Research by Hand: About

The media and platforms through which scholars and students can collaborate, produce research, and communicate their findings have multiplied dizzyingly, with new digital tools appearing every day. In this climate, the handmade book–scrappy, time-consuming, limited in its circulation–may seem like an anachronism. In fact, zines (self-published multimedia booklets), comics, chapbooks, and other handmade books continue to be popular, receiving new attention from scholars and educators for their unique pedagogical properties and the alternative economies, guided by logics of the gift and mutual aid, in which they circulate. Chelsea Lonsdale writes, “Zines can offer students a sense of ownership that other types of writing, especially classroom writing, do not provide. Zines also introduce students to multimodal, or multigenre composing, within a single document.”1 Contemporary comics reflect an unprecedented diversity of creators and genres, and have also been embraced by a wide array of researchers. The fields of graphic medicine and graphic ethnography have their own journals, annual conferences, and/or book series devoted to them. In the fields of literary studies, book history, and art history, new work on and in collaboration with small presses–including artist books, fine press, and DIY publications–continues to expand the possibilities for interdisciplinary scholarship.