Collaboration is not always easy, especially for someone like me, trained in the humanities and accustomed to working alone. Reading, writing, researching, preparing, and giving presentations—almost everything I have done in my graduate career—has been a largely individualistic pursuit. It is sad, in a way, to think of all of the work I’ve done and only shared with an instructor via a term paper, or, at most, a handful of graduate students in a seminar presentation. On the other hand, it can be hard to relinquish control of ideas and outcomes, preferences, and procedures, to be flexible to a vision, or a version, other than your own.

Recently, the Maker Lab collaboratively produced two videos. One film documents Jana Millar Usiskin’s Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit. The other film playfully narrates the importance of makerspaces in the humanities. Both are excellent, but even more impressive was how the Lab came together to conceptualize, film, edit, and produce two great films in an incredibly short period of time. Contributing to the project was one of the most fun and most challenging experiences I’ve had in graduate school. Collaborative work becomes this creative and exciting process, where ideas you could have never imagined build on the ones you could, and something you suggest is changed and tweaked and made even better. Naturally, frustrations happen and concepts clash, but in the end the outcome far exceeded anything I could have ever fathomed or created on my own. Who doesn’t want to be on board with that?

Post by Mikka Jacobsen, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Featured images for this post care of “Makerspaces in the Humanities” and “MLab Team Wins SSHRC Contest.”

Trying to offer helpful feedback, I focused mainly on questions of audience and readership. Most of my comments were simply requests for writers to define terms and clarify acronyms. And the whole time, I was questioning the validity of my questions and qualifying all of my comments. So, for example, my feedback reads generally like this: “Do you think your reader will know what RDF is? Would it be helpful to define?” Or, “This is embarrassing, but I don’t exactly know what metadata is. Would it be helpful to explain this, or is it simply too basic?” Self-conscious at confessing my lexical deficiencies, I had to acknowledge that other readers might also be in the dark, so to speak, when it comes to DH terms and concepts. And let me tell you, a Google search of some of these terms, RDF for example, may do more to confuse than illuminate.

Esoteric DH-language seems to act as something of a barrier to those outside the field. I often feel alienated by some acronym or other, and for me, language has become a divide that separates the work I am doing from digital scholarship in the humanities. So, on the one hand, maybe it is helpful, even necessary, to continually define what propels your research. But, when does it become irrelevant or even annoying to DH scholars who may be interested in what is happening in the Maker Lab, but don’t want to have to wade through endless descriptions of processes that are well known in the field? Would I, for example, want to have someone outside of my discipline ask me to continually clarify my language, especially in regards to concepts that I could expect everyone in my field to be familiar with? Would this be helpful or relevant? Ultimately, I think it’s a matter that requires a little work on both ends. If I want to know what is happening in the digital humanities, maybe I need to do something to find out (like read Maker Lab blogs)! That said, I don’t think it hurts a writer to have to describe the tools and research terms she works with, or a reader to come across a new definition of a familiar concept: if anything, it might even lead to a more nuanced understanding of digital tools and digital language.

Post by Mikka Jacobsen, attached to the Makerspace project, with the versioning tag. Featured image for this post care of Mikka Jacobsen.

To get inspiration and start building ideas for the project, Jentery suggested I review Why Publish? Compiled by Fact Sheet Five’s Mike Gunderloy, Why Publish? documents the responses of zine publishers to the title question. Zine publishers publish for all kinds of zany reasons–spiritual, political, ethical, egotistical, to name a few–but mostly, they want to have their voices heard. They want to connect with others in their community, whatever community means to them. And they want responses. Zine publishers thrive on the letters they receive from their readers. Most are dissatisfied with mainstream media and want to provide alternatives to the print publications authorized by mainstream venues.

My favourite zine in Why Publish? is Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalogue. While it was in circulation in the sixties and seventies, the catalogue provided skills-based information and supply access for what I will call, for lack of a better descriptor, back-to-the-land communities. For example: where to buy a windmill, how to keep bees, where to buy good seeds, etc. Partially updated by its readers, the catalogue was meant to redistribute power from the supplier to the user. I like the concept of The Whole Earth Catalogue, that it enables its readers to make things and do things, catalogues information on where to buy supplies and instructs and shows how to use them. To me, this is a way that we might begin conceptualizing the Maker Lab zine: a publication that helps its user make something, empowers its reader, and provides information on how to access the materials and tools to make Maker-Lab-like things.

Reading about zine culture led me to think, admittedly for the first time, about the materiality of digital publication. In a way, I had imagined that the internet had democratized publishing, for better or worse. But, as I read more about why zine publishers continue to publish print media, I began to understand that most internet users are confined by the structures of the web, by the creators of the software that hosts their blogs, and by the capital that creates and sustains these structures. I am surprised, again, by my own naivety. I thought the internet was just free space! So, I like the idea that a zine, the Maker Lab zine maybe, might be something that could empower its reader. That learning how to make things, learning to create with digital tools, is empowering. Still, I am left with more questions than answers about what our zine will do. Who will read it? Will it be meaningful? Will it be relevant? Why publish?

Post by Mikka Jacobsen, attached to the Makerspace project, with the fabrication tag. Featured images for this post care of Goodreads, at goodreads.com; and the Whole Earth Catalogue, at wholeearth.com.

Already, I have had to confront my own skepticism and limitations. Initially, I was suspicious of the principles and priorities of digital design practice. For example, the research I have done suggests that designers should prioritize efficiency and productivity. I question whether efficiency should always take precedence. I don’t mean to suggest that one would aspire to create an inefficient interface. But should productivity always be prioritized in digital environments? I have also been struggling to understand digital interaction as an embodied experience, or, at least, as embodied as other, non-digital experiences. Likewise, I surprised myself by reacting to the concept of digital objects. While I am now getting used to the idea of icons, boxes, etc. as objects, I still cannot resist the tendency to consider the digital as always ephemeral in some way, and the object as material. So far my Lab work has led me to question many of my own assumptions about both digital and non-digital environments. I am considering, for the first time, how digital environments are constructed, and how they construct their users. I am looking forward to applying some of these questions, and my own non-knowledge, to Maker Lab projects and processes.

Post by Mikka Jacobsen, attached to the Makerspace project, with the fabrication tag. Featured image for this post, of Verner Panton’s S Stuhl, care of Wikipedia.