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

Printing zines to read yourself

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

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

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

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

Live in (or visiting) Charlottesville? Pt 1

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

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

Live in (or visiting) Charlottesville? Pt 2

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

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

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

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

Free zines vs paying for zines

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

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

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

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

I’ve got a conference poster at DH 2025 this week, and since I needed to attend remotely and things being what they are, I went all out on making the design Very Extra and much in the spirit of this site’s design :) Enjoy! (A full PDF version, in case you want to zoom in more than the image version below allows.)

Q. Do you know of zine templates that let you import your zine content and then print it properly?

A. I’ve run into this a lot, partly bc some printers have various hidden amounts of white space they’ll require to allow for where they grip the paper, even if you set printer settings to zero margins. Very frustrating, especially for printing minizines, where this can through off what’s visible per page when you fold the pages.

A few printers have true borderless printing, but I haven’t happened to run into one at home/work yet. Sometimes I use a paper cutter or scissors to remove that unprinted edge after printing, to make the zine look printed all the way to the edge when it doesn’t have a white background.

Researching what those secret extra whitespace settings are for my particular printer brand and model has helped, as well as printing a test template with text running off all the zine page edges. This lets me then measure on the printout what of the text gets cut off, then design so my text/images don’t go there. In Canva, I’ve drawn those measured cutoff points as colored boxes, then duplicate that page to fill it with zine content and remove the boxes once I’m ready to print, like so:

Canva (free plan) lets you set margin and bleed guides (file > settings) that helps with designing for printing correctly. While these don’t override that secret won’t-print-there grip area of paper many printers have, ustom print margin settings can sometimes help too:

I’ve tried various zine arranger (plus additional cool features!) tools, such as:

• Zine Arranger
• Electric Zine Maker
• Spectrolite
• This GDoc template, made by Reddit user ttuulliipp

These all do useful things, but ultimately can’t address different printers adding that secret extra space—so the hacks above have worked best for me.

From text originally posted by me via the Scholars’ Lab Bluesky account in response to a question there.

I presented about the Zine Bakery today at the Global Digital Humanities conference last week. Below are some links that had to fly by on my screen, so folks have more time to peruse them.

I’m on Bluesky at LiteratureGeek.bsky.social if you want to chat there!

Key parts of Zine Bakery

• Homepage & what is the project? as well as links to subsets of the zines, such as all the social justice zines that are free to print and share
• Zines I’ve made & co-authored
• The public catalog
• Zine cover quilt viz
• Physical distro at the Scholars’ Lab
• Redistro/publication and hosting for zines

Where to find zines:

• ZineBakery.com
• Queer Zine Archive (archive.qzap.org)
• Barnard Zine Library (zines.barnard.edu)
• Social media + #zine(s)
• Internet Archive + “zine” search
• Random tables in libraries, coffee shops, communal spaces…

Citations & further reading

Fox, Violet B. et al. “The zine librarians code of ethics” web resource, zine. November 2015. zinelibraries.info/code-of-ethics-1115-web-version.

Freedman, Jenna, et al. Zine Union Catalogue web resource. zinecat.org.

Nemergut, Nicole Acosta. Teaching with Zines zine. 2018. github.com/zinecat/zinecat.org/blob/master/Documents/Teaching%20with%20Zines%20-%20Acosta.pdf.

Sahagian, Jacqui. “Zine-making as Critical DH Pedagogy”. Scholars’ Lab blog post, January 14, 2022. scholarslab.org/blog/workshop-zine-translation.

Stevens, Amanda, et al. Zine Subject Thesaurus web resource. anchorarchive.org/subject-thesaurus.

Visconti, Amanda Wyatt. “Book Adjacent: Database & Makerspace Prototypes Repairing Book-Centric Citation Bias in DH Working Libraries”. DH+Lib special issue, Spring 2024. dhandlib.org/?p=154321.

—. Zine Bakery. ZineBakery.com. Project’s research blogging includes:

• “Metadata for Zine Collecting”. April 2024. zinebakery.com/2024-04-10-zine-collecting-metadata
• “Zine Bakery: research roadmap”. August 2024. zinebakery.com/2024/08/18/zine-bakery-research-roadmap
• “Zine Bakery: topical zine collections”. August 2024. zinebakery.com/2024-08-16-zine-bakery-topical-collections/

—; Quinn Dombrowski; Claudia Berger. “#DHmakes: Baking Craft into DH Discourse”. Korean Journal of Digital Humanities, 1(1), 73-108, 2024. accesson.kr/kjdh/v.1/1/73/43507.

