Daniela Capistrano (People of Color Zine Project), Jenna Freedman (Barnard Zine Library), and Melissa Rogers (Women’s Studies Multimedia Studio, University of Maryland) are interested in opening up a conversation about issues of ethics and materiality when it comes to digitizing and digitally archiving zines: do-it-yourself, independent publications, usually circulated on a small scale. What is gained and what is lost when they are changed from print to pixels? We explore questions of fair use regarding materials that are sometimes orphan works, and other ethical concerns of zine archivists, librarians, scholars and creators.

As zines gain institutional histories by finding homes in both community and university libraries and archives, as well as in digital formats online, it is important to ask what is at stake in digitizing them. What are the goals of digitizing, and what are ethical ways to go about archiving and circulating the ephemeral (and often anti-copyright) medium of zines? How might digitizing initiatives best involve the members of the communities to which zines matter, and what practices can help ensure that digital archiving serves their needs? What kinds of collaborative, activist, and artistic projects could come out of efforts to digitize zines and preserve the worlds from which they emerge?

A little background reading:

People of Color Zine Project, Queer Zine Archive Project

Licona, Adela. “(B)orderlands’ Rhetorics and Representations: The Transformative Potential of Feminist Third-Space Scholarship and Zines.” NWSA Journal. Vol. 17, No. 2 (2005), pp. 104-129. www.jstor.org/stable/4317128 (accessed March 15, 2013). [Part of her new book Zines in Third Space!]

Piepmeier, Alison. “Why Zines Matter: Materiality and the. Creation of Embodied Community.” American Periodicals. Vol. 18, No. 2 (2008), pp. 213-238. www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/41219799 (accessed March 15, 2013).

Wooten, Kelly. “Why We’re Not Digitizing Zines | Digital Collections Blog.” News, Events & Exhibits – Duke University Libraries Blogs. blogs.library.duke.edu/digital-collections/2009/09/21/why-were-not-digitizing-zines (accessed March 15, 2013).

SESSION NOTES

Michelle Moravec and I are interested in a discussion of the risks of speaking and silence when race, racism, and feminism are the topics of conversations.  The starting point for this conversation will be a few blog posts that exemplify both ends of the spectrum–the silence and the speaking.  In May 2012, I wrote a blog post titled Of Clicks and Cliques: White Women, Women of Color, Diversity and Tension. Michelle Moravec wrote a response (because hard questions deserve answers), and we hoped for a dialogue around the recurring tensions between white women and women of color in the academy. The posts were met with silence. Although my post generated 130 visits to my blog in just a few hours and remains the most visited post on the blog, very few women responded, and of those who did (mostly via e-mail), Michelle was the only white woman to respond. Almost a year later we both watched as Tressie McMillan Cottom asked what seemed the most mild of questions about the silence surrounding “The Onion’s” slur against little Quvenzhané Willis: Did White Feminists Ignore Attacks on Quvenzhané Wallis? That’s An Empirical Question. The backlash didn’t just come from defensive white women on twitter but, as McMillan Cottom recounts in a follow-up post (On White Women’s Anger), from Women’s Studies faculty enraged by her question.

We are interested in a discussion that aims to get underneath both the silence and the speaking (and the shouting). If, as so many have argued, social media and digital communities can be a space for open dialogue, why the silence? Why the shouting? And what do we do with the fact that when a white feminist wrote on the same subject (On Quvenzhané Wallis ) she got a very different response?

SESSION NOTES