Crunching Around

Zines and DIY Digital Scholarship

Abstract

Crunching Around: Zines and DIY Scholarship documents and reflects upon work the author presented at the 2025 meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. It is based on a panel presentation entitled “Exploring DIY Geographies and Communities in Broken Pencil and Punk Planet Using Digital Methods," and focuses on both proprietary and open digital scholarship tools to explore zine archives and to locate entry points and workflows for engaging with zines' digital afterlives. The zine narrates the author's ideas and thought process for comparative work with ProQuest TDM Studio's geospatial analysis of Broken Pencil, the storied Canadian metazine, and his own homebrew processing of Punk Planet, a U.S. publication similar in content and audience, available on the Internet Archive. The author considers some affordances and tensions in working with established and do-it-yourself interfaces for doing digital scholarship in Zine Studies, concluding that the messy, open-ended, and playful ethos of zine culture is a suitable match for hands-on experimental approaches and that “crunching around” in the code, data, and zine content offers us ways of knowing typically occluded by closed corporate platforms.