A Conversation on Critical Making
The “Margins and Methods” workshop series occurred this spring and summer in the Critical Making Lab at Northeastern University’s Centers for Digital Scholarship. The Margins and Methods workshops were funded through a generous grant from the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science. The team developed a pilot workshop curriculum including handouts, instructions, samples, and other supporting materials. The team was Julia Flanders, Meg Palmer, Marley Bristol, and Colleen Nugent McLean. Colleen facilitated a conversation reflecting on the workshop series. Their comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Colleen: I think to begin, what would be most useful for the readers is to just get a general sense of what the mission and goal of this project was. Meg or Julia, would you start us off there?
Meg: The Margins and Methods project stemmed out of an in-passing conversation between Julia and I acknowledging that our digital scholarship community had this love of baking and cooking and wanting to have a way to share recipes with each other. And that is paired with this shared love of like material, booky, papery things, which led us to some experimentations with zines and thinking about a really homegrown DH cookbook that could pair both recipes and other wanderings, ramblings about our tech processes, and that by juxtaposing those two things next to each other, might we not come up with something like really interesting. You want to chime in, Julia?
Julia: Yes, I love what you just said. I'll also add that a previous PhD advisee of mine, Avery Blankenship, had done a lot of work in her dissertation exploring the relationships between cookbooks and procedural thinking and technical writing. And I found that really provocative and interesting. And so Meg, in our conversation about cookbooks and zines, I found myself thinking about the connections between those topics and a kind of broader digital humanities framing— and the existence of the critical making space in the CDS and also of the critical making working group in the NULab made me feel that there were a lot of interesting threads to pull together here.
Meg: Yeah, and from that, we envisioned this four-part workshop series that would guide participants through the various parts of what we are now calling expressive paper forms that we think are particularly rich for those kinds of conversations. So what form are these pieces of paper taking? What medium are we using to communicate information? What happens when we aggregate the things we make together? And from that, we kind of built out this workshop series and all sorts of other things.
Colleen: Yeah, that's great. What could be really nice to hear from everybody here is how we all came to be involved with it. I originally asked Megan and Julia to talk about it, because I know you two kind of came up with the idea, but I guess I can start us off and then we can kind of go around. I came to this project through my work as the coordinator for the CDS. And I think originally my participation was more so in the event coordination and publicity side of things. And I think then as it continued to go on, I got more involved and more and more invested in it. I really enjoyed making zines at every workshop.
Julia: I can jump in. I feel as though my path for this has stemmed at least partly from my long-standing fascination with bookbinding and with sort of the different kinds of forms that paper can take in communication and in our experience of language. In other words, the ways that paper works as a stratum for language has always fascinated me. And in addition to bookbinding, I have a kind of voyeuristic fascination with artist books and other forms that kind of play with or violate our expectations of what books are like. And in particular, because I feel like in digital humanities, there's been a long-standing narrative about how the book is this tyrannical thing that enforces order and system, et cetera. And I'm like, “not all books…” I was excited with the opportunity to explore.
Meg: For me as a PhD student in the English department with a focus on rhetoric and writing and communication, I am constantly thinking about how form and medium shape meaning and what happens when we experiment with those things. I also come at this from a very DIY ethos that was supported by my previous work in women's centers where the zine is a tool of feminist kind of resistance. And that has expanded into these other more experimental paper forms. Thinking about specifically, like what kinds of narratives or communication different forms of paper enable or constrain, which has also led me to think a lot about like the agency of paper and just what it wants to do. So the way we initially came at this was Julia with this DH critical making lens and then like me with this rhetorical DIY lens and kind of just smashing them together.
Marley: I can share a little bit. My first exposure to what this position would be was just that I knew it was called the “critical making lab coordinator” and that it had something to do with zines. And I had previously made a few zines in high school and my friend had a very small business that I would help them actually create zines and I contributed to a few. So I was really interested in how zine making could be a critical making process and how it can be brought into the scholarly realm and how it can exist in sort of both realms. Then echoing Meg, I also have been a long time rhetoric and composition writing and rhetoric person—so just thinking about how narrative information can take many different forms. One thing that I've really enjoyed is just being exposed to so many things, especially in the digital humanities field. One example is obviously the Collection Builder website that we're working on and just metadata as a whole. Like obviously I knew it existed, but I didn't know all the questions behind it. So I've really taken a more exploratory approach to a lot of this stuff too. I feel like a young Padawan being shown around this world, which I'm really appreciative of.
