Expressive Paper

Contents: About the Collection | About the About Page

Workshops

We developed and hosted a series of four zine-making workshops held at Northeastern University’s Critical Making Lab housed in the Centers for Digital Scholarship (CDS). This workshop series considered the scholarly implications of zine-making as a community-based critical making practice. With the help of our participants, we explored the capabilities of zines and other paper forms to encourage collaborative engagement with physical and digital modes of expression, narrative, knowledge, and information.

Interactive Paper: experiment with form

Date: 03/11/2026

Location Critical Making Lab, Northeastern University

The items in this colleciton were born from the first workshop in the series. “Interactive Paper” provided participants with instructions and materials to experiment with traditional zines, chapbooks/pamphlets, flexagons, and more. The workshop was finished with reflective questions about the critical making process and the place of zine-making in the digital humanities field.

Expressive Paper: experiment with medium

Date: 04/08/2026

Location: Critical Making Lab, Northeastern University

The items in this collection were born from the second workshop of the series. Focusing on medium and its connections to information materialization, this workshop instructed participants to experiment with decorative and expressive techniques on blank, pre-made zine forms. Discussion questions about hor narrative and information can be represented through zine-making were posed to prompt participants to consider their creations in the context of critical making practices and materiality.

Remixable Paper: experiment with aggregation/scale

Date: 05/13/2026

Location: Critical Making Lab, Northeastern University

All items in this collection came from the third zine-making workshop in the series. Participants were encouraged to continue working on previously made zines and paper forms for the purpose of aggregation, remixability, and digital archiving. Driven by questions of how the zine form can be picked apart, put back together, and preserved for archival purposes, “Remixable Paper” sought to critically engage with questions of linearity and preservation.

Celebrating Paper: reflecting and sharing

Date: 06/24/2026

Location: Critical Making Lab, Northeastern University

This workshop featured a cumulative presentation of zines and other forms produced throughout the series. Accompanied by critical making questions about how information can take material form, and how shared practices of composition and experimentation constitute knowledge presentation, “Celebrating Paper’ aimed to take and evaluative look at the series. Participants were invited to assemble and bind their own collection of zines while discussing the uses of zine-making in teaching contexts and how to represent complex paper forms digitally.