Digital Humanities practitioners and librarians are increasingly engaging in data embodiment and visceralization. Towards this, “Crafting Encounters with Humanities Data” is a special issue of dh+lib that will explore ways of integrating critical making and data physicalization into library-based digital humanities pedagogy in a variety of forms and modalities, including workshops, course-related instruction, and more.
Methods and topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Crafting (knitting, sewing, crocheting, weaving, etc.) visualizations
- Data physicalization as accessible/tactile data visualizations
- Teaching technological concepts through making
- Digital humanities data objects
- Supporting creative approaches to data and technology
Proposals (~250 words) should describe the topic and/or method being explored, and introduce a tentative idea for a pattern that readers can use to make a similar physical object (see theĀ zineĀ from our earlier special issue). You do not have to be a librarian or work in a library to submit, but the main audience of your piece should be library workers. We also understand these proposals might not represent work already done, and will be flexible if your topic shifts as you do the work.
Inspired by cooking blogs, each piece will have a written narrative + a pattern tied to the theme of the narrative. Narratives can be formal or informal and the recipes will also be gathered into a standalone zine that will be freely available to print/download/share. For inspiration and examples of this work please see part one of this series āMaking Research Tactile: Critical Making and Data Physicalization in Digital Humanitiesā (2024).