On March 15, as the CDC advised against gatherings of 50 people or more and states like Illinois were banning in-person dining, longtime self-publisher Marc Fischer got to work on his risograph machine, printing 100 copies of the first issue of Quaranzine in his Chicago basement. He was grappling with the gravity of the spreading pandemic and kept busy by photographing and writing about his compost worms. The result — a two-sided, one-page zine — included images of his worms with the text: “These worms have the luxury of not knowing about the Corona virus. They are out there eatin’…
Author: Jason Luther
Jason Luther
Jason Luther is Assistant Professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University. His work focuses on zines, self-publishing histories, DIY culture, and multimodal (counter)publics.
As their time with the DRC draws to a close, the 2016-2017 DRC Fellows offer reflections on their time, what they’ve learned, and where they go from here. David Coad The DRC has been a wonderful experience of engaging in and promoting community in our scholarly world. I am using this post to share some things I’ve learned about digital community building—something I am interested in and something I believe is very key to the DRC, it’s purpose and success. I recently published an article in Computers and Composition about graduate students engaging in community building on Twitter at the 2015 Computers…
When we circulated the CFP for our 10th blog carnival back in September, we asked scholars to consider digital publishing by looking both backward and forward: to consider how authorship, processes, and tools have changed, to assess present challenges, and imagine how digital publishing might look to future publics depending on how the field responded to these challenges. The responses to our call took us as far back as 2003 and had us look forward to emerging new spaces, such as MSU’s Digital Publishing Lab. In addition to a temporal approach, our contributors also: accounted for the increasingly complex writing…
The ubiquity of digital platforms, spaces, and networks for writing in our current moment makes it difficult to imagine forms of publishing that exclusively circulate in print. Yet, innovations in mobility, connectivity, and multimodality suggest that the effects of digital publishing are echoing deeply into our larger socio-technical systems. Among these effects are increases in networked participatory scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2011), more visible and active self-publishing cultures (Laquintano, 2016), and significant shifts to the supply chains of the book publishing industry (Martin & Tian, 2010). Of course, the effects of digital publishing have also produced challenges for our institutions,…