Publications

In this chapter, Spencer D. C. Keralis applies the framework of media archaeology to the study of queer zines, positioning these ephemeral publications as vital sites of resistance and community-building. Keralis argues that queer zines function not merely as historical artifacts but as dynamic media objects that disrupt traditional archival hierarchies and heteronormative narratives of book history. By examining the physical and digital lifecycles of these works, the author highlights how the "tactile" and "underground" nature of zine production—ranging from photocopied aesthetics to hand-stapled bindings—serves as a deliberate strategy for maintaining queer visibility and agency outside of mainstream institutional gatekeeping. The chapter further explores the intersection of Digital Humanities (DH) and Book History (BH), specifically addressing the ethical challenges of digitizing queer ephemera. Keralis cautions against the "sanitization" of queer history that can occur during the transition from physical to digital formats, where the radical context of a zine’s original circulation may be lost. Instead, the author advocates for a "slow" and "relational" approach to digital scholarship that prioritizes the lived experiences and privacy of the creators. Ultimately, Keralis demonstrates that by treating queer zines through a media archaeological lens, scholars can recover lost voices and better understand the material conditions of queer creative labor. The work serves as both a methodological intervention and a call for a more inclusive, justice-oriented practice within the fields of digital scholarship and bibliography.

Digital humanities and book history are both potentially expansive tools for advocacy, activism, and recovery work in our current moment. This collection extends an invitation to readers to reflect on power, privilege, and potential in the wider fields of digital humanities and history of the book. Contributions from an international community of scholars explore the limitations of digital collections, the potential of digital methodologies to enrich bibliographic research, and the pleasures and challenges of interdisciplinary approaches to book history scholarship.

During the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, library workers learned very quickly that institutions see library workers as instrumental to student learning outcomes and faculty research and teaching needs, not as partners or collaborators in these endeavours. In effect, library workers operate institutionally as infrastructure to be relied upon, not as colleagues with whom to collaborate. This chapter seeks to re-centre the human to address this inequity, reconceiving infrastructure through conspicuous repair, rather than attempting to restore a seamless, prior whole. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, the Design Justice Principles, and the Japanese tradition of visible mending, this chapter proposes that by re-centring the human we can begin to recognise the interrelationality of infrastructure.

In this chapter, we argue that academic librarians can better represent how their labor contributes to the complex ecosystem of digital scholarship in the humanities through what we describe as a documentary practice of digital humanities, one that reveals librarians’ positionality within and among other DH stakeholders. This documentary practice can provide a model of self-advocacy for others in the DH ecosystem whose labor is similarly elided or assumed and can help make DH more sustainable, equitable, and just for all of its practitioners.