Colleen: I've been wanting to do more with things like Collection Builder, and working with this project has been a really good opportunity to learn about it in a more friendly collaborative space, which has been really nice. Hearing about how cookbook- and baking-focused the original idea was, I think it would be really interesting to hear about the evolution of the concept and how it went from that very sort of focused angle to end up much more broad.
Julia: I'm going to steer away from the phrase “scope creep”! I think one thing that definitely moved our sense of the virtuous scoping of this project was the desire to articulate a clearer connection to digital humanities, and the idea that Critical Making is a core digital humanities research and development area. I think this is true, but needs to be better articulated. I think what that desire opened up was the sense of a need to move this into more theoretical spaces or more spaces that would give us an opportunity to experiment with more different possibilities. In other words, the cookbook mission could be a very fruitful place to experiment with critical making. Having the parallax of other kinds of things that you can do with these media, I think really helped us see the full potential of the idea and also made it possible for us to imagine this curriculum as a more open-ended curriculum. In other words, a framework within which many different kinds of content ideas could be at home and could be fruitfully explored in a pedagogical way.
Meg: Yeah, I think the modularity of what we're doing is really interesting. And I think what we originally imagined as the content being recipes and cooking turned into something much more meta where the content is in many ways the project and is us thinking through the core questions of the project. In that way, the thinking has become more theoretical and doesn't feel pilot-y, but I think is produced by the fact that we were piloting a thing.
Colleen: I think that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like a goal emerged for the project to make materials that could be shared in a pedagogical context and that could be used with a little bit more utility than just cookbook stuff. I'm wondering if there were any other big goals or what you envisioned as the outcomes before any of the workshops had started?
Meg: One of the outcomes I think that we were hoping for was kind of unrelated to the project at all and was just that we wanted people in this space. We want people who have never been to the CDS yet to have a reason to come to the CDS. And I think to that end, we've been pretty successful. We have folks who have come to multiple workshops, but we also have folks who have come to one. I think just the act of gathering in a really cool space with a snack or two is part of what we wanted to come out of the project. Also I think there was a deep desire for a digital humanities project that slows down. When I think too hard about outcomes and I go, oh, we don't have X or we don't have Y, but we have a project that is moving at a pace that is sustainable, ethical, and responsive to the needs of our community.
Julia: Yeah, I agree with all of that. I would also add that one outcome I hoped for was the opportunity to create connections between the Critical Making Lab and the CDS and other groups that I think are doing really interesting work in a similar vein. So Huskiana Press, for example. And I feel like we haven't done that outreach yet, but we now have something we can bring to those conversations and say, you know, we have some ideas, we have some examples, we would love to talk with you about them.
Colleen: Yeah it has been so interesting watching it all take shape. I wanted to ask about any especially memorable moments or products that were made in any of the workshops. I know one thing that comes to mind for me is that I really liked that plastic zine that you made, Marley, that was see-through. I thought that was a really interesting form and it also happened during the first workshop. I feel like that was kind of when I was like, oh, okay, I can really see how different these forms could become. Are there any sort of standout moments that any of you would want to talk about here?
Marley: Yeah, I'll talk about my little plastic zine. In that first workshop, we were focused on material, or that's kind of the way I took it, and decorative techniques and more expressive stuff. So I just wanted to have a see-through zine. Then not even really on purpose, it prompted a lot of questions about linearity, like what's the front of this and what's the back. There's not a lot of narrative content, but if I were to make a plastic zine with words in it, how would it look when all the pages are stacked on top of each other versus when the book is laying flat open? And then of course the digitization question, how do you digitally capture a transparent object?
Julia: I really love the plastic zine. When you held it up just then, Marley, I was thinking, it's like a palimpsest in reverse. It's like a palimpsest where you can read everything that's in there as opposed to only the outer layer.
Meg: One of the things that stuck out to me was during our workshop on aggregation seeing the ways that we all took the same content and assembled it in very different ways. The way it transformed the original content was really powerful. Because I think it is one of the things that really puts people's brains on display in terms of how you think about information and information in space. So I think that's one of the things that really stuck out to me as a pivotal moment.
I think another one was our decision to move to Collection Builder, which was informed by our conversations with the DRS [Digital Repository Service] and that kind of perspective sharing about their role. They had really interesting questions for us about materials we had kind of just started to take for granted. I think that was a big aha moment for me too, having those folks in the room to say, have you thought about this? And the answer was “no, but we should.”
