Digital Humanities on Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

How To Make an Academic Zine for a Public Audience

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re at all familiar with the fiercely independent, anti-institutional history of the zine, you might reject the supposition that they can be used within academic circles. Yet zines have potential as a creative, cohesive outlet for public history.

Zines originated around the 1930s in science fiction circles but are most often associated with the latter half of the twentieth century. Used as an alternative art form outside of mainstream media, zine authors from the 1960s through the 1990s used self-publishing to broadcast bold ideas through small, often collaborative, pamphlets. Zine topics could range from birth control to bus routes, but almost always were intended to communicate something significant from the creator to the outside world. For a brief history of zines, visit the Rare Book Collection at UNC Libraries.

South Asia Collections at The Met: A Preliminary Computational Look

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published at https://www.deepthimurali.com/art-history-and-data/south-asia-at-the-met

Museum metadata is messy metadata (and sometimes, also, just messy in non-computational ways.) But museum metadata is also historical archive that scholars and the public alike ignore.

Every object in a museum collection arrives with a story attached — a donor’s name, a date, a department assignment, a classification. Individually, these are administrative details: the bureaucratic residue of how an object got from somewhere else to a vitrine, a storage shelf, or a database entry. But at scale, across thousands of objects and more than a century of acquisitions, these details become historical data. They become a record of how an institution decided what South Asia was, who got to decide that, and when those decisions were made.