Great start for a semester-long project!

Let me just express gratitude for the DH curriculum in GC. It is so practical, open!

With a lot of enthusiasm, I signed up for this class, and last week I decided to be part of Kristy’s project. I am captivated by the community-driven approach that goes with my primary goal of joining DH, i.e., the storytelling of the unheard, the outliers. To me, a zine is a space for creative storytelling that has a lot of room to grow.

Now comes the brainstorming! We had a fruitful meeting during the weekend. I am amazed by Kristy’s passion and knowledge of zines. We talked about different aspects of the projects, such as different forms of storytelling, visualization, doing multimodal analysis of Zine, focusing on the final output from this endeavor, making the website community-facing, i.e., allowing people to submit Zine, considering GC as a community to begin our experiment, and so on and so forth. There was a lot we brought to the table. We eventually decided to start with the GC community, and we are currently in contact with GC librarian Alycia Sellie, who has extensive experience in the field and is enthusiastic about Zine.

Here’s my thought! There are some questions that must be addressed.

1. Since Zine often has multimodal content, like a comic, can we interpret Zine to bring the creator’s story and emotions to light? We are still unsure whether we should ask for participants’ motivations behind their zine. We do not want to put a boundary on creative thinking.
2. Can I do any computational analysis for Zine? 2D shape analysis may be
3. How do I compress a zine during digitization to maintain maximum quality at the smallest possible size?
4. Can I build a dataset of zines to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to generate zines?
5. What is the best visualization of zines?
6. Can Turtle be used to draw digital zines with Python?

I would love to follow up!