Walters, Jess. “Zines” (Walters’ zines & work, including zines for disability jistice community, learning, advocacy). jesswaltersart.com/zines

I’d like to develop some kind of scale to show what a reader can expect from a zine I author, in terms of their reading experience and perception of the effort and care that went into a given zine. For example, was it hand-lettered in one sitting with a few grayscale images pasted in, or does it have extensive digital design work (and digital font, possibly allowing denser legible text)? Does it represent significant research and/or creative writing, or is it something quicker (like a short quick blog post)? I’d like to create all kinds of zines, and I think having language for different kinds of approaches could help people know that when I share I’ve made a new zine, it might look different from my zines they’ve seen in the past. I think these are all great forms of zine to have in the world, though, so I don’t want to use language that treats one level of time/effort/etc. as inherently higher “quality” or better, than another.

I liked the idea of “trash games” that Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux shared at a past workshop for the Scholars’ Lab—the idea was to create more quick, probably crappy art/games, as a way to enjoy making things, make more things, expand your game design knowledge in ways that could ultimately contribute to non-“trash games” as well. I like the “make more bad art” idea I saw on a laptop sticker somewhere.

I’m a bit uncomfortable with using “trash” to describe this kind of zine (assuming I make some), given classist/racist/gross applications to people and cultures it’s been part of. I also don’t think such games, zines, other art actually are trash—they’re worth sharing, preserving, discussing, and I don’t want people unfamiliar with the term to assume otherwise. I do dig how a term like “trash zines” could be freeing in terms of lowering a mental barrier—just sketch a thing! Don’t worry if the writing is legible to others! Include arrows when you realize you ned to move chunks of text elsewhere! And maybe you just have some personal creative enjoyment, which is enough in itself. But it might also help you get comfortable with sharing or polishing a zine?

I’ve been thinking of “initial rise” for Zine Bakery homemade first-draft zines, but that depends on my running bread puns. I also think initial draft is not the same as deliberately crappy zine sketching in spirit or outcome. Regardless of what terms I end up using, I think developing a list of features I sometimes include in zines I make could help in how I describe them—things like what kind of research went into a zine, amount of time spent on art and layout, maybe other kinds of media formats I think a given zine approximates (e.g. journal articles vs. quick blog post).

Ideas for other ways to refer to this kind of “do bad art quick” than as “trash art”/trash games/trash zines? Let me know! (e.g. on Bluesky; check out my friendly academic/DHy guide to Bluesky if you aren’t on yet!)

I recently published my first zine! I actually fully drafted another zine just beforehand (on letterpress printing!), but for whatever reason I finished this lasercutter cheatsheet zine draft first.

Very excited to finally finish making a zine!

I’ve drafted a couple zines online using Google Docs in the last year or so, but never completed them. (One was from notes on Miriam Posner’s cool Scholars’ Lab talk on the tech underlying the ethical choices of global logistics systems, and one was on the “#DHmakes: Baking Craft into DH Discourse” article I cowrote with Quinn Dombrowski and Claudia Berger.) I’ve wanted to make my own zine for a while, and I think it happened now because:

• I took a 4-day intensive letterpress printing training I was really excited about, and taking notes to help me remember what I learned each day involved a fair amount of sketching. That probably made me think of using a standard 8-page minizine layout as a way to organize the notes—that layout folds a sheet of paper into 8 parts (fold in half once across vertical axis, fold across horizontal axes to divide those two parts into eight parts).
• I realized that I liked hand-drawing/lettering the zine a lot better than I did struggling with GDocs not wanting to support zine layouts well (GDocs no longer allows custom page sizes, and its tables have issues for page sizing too; Canva felt like it would end up looking too not like my personal style, though I still want to try using it in the future.)
• I met with Ammon Shepherd, Scholars’ Lab’s makerspace expert and lead, to get a training refresh on our new lasercutter. I took a few notes on paper, then more afterward while preparing to try lasercutting something by myself the next day. Again, the combination of a sequence of steps and needing to sketch rather than write/type some parts made a zine feel comfortable as the format.

5 things I learned while drafting these two paper zines

(Noting the second zine, on letterpress printing, isn’t finished/published yet—but a first draft was done 8/2024.)

1. Leaving space on the sheet around each zine page, during the first draft, really helped with organizing and layout (and with not worrying too much about placing things wrong then needing to move to a new sheet of paper). For the letterpress printing zine first draft, I used both sides of the minizine-folded paper instead of the intended eventual one side, which let me use the page space below each real page as a pre-drafting zone. You can see where I drafted the idea of a Vandercook press sketch in the lower-left, then sketched the full thing in the upper-left:

   

   For the final version of that zine, I’m switching to a larger page zine and different folding format (see #2 below) that will print to legal-size paper. I didn’t have any of that size paper yet, but I made drafting templates that fit two pages per sheet, with lot of space around them for layout notes:

2. Folding standard 8-page minizines is annoying—you have to pay a lot of attention to lining up each edge, and creasing carefully. I started a table to track what different sizes of paper + folding techniques produced, in terms of final page dimensions and number of pages, so it’s easier to select something that fits my needs (such as making such a zine fits into an acrylic brochure holder I’d bought for sharing small zines).

