Group items tagged

This is the digital arm of the diy zine archiving project I have been involved with for years. Check out the about section for explanations of collective structure, tools used to build the site, and connection to other diy archives.

Super cool project, Mara! I like how the mission statement notes that QZAP is a "living history," and that the members are also documenting the history of hardware/software used to create this digital platform where the archived history of these zines lives. (I'm not sure if that last sentence makes sense, but hopefully you know what I mean...)

ABSTRACT In this review essay, the academic merits of three anthropological blogs ("Savage Minds," "Zero Anthropology" [formerly "Open Anthropology"], and the official blog of the American Anthropological Association) are considered.

Here's a working academic blog, mostly on the writing process. https://lauraportwoodstacer.wordpress.com/

I appreciate the working academic blog. I might be interested in seeing two or three similar sites that are in dialogue with other another. Either people working on the same project or researchers in a similar field engaged in similar topics. This serves an obviously helpful role in garnering interested in your project.

Vectors is a beautiful journal of culture and technology. It pushes its contributors to present research in innovative ways. Not every piece is ethnographic, but it may inspire us to present our research in visually stunning ways. This would be great to consider in week 9.

I really like this piece! I'm not super familiar with DML as a field, but the author's attention to the world-making capabilities (and not even capabilities - it's built in or "politically preloaded") of research methods. The post provides a clear defense against those who would argue that research is just objectively recording the world. At the same time, it doesn't slip into a poststructuralist wormhole about meaning. There's an attention to politics here that 's fruitful [Ah! but politics in general.. What are this author's projects' politics? What departmental/ disciplinary political fights shape the ground on which DML research takes place?]

I really like the concept of "scene," as it is applied here. The author uses it to mean the ways groups of people gather in clusters historically, emotionally, and physically. He argues the term avoids the "fetishiz­ing tendencies of subcultural theory". Does it, though? If mapping and analyzing subcultures brings with it a temptation to nail down hierarchies of taste cultures (as in - "my study of zine making shows this is a real zine, that is not" - a temptation that looms even bigger for those of us who try to study our own subcultures), how does scene help us avoid that? Might I be tempted to flash my knowledge of the scene/ being a scenester in ways that produce the same effect? The visualizations help map out the fluid connection between actors and organizations. Describing local fan communities as "a nexus of niches" is tremendously helpful. I'd be interested to see this kind of network analysis applied to online fandoms across platforms. Thinking about the graph though, I'm not sure I need it to understand what he found. It looks cool (and bonus - !science), but I could do just as well without it. If the graph isn't supporting the argument - what is it doing? Final note - I like the choice of the word "patronage" - it may capture something really interesting about the relational and inter-generational aspect of scenes!

As we are thinking about digital presentation, take a look at the Fembot/Ada site. It's an international collective working on building a digital, feminist peer review process.