Julia: Yeah, I think another really interesting series of moments for me was observing how differently people experienced the process aspect of the work. There was a very interesting point in which one of the participants had created a zine in pencil because they felt that there was a kind of provisionality about what they were putting into the zine and in a way that reflected the provisional signals we had sent in framing the activity. Also noting my own practice, there were several cases where I would feel sort of baffled and stymied sitting in front of a blank zine, and then I would start to fill it in. And in the process, I could feel my brain engaging with the task. By the time I was done, I could see what the zine was that I actually wanted to make. I felt like there's all sorts of things written about craft and process and so forth, which I have to sort of take on board. But then also thinking about academic labor and how we frame tasks and the ways that we position ourselves in relation to tasks, and our hesitancy or the obstacles that confront us. The psychological picture that this gives in a very small, low-stakes way, I thought was extremely interesting.
Colleen: It’s like the craft version of the blank Word document when you're trying to write something. I think what you said, Meg, tied pretty nicely to one of the other questions that I had, which was about the dissemination of the zines. What sort of digital modes are looking the most promising or less promising? I know when I first came to the project, it seemed like we were thinking the easiest spot might have just been the DRS because of our positionality here at Northeastern. I think how that change happened is interesting for us to talk about.
Julia: Our colleagues in the DRS are so helpful and they really entered into the spirit of our questions and challenges, which were: how much of what we want to represent about these things can the DRS represent? And the DRS is already a very powerful space, but optimized for retention and kind of uniformity across a very wide range of things. I know that the DRS is also a work in progress. Future versions are going to emphasize, more than the current one does, the sort of diversity of metadata that projects might think of. But at the moment, the advice we got was that the DRS was going to be a very good place for a simple version of the thing, but not necessarily a good place for the more exploratory roles that we thought metadata might play. So I think that then turned us towards a question of where could we house this that would give us more latitude for those kinds of experiments? Then just by coincidence, in another part of our universe, there was experimentation happening with Collection Builder.
Meg: Yeah, and some of the questions that we were asking were related to process and product. What do we do with materials that are created during a workshop that aren't finished? Is there a space for those in whatever form the digital collection takes? If we think the answer is yes, what purpose are they serving? Who is that for? How is it related to other items in a collection or to other materials that we've created? Are some of these unfinished materials meant to be remixed and finished by somebody else? This brought up questions about file format and how those objects were linked. Due to our experimentation with Collection Builder, we thought that that might be a great space that could reflect some of those ambiguities. And also aligned with our ethos of the rest of the project. The GitHub universe allows for iteration in a very tangible and visible way that matches some of our other goals for the project.
Colleen: That makes a lot of sense. It's been a really great opportunity to get more comfortable in the world of GitHub and Collection Builder. I've been thinking a lot about what our experience with trying to digitize these physical objects has taught us about the relationship between physical materials and their digital representations? What's lost or what is potentially gained? Do we have any even preliminary thoughts on best practices for doing this sort of work? It seems like, from my experience, there's not as much of an existing roadmap for this sort of work as there is for an archive of manuscripts or photographs.
Julia: Yeah, it's really a research topic in its own right and one that I think we sort of tripped over rather than baking into the budgeting and planning. It also is really striking how expensive complexity is, right? As much as it's beautiful to say that we're exploring the complexities of paper forms and their informationality in the ways that they can house different kinds of narratives. It's so bizarre that it turns out that's also more expensive when you go to digitize the thing, expensive in terms of expertise, challenges, difficulty, the kind of equipment you need, right? That's not an unforeseen, but an odd wrinkle in the aesthetics of the universe.
Meg: I feel like we have artifacts particularly related to aggregation where for us, the point is no longer the content, but what happens when it is stapled to other things versus glued to something else versus found in a book that folds in a weird way in a pocket. At that point it doesn't matter as much that there's a recipe for pickles in there. What matters is our theoretical conversations about that object. That is very challenging to replicate in a digital space because so much of it is about how do I kind of handle this object and how do I glean meaning from it if I was not the one who made it? So I think the questions that we're asking are kind of weird.
Julia: I'm kind of curious actually, Marley, about your coming at this from the perspective of the zines and the material aspects, before you had perhaps even gotten one foot fully or partly into the digital world. In other words, does the digitization process feel integral to the kinds of missions you bring to this? I would love to hear more about that.
