discussing internally, and will get back you with more by [DATE]” if needed. This is useful when an ask requires us to talk to colleagues in different units about a project’s history, ID whether anyone has some specific software experience, and/or when multiple relevant staff across units might all be available to attend a consultation together.

This meets our goals of making sure the person contacting us feels welcomed and knows we’ll be helping them, but also does not require staff to constantly check or reply to email. As with my post on personal email/etc. approaches, we often reply to folks within the same day! But setting the minimum bar higher is good for making sure folks can set boundaries on email management, and also get non-email work done.

I try to emphasize communication over conformance: it’s okay if you need more time, need to change plans, etc. But the way you make this not adversely impact colleagues is by communicating as early as possible when you need a change and why. (E.g. if you’re repeatedly asking for extensions after deadlines pass instead of well before, it could be a sign that deadlines are being set too soon, you have too much work, or something else we should work on making more sustainable.)

Look for ways to support others’ needs

We know other Library colleagues sometimes have in-person, or urgent questions from visitors for us. While protecting time to do the kinds of focused work we’re tasked with (and acknowledging we’re not staffed to have someone guaranteed available and able to drop their work at any time for unscheduled non-emergency drop-ins), we’ve got several approaches to staying available to other Library staff, including:

• Our consult listserv goes to our whole team of 12 people, so even if each person is only checking email once a day (not the norm), when that happens would vary enough we’re getting someone seeing incoming emails who can usually note if something’s urgent.
• We use Slack a bunch, and its notification settings make it easy for us to find each other and ask for a quicker reply, when one’s actually needed.
• We’ve set “core staff hours” when it’s most likely you can find a free staffer somewhere in the lab, and shared these with library circulation desks; as well as non-public, broader core times when at least several of us are physically in the lab and findable if needed.

Ultimately, we are privileged to encounter few work-related emergencies (e.g. site is down before a conference talk about it; water is leaking into the makerspace; short-notice funding possibility). We try to make our availability and response practices clear, so folks know how and when they can find us.

Part 2 of a 3-part series: notes on what works for me, when managing alt-academic job work-chores. This one covers Slack, tasks, and meeting notes. The 1st post covers my email practices, as well as some caveats about my particular context relevant to why I can and do things this way. The 3rd post on supporting work practices like these as a manager will be linked here, once it’s published (assuming I remember…).

Slack

I have a daily “Slack catchup” time, like I do for email. This works best when I do it at a time there aren’t many folks actively chatting, so that I do eventually get to all waiting messages; on the downside.

• As with email, I do in practice check Slack elsewhen, but having the daily catchup time lets me close Slack (and Outlook) when I’ve scheduled myself to focus on getting a specific thing done. I could easily spend all day answering email and Slack if I just kept them open and checked them throughout the day.

Slack has a couple helpers I like, both superior to “mark unread” (as it’s easy to accidentally open a channel, and have it auto-mark something as read when you didn’t actually look at it):

• Bookmark icon/”save for later” holds messages in a “later area => stuff I want to remember or look at again during my weekly Brain Day time or after, but zero urgency
• Message menu > remind me about this => for messages I want to be reminded of at a specific time (e.g. something I skimmed but need to respond to by the end of the day, but not now because I’m leaving for a meeting; something I want to remember at the end of term).

Task management app

I use a task management app that allows setting recurring reminders:

• There are many good, free options; it’s worth playing with a couple to see which is comfortable and matches your particular way of handling tasks (also look for: syncing to phone/between computers; ability to export/backup in readable format). I use Things3 for Mac.
• I keep a “Brain Day” area on my task app that fills with recurring tasks on my Friday “Brain Day”s, in the order I want to do them in (stuff I can’t miss doing weekly or it’s a problem, e.g. email catchup, first).
  • I add a weekly reminder to check Slack’s “later” area for messages I should respond to, that I do once I’m on top of email.
  • This approach also helps with non-weekly reminders, like “add your consult stats to LibInsight bimonthly” and “bimonthly block out any leave days on my calendar for the next two months” (so I remember to mark stuff so people know when they can’t schedule me).
• I have task app areas for various categories of things, including
  • “flagged” (do this first when you start work on x day)
  • sets of tasks I only want to look at/work through in priority order at specific times (e.g. my ACH volunteer work, during the ACH meeting’s work time)
  • tasks I can’t/shouldn’t do until a specific date (so I don’t need to see them until then)
  • things I asked of others (as a manager; reminder of when to check in, if don’t hear back)
  • “errands” (zero-urgency things I get to in priority order, just as time allows)

Meeting notes

I use a Remarkable 2 tablet (e-ink tablet) to take notes during meetings:

• I use a different notebook for each meeting kind: 1 notebook per
  • recurring 1:1,
  • recurring groups like our all-staff meeting,
  • related aggregators of ad hoc meetings, such as external consultations, SLab website sprint discussions
• Each new meeting date starts on a new page of the notebook, with the date and meeting title at the top.
• I keep a small lined paper pad and pen next to the Remarkable. If a task for me comes up during the meeting (something I need to do or say), I write it on the paper tablet:
  • Things that must be done before my next “Brain Day” get a star, and I try to remember to do them or add them to my task app that day. I used to use symbols in my meeting notes to mark things that were tasks, but that means I need to look back through my meeting notes to find tasks from the past week, and I repeatedly did not and let those build up.
  • Keeping tasks on their own paper list means I can just see all incoming tasks there; paper vs. directly into task app means that the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and “I can do this in 30 seconds after meeting ends” don’t clog the task app (I used to struggle with putting way too many “wouldn’t it be cool if” ideas into my task app, making it hard to see what’s actually urgent and look like I’m behind on working though tasks).

I’m sharing some approaches to work chores (email, Slack, etc.) that are currently working for me. This is another “my SLab colleague told me I should write a post about this” post—thanks to Brandon Walsh for suggesting I make some of my more personally-successful work-chore practices (which I periodically have shared with various staff, when asked) into a public post. I’ve found it most useful to try out small changes at a time, not huge swerves among different systems of task management.

Short version, pls

tl;dr of the hacks detailed below and on subsequent posts in this series:

1. Have a daily email/message triage time, putting those messages that can wait for reading/reply until a weekly email catchup time, into a folder to attend to then.
2. Block that weekly catchup time on your calendar, preferably the same time each week, at a time you won’t struggle to put aside other work to finish going through those emails (e.g. I do it first thing Friday mornings).
3. Use: Outlook rules to divert low-priority emails and highlight high-priority emails; Slack “save for later” and “remind me about this” (not “mark unread”); a task manager that supports recurring tasks.

Some caveats

This is a very “your mileage might vary” post; this doctor is not saying whether these approaches are right for you. Directing a library-based DH research center means my workday involves a variety of communications (e.g. Workday notifications, budget reports, sending many recurring meeting invites to various groups) that make it more useful to have a more formal system for balancing them against focused work time, as do my own particular work habits and neurodivergence. (FWIW, I am very much an Always Inbox Zero, Task App: Too-Many person.)

I also recognize my privilege in having the job type, security, supervision level, accessibility accommodations, and more that mean I get to make these choices. Some workplaces have invasive policies about when, how, how often; some jobs actually need you to be checking or replying to communications as they come in; some teams would be negatively impacted by someone not checking messages as often as the group truly needs. Different jobs have different needs and/or culture regarding what goes into email, Slack, recurring meetings, or ad hoc conversations.

In particular, the part about how often I check my email felt a bit fraught to share, especially without sharing more context about accessibility. But it’s made a significant improvement in how well I can focus, make progress, maintain work boundaries and sustainability, as well as do well by my colleagues—so I wanted to share it, even if it isn’t necessarily something everyone else can implement as described. (Part two of this blog post will discuss how I try to accommodate similar practices for my colleagues, as a manager/director).

