Kludging It All Together
Location
NYPL’s Stavros Niarchos Library Foundation, 5th Ave + 40th St, Room 604 — or virtual!
Agenda
This week we’ll wrap up and discuss our final publication. I’ll invite each of you to submit a brief proposal for your publication contribution to help structure our class discussion (a mix of small groups and plenary), and to give me something to respond to — to help guide your work over the next couple months
To Prepare for Today
Please submit, via Google Docs — in editable doc form (so I can offer comments!) — a brief (900-word max) proposal outlining the “what,” “why, “how,” and “with whom” of your proposed contribution. A sentence (or two or three) for each question should be sufficient 🙂 Please share with me at my metro.org address!
- 1. What would you like your contribution to be about? What critical question(s) would you like to ask? What theme(s) would you like to investigate? What topics or subjects do you plan to focus on?
- 2. Why do you want to engage with this subject matter? How does it embody “misfit,” why does it matter to you, why might it matter to — or otherwise resonate for — our broader publics/communities, and how might it serve our publication goals?
- 3. How would you like to present your work? What form will it take? Will it be an essay, a short academic article, a poem, a recipe, a photo essay, a speculative finding aid, or some other genre? Why this format? What might it look or sound or feel like? How will your chosen mode of expression give form to (i.e., “do justice to”) your subject matter?
- 4. With whom are you in dialogue? What are your networks of citation and lineages of provenance? Are there aesthetic inspirations, scholarly references, precedent projects, particular archival collections, professional communities, etc, informing your work? How might you integrate acknowledgement of these influences — even if your work won’t include traditional footnotes?
- 5. Are there particular NYC knowledge institutions, special collections, information worker professional communities — any bodies within the Metro NY Library Council orbit — that your work will draw upon, celebrate, remix, challenge, or otherwise reference? I ask because we ultimately want to find subtle (or not-so subtle!) ways to highlight our publication’s pertinence to METRO members!
- 6. Are there any questions you have for me regarding your own contribution? Anything you’re not sure about, any difficult choices you’re facing, any references you’re looking for, any connections you’d like to make? Ask me! I’ll do my best to help!
- 7. Are there particular skills (e.g., collective editing, riso printing, book binding, etc) you’d like to develop, and/or learn from others in our group, through the collaborative production of our book, and would you be willing to contribute additional time — most likely beyond our two foundational workshops — if we collectively decide to adopt a more hands-on, bespoke production process?
It would be tremendously helpful to me if you could please submit these proposals by 6pm on Wednesday, December 3, so I have time to skim through everyone’s plans and organize you into thematic groups before our Thursday class 🙂 In the subsequent days, I’ll carefully review everyone’s proposal and offer substantial feedback — guidance, references, caveats, etc — that’s intended to help shape your thinking into the new year, leading up to our first workshop!