Marley: I think it's interesting, like you said, having entered this world somewhat recently, at least compared to all of you. But I did have an in, which is that these materials we're working with I'm familiar with. I came in with an understanding of the DIY culture as a mode of resistance. That was my in and then learning about all of the questions, dilemmas, challenges, affordances, limitations of digitizing these types of objects has been really, really interesting. It has only made me more curious about this whole field. Our conversations about metadata, I kind of knew a little bit about it, but now I really understand,for example, what is the difference between form and genre? It's not something that I was previously aware of, but I wasn't super curious or it didn't feel like something I wanted to spend a lot of time on, but now that's not the case anymore because I have had a lot of exposure to it in a way that seems familiar to me, which is zines. So it's been super, super fruitful and important.
Colleen: I think that ties pretty nicely into one of my other questions which is just how are we all planning on taking what we've learned through this experience into our own work and our own practice? I know for me, it feels almost silly to say something so small, but I think in the past few years, especially post-pandemic really, everything was on the computer. And I've moved my to-do list into a paper form and that seems small, but it's felt pretty transformative for me, being able to return back to the material world a little bit more than I had been. I feel like that's something I'm taking not just in my academic life, but just my life in general.
Julia: Yeah, I feel the same way. In an odd way, I feel as though the domain of static site, lo-fi digital spaces is aligned for me with my paper to-do list in ways that I find baffling because obviously, Collection Builder is also digital. And yet it feels digital in a different way and maybe because it exposes rather than concealing, right? The thing that I like about my physical notebooks is the way in which they wear process on their surface and the ways in which process kind of leaves its traces all over the place. Something about GitHub Pages sort of does that too, both with the version log and also with that sense of step by step. So that's given me a lot to think about just in terms of how I categorize things and what they feel like.
Meg: One of the things that I am taking from this is, similarly, an acceptance of things in progress. I think there is so much about our culture that prioritizes products. And there is a version of myself that looks at what we've done and goes, “but we don't have the thing we said we wanted at the very beginning, which was everybody's recipes in one place in a form that is neat and tidy and easily shareable, right?” I am trying to be the version of myself that looks at what we've done and goes, “yeah, but look at this other thing that we did!” Now I'm thinking completely differently about cooking in general. And I like how we put so many interesting things in a room together that aren't generally in a room together. It would be silly to assume that it's going to produce the thing we thought it was going to. So I think one of the things that I'm taking is a deeper appreciation for process and a different appreciation for the physical. Because I've always been a bit of a Luddite, but now I feel I have a theoretical foundation for which I can base some of those claims on.
Marley: I have two main takeaways. I really came in from an outside and introductory perspective. I have a renewed sense of commitment to thinking about critical making as a practice, whether it be zine making, fiber arts, or cooking, really any kind of hands-on community-based crafting or creating. So thinking about how ripe that is for scholarship.
Then the other thing is Collection Builder. I didn't know what it was before, but I'm just thinking about all of the possibilities, both for personal use and for non-personal use. I’m thinking about the act of putting objects or things into one place and how do the interpretation of those objects differ when you frame it in a certain way? I also like the DIY aspect of it. We moved away from the DRS and kind of are taking things into our own hands. That's how we are allowed to ask these questions and make the decisions.Thinking about Collection Builder and the process kind of feels like a practice of critical making in a way too.
Julia: Yeah, I feel as though the emphasis on doing it yourself as a critical making practice is potentially one of the really fruitful pedagogical framings that we'll take away and that we'll be able to emphasize when we do the series of workshops again for perhaps a bigger audience. I think that's something that will travel particularly interestingly.
Meg: One of the early things that I really appreciated about the project was our dedication to making good instructional materials. And I am excited for them to have a public home on the Collection Builder site because we were really thoughtful about showing people how to fold a thing in a particular way and also being explicit about why we've chosen these particular forms this time around. I am excited that those will get to live a life and can be used by other folks who are interested in bringing some of these expressive paper forms into their own work or into their own classroom. That feels like a nice thing that we have done that will live a life beyond the workshops and I hope people use them.
Julia: One of the things that was really striking to me about the workshops themselves was how joyful they were. There are a lot of spaces of digital inquiry that are very heavy these days. And this felt like one space where people had a genuine delight in the topic, which was very nice.
Colleen: That feels as good a place as any to wrap things up, thanks all for a lovely conversation!