This presentation was delivered to the Digital Humanities Congress at Sheffield in the UK in the summer of 2024.

Presentation Slides

Link here: Presentation Slides

Presentation Script

Together, we are the co-founders and co-directors of HIVES, a Research Workshop and Speaker Series. HIVES connects students and community members in the greater Lansing area and online with disabled artists, scholars, and activists to model the importance of access in shaping thriving environments. HIVES is an ongoing scholarly, artistic, and communal organization that combines disability studies with intersectional pursuits. 

As part of this work, I have acted as liaison between arts organizations and grant projects, authored white papers on access concerns such as teaching art classes online in a screen-reader friendly fashion, and presently sit on the Michigan Humanities Grant DEIA Advisory Committee.

In past years, we have themed events and publications around Disability, interdependence, and Animal Studies; Disability, Race, and Performance; and 

Disability and speculation. Each of these thematic arrangements resulted in a widely-accessible publication called the Buzz-Zine.

What is the Buzz-Zine project, and what makes it accessible? Historically, zines are homemade publications that were made by fans–fans of science fiction, fans of punk music, fans of just about anything who want to make something easily and put it into the world. HIVES wanted to take this practice of quickly printing exciting ideas on paper and make it accessible to the disability community–not everyone is able to access a paper zine, perhaps due to being blind or having low vision, perhaps due to shaking hands that can’t hold delicate paper.

It’s this foregrounding of access that is most important in the work that we do. We access is tacked on as an afterthought, it implies that the entire project is for someone else and must be changed to be accessible to other communities. By foregrounding access, we insist that everyone has a place in the zine and that everyone has a place at the table. Doing work in this manner is part of a collective act of responsibility and inclusive practice.

 In order to address the question of accessibility, HIVES turned to the digital humanities and the tools that exist for access in order to make a multimedia zine that holds together contributions from multiple contributors and has included everything from documentary video to yoga paintings to poetry. This year, the zine is being released in partnership with the Creativity in the Time of COVID-19 grant and the exhibitions in multiple locations around Michigan under the name Art as Medicine: Creativity in the Time of COVID-19.

In order to make the final product as accessible as possible, the Buzz-Zine has five iterations: a print copy, a braille edition, a large-print Google Doc, a downloadable alt-text .pdf, and an HTML version, all accessible through the HIVES Website. The printed editions are circulated among libraries and folks who request them when they are first printed. They also include short links and QR codes that connect readers to the digital zines and their attendant accessibility features.

In this move from analog to digital zine, we also introduce a suite of features meant to increase access for those using technological interfaces to engage with the zine. Among these include high-contrast digital images, alt-text for screen reader technology, detailed image descriptions that make visual media apprehensible as language, and captioned videos for the Deaf and hard of hearing.

The Google Document format allows for online reading. Because of the shared, viewable practice, readers can copy the Google Document form of the zine and adjust the size of the text to best suit their reading style’s font style and size. The downloadable .pdf file means that the zine can circulate as a link or file in the ways that paper zines were passed around, while maintaining the embedded alt text for images. The HTML version on the website brings all of these features together and acts as a digital archive of each of the zines.

This is the cover of the Buzz-Zine: Volume 2. It is “We Will Not Be Silent” by Chanika Svetvilas. The image description from the artist reads: My gaping mouth fills the entire page of lightly lined paper as I bare my crooked teeth. At the back of the mouth in caps and reversed is an EXIT sign. In front of the mouth are three lines of heavy barbed wire centered in front of the mouth. 

HIVES has been able to use our background in access consulting as part of the work being done at Michigan State University on the Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: 

Art as a Tool for Combating Inequity and Injustice Mellon Just Futures Initiative Grant. This project, called Creativity in the Time of COVID-19 for the sake of brevity, was a swift response to the global COVID pandemic. Proposed in 2020 at the height of the pandemic and put into practice less than a year later, The Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC) in Michigan State University’s Department of English created an open call for submissions to gather an intersectional collection of creative outputs, coping strategies, and human reactions created during the pandemic.

All too often, the voices of those most impacted by so-called natural disasters are the ones that fall to the wayside when creating archives. Natalie Phillips, Julian Chambliss, Soohyun Cho, and Tushya Mehta, among others involved with the grant, took steps to make sure that the records of how people creatively responded to isolation, social distancing, were maintained as accessibly as possible. 

They began with the simple question: How have diverse communities turned to creative outlets to process the individual & collective trauma of Covid-19? A cursory glance at social media at the time showed some examples of ways people were using the newfound time not spent on in-person gatherings or commuting: fresh attempts at baking, viral dance trends, and photographs of landscapes devoid of people and littered with disposable masks.  

In order to receive as many responses as possible, the grant created a survey that was meant to reduce the barriers commonly associated with academic projects: limited scope, single language, jargon, lack of image descriptions, lack of ASL, lack of transcripts. The resulting survey was offered in multiple languages, with plain language English, and as an ASL video survey. The result was more than 2,000 unique submissions that ran the gamut from still images of grandparents who couldn’t travel reading over Zoom to toddlers who couldn’t at the time be vaccinated to Minecraft creations to interactive AR tributes to those who have died from now–endemic COVID. 

With these submissions, it was absolutely necessary to continue the access planning that went into the beginning of the project through to its completion. All too often, access is an afterthought. For Creativity in the Time of COVID-19, access has been bone deep. Using grant funds, CIC-19 commissioned and open-source adaptation of Omeka S that would include a full suite of access tools and descriptors to make sure that access was included on the final database. 

The materials on the Creativity in the Time of COVID-19 website are attached and associated to the same elements that HIVES incorporates into the Buzz-Zine. Still images feature an image description as part of the archival data in order to make the objects accessible for researchers of art that use screen-reading software. The often paragraph-length descriptions are paired with 1-2 sentence alt text descriptions that offer the option to skim.

Moving images are similarly supported with access in mind, including subtitles for dialogue, audio description for the action that takes place on the screen, and transcripts that contain all of this information in a single file that is not bound by the time of the performance taking place in submissions. In these ways, the Creativity in the Time of COVID-19 archive not only acknowledges that disabled researchers are out there, we expect that any of them can wander onto our site and use it with as few barriers to access as possible.

In order to make sure all entries are documented in a way that is sustainable and can be returned to, the project insisted on a controlled vocabulary that recognizes how creative expression lines up with formal language that controls the arrangement of art. To do so, the data team began with the main differentials of Dublin Core: moving images, text files, etc. We then organized each item by its specific type–still images striated by those of digital composition or of photographs or of painted works. Finally, we used the Getty Art and Architecture thesaurus as the controlled vocabulary of each item in the archive structured principally on the visual works entries.

The front end of the archive, then, takes all of this into account. It blends the necessary items of a digital archive with key access features in anticipation of whatever researchers may want to consult it. The website is screen-reader friendly, has a researcher access portal, and among the resources it offers includes access tools as a model for future archives.

As an example, here is one object from the archive, “La Sagrada Papel” by creator Arthur Lopez. In addition to Dublin Core language that places it in conversation with other images of physical objects, it notes that the image is representative of a woodcarving. The image description of the item clarifies that it is a photograph of a hand carved and painted wooden sculpture on a dark blue altar the altar is labeled La Sagrada Papel (“the sacred paper” in Spanish) and depicts a roll of toilet paper with painted gold spikes emitting from the back of the roll like radiant light.