   

3. I forgot to leave space around the margins for printing. The lasercutter zine PDF looks fine, but when you print (even using “borderless” or no-margin settings, on some printers) the place the printer grips the paper might not get inked, and text/images at the edges get cut off. (If you don’t fold precisely or leave space around the folding lines, stuff can get cut off/moved to the next page that way, too.) I started to use Photoshop to move things in the PDF around away from those places needing more space, so the whole zine could print. I’d assumed that simply scaling down the zine wouldn’t work, given that the folding-in-eighths would still hit in the same places on the sheet—but it occurred to me to try printing at a slightly smaller scale (96%), and that actually solved the whole issue? A little annoying to have to tell people to scale when printing, but for a first zine, that’s fine by me.

4. I enjoy doing small, neat lettering, so handlettering in the minizine’s small space was fun. I made it until the final line before my brain glitched and I wrote the wrong letter in a word. Luckily, I was able to use what I infer is a time-honored zine technique: covering the typo with a pasted-in image. I promptly purchased some whiteout, too. (And I can always fix things after scanning, using Photoshop—but I like the idea of the final paper copy being accurate to the PDF.)

5. I researched and bought a $70 scanner, so I could take better zine scans from paper zines at home. I used standardish white copier paper for the lasercutter zine, but the texture of the paper still kind of came through in the scan? So I’ll need to experiment in the future, if I want zines digitized from paper to have their backgrounds look as clean as digitally-produced zines. Or maybe just accept that’s part of the charm.

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

The Zine Bakery catalog is a public view of a subset of the Zine Bakery dataset. It includes most/all of the zines in my personal catalogue, but only a subset of the metadata fields—leaving out fields irrelevant to the public like how many copies of a zine do I have at home, or private data like links to private PDF backups of zines.

I recently set up a “Zine Reader’s View” here, which is 1) only the zines that allow anyone to read them online for free, and 2) only includes my catalogue metadata of most interest to folks looking to read zines (e.g. the metadata about printing zines is hidden).

I also set up my catalogue to link readers directly to just zines with certain themes, like feminist tech zines and digital humanities zines!

Screenshot of the multi-colored buttons on my ZineBakery.com website, linking people to specific subsets of my zine catalogue such as “tech knowledges” zines and “feminist tech” zines.

In addition to viewing the whole public catalogue, you can now easily see:

• 59+ “better together” zines (zines about community building, collective structures, solidarity)
• 107+ “learn a thing” zines (tutorials, workbooks, manuals)
• 53+ “feminist tech” zines (out of 93+ total “tech knowledges”-tagged zines)
• 37+ “digital humanities” zines
• 41+ “creative building” zines (craft, make; generative art)
• 53+ GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) zines
• 17+ zines about zines (making, studying, cataloguing)
• 14+ pedagogy zines
• 190+ zines w/various social justice tags
• 22+ “disabled experience” and/or “accessibility, disability justice, embodiment” zines
• 41+ “comics-form” zines
• 22+ “textual studies” zines—zines related to textual studies & book/media history; history of tech, communications, media

(The “+” means that was the count of zines when I created these tags in early August, but I’m adding more zines all the time.)

My DH 2024 conference talk on my recent book-adjacent data physicalizations and makerspace research, as part of co-facilitating the #DHmakes mini-conference. What is #DHmakes? Briefly: anyone (you?) DH-adjacent sharing their (DH or not) crafty or making work with the #DHmakes hashtag, getting supportive community feedback. Resulting collaborations have included conference sessions and a journal article. For an in-depth explanation of #DHmakes’s history, rationale, goals, examples, see the peer-reviewed article I recently co-authored with Quinn Dombrowski and Claudia Berger on the topic.

Hey! I’m Amanda Wyatt Visconti (they/them). I’m Director of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library.

My background’s in librarianship, literature and textual scholarship, so a lot of my making is reading- or book-adjacent. I know the ways we do and share knowledge work can take really any format, as can the things that influence our scholarly thinking. I have been informed or inspired by, for example, a literal bread recipe; fictional creative work that explores new possibilities, or conveys an ethos I took back to my research; tutorials, informal discussions, datasets, infrastructural and administrative work, zines, social media posts, and countless other of the ways humans create and share thinking*.

Why make book-adjacent prototypes?

“Generous” citation—in whom we cite, and what formats of work we cite—is actually just accurate citation. Academia routinely lags in citing all the emails, attended conference talks, social media posts, elevator conversations, podcasts, reviewer comments, and more that inspire and inform our scholarship. With my particular context of a library-based lab: physical scholarship displays in academic libraries tend to disinclude relevant reads that aren’t in a print scholarly book or journal format.

