I get the Mastodon idealism—the openness & community orientation are genuinely appealing—but I just had to press the TOOT! button >10 times to post something because of server issues—I suspect for 90+% of potential users that interaction would be their last interaction with this site—even if they share the Mastodon ideals, the tech has to work well enough that using it doesn't become a chore
Had two (related) ideas for a Skeuomorph Press’ logo/printer’s mark, so I sketched them in Illustrator & carved them in some scrap wood in the FabLab —I essentially printed from plywood so they’re messy, but I think the idea works. Which is best?
@samplereality @ryancordell
Will academic institutions or their components set up their own instances?
Will scholarly communities congregate in instances, as some #histodons have been discussing?
Will easy account transfer from instance to instance allow project-or-discipline-oriented instances to wax and wane with less fallout that abandoned blogs and websites?
@ryancordell Scratch the surface, and some fundamental differences show up. The ability of each server to establish its own ethos and moderation policy, for example. The overall culture of content warnings and attention to accessibility strikes a different tone too. The lack of quote posts is a deliberate choice too, designed to discourage people from talking over each other.
@ryancordell I think the federations are actually a huge value-add. From building affinity networks, to protecting privacy, to even the ability to extract and analyze your own social graph, the data ownership and community affordances of a
#fediverse are a significant improvement over Twitter. Also, it's ahead of the game on accessibility, e.g. automatic OCR in image descriptions
@ryancordell The greatest non-Twitter thing is Mastodon being part of the fediverse. This means you can follow with your mastodon account others on
#pixelfed (like federated Instagram),
#peertube (federated YouTube),
#lemmy,
#Bookwyrm etc. And because it is all based on the open web standard
#activitypub you can also build additional software to interact with anybody on the fediverse. Open standards make the ecosystem shine.
So I guess the real question for me over here—& I think the big question for this space, generally—is whether the *only* appeal of Mastodon is its not-Twitter-ness. So far as I can tell, it does most of what Twitter does, though some things are clunkier—& it doesn't do anything Twitter doesn’t do, right? There aren't new paradigms it unlocks, I don't think. & If that's the case, can it survive past the moment when "not Twitter" is what people are looking for?
Please share—a new CU FabLab/UIUC iSchool research project will survey the research, pedagogical, & public service missions of humanities-focused makerspaces in US colleges & universities—this initial survey will help us map where such spaces exist.
https://forms.gle/DFBaAzitNAhizwUc6
SHMLM Data Gathering Survey
Between 2023-2025, researchers at The Champaign-Urbana (CU) Community Fab Lab will be surveying the research, pedagogical, and public service missions of existing humanities-focused makerspaces in US higher education institutions. Surveying the Humanities MakerLab Movement (SHMLM) will seek to identify commonalities among such efforts across disciplines, technologies, and organizational structures and compare their activities and institutional identities with comparable contemporary STEM- or arts-focused maker spaces.
To begin this work, we are seeking basic information about humanities-focused makerspaces in colleges and universities in the United States. For the purposes of this study, we define a humanities makerspace as:
1. having a research and/or pedagogical mission grounded in a humanistic discipline (e.g., literature, history, religious studies, libraries)
2. facilitating hands-on, experiential, participatory approaches to research and/or teaching
While makerspaces often work across disciplinary boundaries, for this research project we are not studying makerspaces with missions or activities primarily grounded in STEM or arts disciplines. While our study might eventually expand to include non-US institutions, in this initial phase we are focused on the US only. This survey seeks only to gather information about what humanities makerspaces exist in the US; we will follow up with specific makerspaces to learn more about their missions, activities, and organizational structures.
The CU Community FabLab is supported by the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and houses its own humanities makerspace, the Skeuomorph Press and Booklab. This research is led by Ryan Cordell, Kyungwon Koh, and Isabella Viega.
We’re interested in a wide range of makerspace approaches/technologies—e.g. letterpress, textiles, 3D modeling, vintage computing, gaming—so long as the space’s research or pedagogy is grounded in a humanities discipline & involves hands-on activities—The research aims to compare the missions & activities of humanities makerspaces—which we believe have expanded in the past decade—with more widespread STEAM-focused makerspaces—so we’re not gathering info about spaces *primarily* focused on STEAM
Portraits of a little girl very worried about her momma (whose back is in lots of pain today)
Tom Elliott
Mark Sample
Jane Adams
Adrian