Ultimately, I try to balance two things:

• being able to get to the kinds of focused work that are part of my job, without interruption (unless something is truly an emergency)
• responding to messages within a reasonable timeframe, and having a triage system keeping my inbox manageable so I can more easily see if a colleague sends an urgent-response-needed message

Some approaches that work for me, right now

Email management

I use a daily triage practice, plus a weekly block for catching up on reading/replying to things that can wait until then:

• I have a daily time when I’m always free (5-30min?), that I block for managing email (Outlook is what UVA uses for staff). I put this daily email time as a recurring hold on my calendar until it became habit, and now I just do it first thing, before any meetings.
• I have a “process today” email folder; when this daily email time happens, I dump everything currently in my inbox into “process today”. I don’t require myself to look at my inbox again until the following day, unless* I’m done with all my other work and feel like it.
  • This helps me not get caught up answering constantly incoming stuff, which can usually wait a bit, and get to older reading/replies first.
  • * In practice, I do actually check my work email several times per workday. I try not to do so until I’ve both done that initial transfer to the “process today” folder, and until I’ve processed that “process today” folder (as described below). This means that any other emails I get to are a bonus, so they don’t carry the same feeling of “I’m behind until I clear this from my inbox”.
• Emails that can wait until my weekly “catch up on work chores” block (Friday mornings) get moved to a “Brain Day” folder.
  • This keeps my inbox more manageable, so I can more easily visually skim it between meetings to notice if someone does have an urgent and/or easy-to-answer question
• I try to reply to everything else in the “process today” folder during that daily time, even if it’s just to say “I received this, but it’ll be [a couple days] before I will have a more substantive response”. I send that kind of message if I’m not sure I’ll get to something (better to followup up sooner than promised, than to forget to respond).

“Brain Day” for weekly work chores

I use a weekly, scheduled catchup block (“Brain Day”):

• During “Brain Day”, I catch up on all emails I moved to the “Brain Day” folder during the week—the ones that could wait to be read (including non-urgent FYI things, newsletters), and emails I told people I’d need more time to reply to.
• If I can’t finish working through all my email then, I block time to do so the following week (rare/ugh).

After completing email catchup, I also use that “Brain Day” block to do other weekly or monthly recurring work chores, like updating our budget, planning what tasks I’m doing the following week, and prepping for the next week’s meetings.

Other email hacks

I use Outlook rules to:

• route stuff that I mostly only need to skim or can wait to read until my weekly “Brain Day” (e.g. from our “general announcements to all Library staff” listserv, which tends to more “here’s an interesting webinar” and less “urgent info to read today”) into the “Brain Day” folder, so I don’t have to look at it nor manually sort it until Fridays
• route stuff I need to get to sooner (e.g. emails to the SLab consult listserv; emails from SLab staff, supervisors) into a place I’ll see them easily
• Move some sent emails to a “Waiting to hear” folder, if I need to make sure I do hear back a response (vs. assuming someone will definitely write back); I check this during weekly “Brain Day” to see if I need to ping anyone about a non-response (when enough time has gone by)

I don’t currently need this, but if staying out of your inbox is hard because you need to notice specific things: I used to use USB LEDs called Blink(1)s to alert me to things I wanted to notice. For me, that was during my dissertation’s Infinite Ulysses open beta, when I wanted to know when someone created a new account on my digital edition, or posted an annotation. But you could hook these up to IFTTT or Zapier and have specific combinations of person and text on Slack or Outlook trigger the light turning on, or blinking in a pattern. (I can’t use sound notifications—if you can, you can of course set up Slack/Outlook to make a noise for certain things, though I think this isn’t granular down to e.g. “make this sound if x person pings me”?)

The next two posts will deal with Slack, task management, and meeting notes; and handling expectations vs. healthy work practices, as a manager.

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