It’s hard to display many of the formats I just listed, but also many people don’t think of them as worth displaying? This sends a message that some scholarly formats or methods are lesser, or not relevant to the building and sharing of knowledge. We know there’s systemic racism, sexism, and other harms in publishing and academia. Limiting ourselves to displaying and amplifying just some of the most gatekept formats of knowledge sharing—books and journal articles—fails at presenting a welcoming, inclusive, and accurate picture of what relevant work exists to inform and inspire around a given topic.

So, I’ve been using making projects to change what scholarly formats and authors the Scholars’ Lab will be able to amplify in its public space…

Data-driven research making

I started by focusing on collecting and describing a variety of DHy digital and physical zines, though I hope to expand the dataset to other formats eventually. (Briefly, you can think of zines as DIY self-published booklets, usually intended for replication and free dissemination, usually in multiple copies as opposed to some artists’ books being single-copy-only or non-replicable.) In the upper-left of the slide is a slice of my digital “zine quilt”, a webpage grid of zine covers from zines in my collection.

Having a richly described zine-y database I know by heart, because I researched and typed in every piece of it, has opened my eyes to ways data can suggest data-based research making.

I’ve got 3 crafting projects based on this zine database so far:

1st, I created a playing card deck that fits in a little case you can slip into your pocket. Each card has the title and creators of a zine, and a QR code that takes you to where you can read the zine for free online. This lets me hand out fun little themed reading lists or bibliographies, as shuffle-able card decks… or potentially play some really confusing poker, I guess?

2nd, I’m learning to work better with LEDs, sheet acrylic, and glass by reverse-engineering a simple and less gorgeous version of Aidan Kang’s Luminous Books art installation. Kang’s sculptures fills shelves with translucent, glowing boxes that are shaped and sized like books with colorful book covers. I’ve been prototyping with cardboard, figuring out how to glue glass and acrylic securely, and figuring out programmable lights so I can make these book-shaped boxes pulse and change color. I hope to design and print fake “covers” for non-book reads like a DH project or a dataset. This would let me set these glowy neon fake books on our real book shelves, where the colored light might draw people to look at them, and follow a link to interact with the read further.

3rd, I’m hooking up a tiny thermal printer, like the ones that print receipts, to a Raspberry Pi and small display screen. I’m hoping to program a short quiz people can take, that makes the printer print out a little “receipt” of reading recommendations you can take away, based on metadata in my reading database. I’d been working to construct a neon acrylic case that looks like a retro Mac to hold the display and printer, again figuring out how to make a simpler approximation of someone else’s art, in this case SailorHg’s “While(Fruit)”. But naming my collection a “Zine Bakery” got me excited about instead hiding the receipt printer inside a toaster, so the receipt paper could flow out of one of the toaster’s bread holes. You can read more about these book-adjacent making projects at TinyUrl.com/BookAdjacent, or the zine project at ZineBakery.com.

Unrelatedly: resin!

Completely unrelated to reading: I’ve been learning how to do resin casting! You can think of resin like chemicals you mix up carefully, pour carefully into molds over multiple days and multiple layers of pouring with various pigments and embedded objects, and carefully try not to breathe. It hardens into things like this silly memento mori full-size skull I made, where I’ve embedded novelty chatter teeth and a block of ramen for a brain. Or for this necklace, I embedded multicolor LED bulbs in resin inside of D&D dice molds.

(See my recent post on resin casting for more about this work!)

Come #DHmakes with us!

I’ve discovered I really like the experience of learning new crafts: what about it is unexpectedly difficult? How much can I focus on the joy of experimenting and learning, and grow away from frustration that I can’t necessarily make things that are pretty or skillful yet? So I’ve got a weird variety of other things cooking, including fixing a grandfather clock, building a small split-flap display like in old railway stations (but smaller), mending and customizing clothes to fit better, prototyping a shop-vac-powered pneumatic tube, carving and printing linoleum, and other letterpress printing.

To me, the digital humanities is only incidentally digital. The projects and communities I get the most from take a curious and capacious approach to the forms, methods, fields we can learn from and apply to pursue knowledge, whether that’s coding a website or replicating a historical bread baking recipe. #DHmakes has helped me bring more of that commitment to experimentation into my life. And with that comes the joy of making things, being creative, and having an amazing supportive community that would love yall to share whatever you’re tinkering with using the #DHmakes hashtag, so I hope you join us in doing that if you haven’t already!

* Some of the text of this talk is replicated from my Spring 2024 peer-reviewed article, “Book Adjacent: Database & Makerspace Prototypes Repairing Book-Centric Citation Bias in DH Working Libraries”, in the DH+Lib Special Issue on “Making Research Tactile: Critical Making and Data Physicalization in Digital Humanities”.