My presentation on “Zine Bakery: borderless DH research, methods training, and scholarly communication via zines” was accepted to the Spring Global DH 2025 conference. My talk abstract is below:

People often picture zines thinking of their 20th-century origin as collaged, xeroxed, free paper booklets about subcultures, social justice, marginalized experiences. Today, though, creators make “zines” that vary widely in format and topic, including 100+ page tiny books, feminist tech tutorials, creative websites. Most zines stay true to the form’s original vision of radically low-barrier authoring, publication, and reading, though.

Using data visualization, an ethics charter, database and metadata creation, and exemplar Global DHy zines, this “Zine Bakery” presentation demonstrates zines as welcoming, accessible, effective formats for borderless do-it-yourself scholarly communication, friendly digital method teaching, public humanities outreach, just-in-time crisis response. ZineBakery.com is a portal to zine-inspired DH scholarship, including:

  • Public, relational-database-driven zine catalogue
  • Data visualizations
  • Zine-related DH theory and practice research blog (e.g. dataset-building, catalogue interface design, coding documentation)

ZineBakery.com’s zine catalogue contains 375+ DHy zines, with 60+ descriptive metadata fields/zine. The catalogue’s focus on zines at the intersections of tech, culture, and justice means it strongly overlaps conference themes: socially just, accessible, global DH; public, citizen humanities; tech and academic equity, diversity, inclusion; DH pedagogy. 45+ of its zines are by non-U.S. authors and/or about non-U.S. experiences; 40+ of its zines are explicitly DH-focused, with another 110+ zines in adjacent DHy areas (e.g. feminist tech, coding tutorials, data science). This presentation will share a list of links to free Global DHy zines (e.g. Bangalore hardware craft, heritage podcasting across Africa, Puerto Rican digital crowdsourcing).

This scholarship will interest DH and library staff managing public spaces/events (for potential zine sharing, instruction); digital methods teachers seeking new ways to support learning; folks new to DH seeking friendly documentation around a current DH project’s in-progress successes and failures; and DH researchers desiring more ways to share their work with the public.