The following is an accepted proposal I submitted to the international Feminist Media Histories journal special issue on “Craftwork within the Digital”, guest-edited by Christina Corfield and Whitney Trettien. In addition to giving a preview of my piece, I thought this might be helpful to folks looking to propose journal articles for the first time.

I propose creating a one-page website consisting of a written scholarly artist statement and 3 digital, printable zines.

The written introduction will consist of 2-4 pages of text exploring the intersections of craft/method-expansive makerspaces and the digital humanities (DH) for feminist practice, including through recounting my zine and #DHmakes community work. I’ll particularly focus on the affordances of one book arts methods and especially letterpress printing craft, offering a list of intersectional, transfeminist values including justice, care, and abundance and how this method offers opportunities to practice these values. I’ll also provide a short, hyperlinked bibliography of free online scholarly readings related to these topics.

Finally, I’ll present a model of one feminist + digital craft case through an overview of how I’m developing my DH-center-based booklab based on intersectional, transfeminist values, to fill local gaps in book arts accessibility, including through:

  • Low-barrier, friendly, safe/hard-to-break printing experimentation available for no cost
  • Building support for inclusive and multilingual printing, especially for non-Latin scripts, Braille, and other typefaces uncommon or difficult to procure in the U.S., with one goal being all lab visitors always have the type available to correctly print their names
  • Experimental & digital humanities explorations, applying our makerspace and prototyping expertise to develop custom, cheaper, and/or otherwise unavailable typefaces and printing apparatus (e.g. to address the dearth of multilingual options), and explore other connections between hands-on book arts practice and our DH skillset
  • Maintaining a free, public zine rack stocking social justice-related titles
  • Growing a collection of historical LGBTQIA+ letterpress blocks, and publishing these in an online gallery; lasercutting wood to create new LGBTQIA+ letterpress blocks to expand what’s available, and sharing the design files and instructions so others may replicate these

The 3 zines associated with this piece will be readable online, as well as by printing and folding. Each will use a feminist-tech tutorial approach (à la Julia Evans) to make introductory letterpress practice more accessible in both a tacit knowledge and a monetary expense sense, covering three topics:

  1. finding your first press
  2. finding your first letterpress type
  3. doing your first typesetting and printing
    I plan these zines to be similar in depth of content to my recent co-authored “DIY Web Archiving” zine, and the zines’ design/polish level to be similar to my co-authored “Speedweve for Mending” zine. I have existing experience with the required methods (web design and zinemaking) for this proposal, and do not need support in achieving them. I have a draft outline and notes toward writing all three zines completed already, so the remaining work is doable during this CFP’s timeframe.

Bio: Dr. Amanda Wyatt Visconti (they/them) is Director of the Scholars’ Lab, an internationally recognized digital humanities research center; and both a researcher and practitioner of book arts and making (e.g. letterpress, zines, resin, data embodiment). An active contributor to the #DHmakes community, in just the last year they’ve organized a 7-session public zoom series teaching craft methods to digital humanists (#DHMakes Methodz Talks), written and published two zines on craft methods (mending with Sam Blickhan; lasercutting) in addition to four other zines, and published two peer-reviewed journal articles on scholarly making (book-adjacent, data-powered making; #DHmakes community history, with Quinn Dombrowski and Claudia Berger). Their scholarship includes intersectional, transfeminist bibliography and digital humanities research coding, and they hold a Literature Ph.D. and Information M.S. both focused on digital humanities human-computer interaction.