Dandizette
What brought about the women’s programming classes?

CHICKPEA:
It in part resulted from a conversation between me and Yossarian – this was after a dissident island radio show (that I’m a part of). We were sitting in the London Action Resource Centre with electronica blaring in the background and cans of red stripe in hand. At some stage in a long conversation I admitted to Yossarian that I wanted to learn programming but that I had some concerns – like where to start, and how I was alienated by the (often quite) macho vibe that surrounds male-dominated techie situations – and the realisation that all the programmers I know are guys and that in the radical social movements in which I get involved a large majority if not ALL of the people involved in the geeky/techie stuff are guys. That’s all a bit shit IMHO.

Yossarian responded by talking about his experience in teaching programming, and also talked about his experience with the macho attitudes in these classroom settings – and expressed an interest in teaching a womyn-only class. And then the moment of “let’s just fuckin do it!” came out of that.
Several crazy summer months went by and then the class started in mid-October and totally kicks ass.

YOSSARIAN:
It’s been cool to get back to geek teaching – I’ve taught a bit before but not for a long time. Since programming is mainly a male-dominated profession and the overwhelming majority of geeks I deal with in my day job as a programmer are men, I thought it’d be interesting to just get into a different environment. It’s been a good learning opportunity for me.

I was particularly interested in trying to figure out what it is that makes programming such a male-dominated profession, whether it’s general sexism, something going on with the educational system, or a general lack of interest in the subject on the part of women. The answers are not totally clear to me, but one thing we can say is that the level of interest in learning about computers has been overwhelming – with no advertising or outreach at all we had six women willing to haul themselves to a Brixton squat every Monday night for three hours, dual-boot their shiny new computers with Linux, learn about how computers and networks function, and start learning to program.
As an anarchist, I’ve got a responsibility to try and challenge privilege and power in society where I find it, so it was also in some ways a political duty for me to address the sexism that keeps women out of technical professions and social movement tech in particular; and teaching women to geek out seemed to me to be a better response than giving boy geeks a lecture about sexism.

Lastly, as someone who does a lot of coding for political projects, I’ve got a lot of work to do, so the opportunity to train up some new programming talent is hopefully going to work out in my favour – I am hoping to get some useful code out of the crew if they’re interested in working on some projects we’ve already got going!

Dandizette
Why did you decide on Ruby? How have the sessions gone so far?

CHICKPEA:
Sessions have been great, really entertaining and interesting. I really feel like my little universe is expanding every week, that there are possibilities being opened like doors everywhere…the realisation that I can learn the skills to make things for myself (DIY or die!) – which has been the case with other areas but so far hasn’t extended much into the world of how computers work…until now! And that is incredibly empowering. Yossarian makes a point of talking about how things can be used, what functionality certain things have, which is also motivating.

YOSSARIAN:
Ruby or Python seemed like a natural choice, since they’re both expressive, object-oriented, interpreted languages with good standard libraries and what I think are good programming cultures. The obvious question is, “why not PHP?”. PHP is easy to install and use but there’s a lot of shitty code and too many sloppy attitudes for my liking – I find it difficult to take seriously a language which uses a backslash as a namespace separator, for example. For me that design choice is symbolic of a whole set of PHP stupidities which I just couldn’t in good conscience pass on to a group of people who could potentially become good programmers.

Java, C, or C++ require too much messing around with the programming environment to be useful in a once-a-week class – they’re often used in university courses which get thousands of applicants to “weed out the dumb students”, but the goal of this class wasn’t to take 1000 applicants and turn them into 10 units of cubicle-fodder, it was to get a bunch of people together so they could find out whether they would enjoy programming.
So far the classes have gone pretty well, we’ve gone through the basics of object-oriented programming, Ruby, HTTP requests, DNS, html, css, request routing, database tables and fields, and object-relational mapping (all this in six classes!). I don’t think anybody in the class could stand on their own feet yet and just attack a project by themselves, but I think at this point we are ready to maybe switch formats and move from a sort of traditional teacher-student setup to more of a people-hanging-out-working-on-a-project-together setup. We’ll see how it goes.

Dandizette
What’s the setup for the group? Have you hosted these kind of sessions before?

CHICKPEA:
Setup? Monday nights, 7pm, the Library House (a social centre in Camberwell) – we have use a room (which comes complete with tea, a heater, a projector, a big table, lots of chairs) – we sit around with our laptops and geek it up.

Yossarian plugs into the projector so we see his desktop and mainly leads the class but we’re always talking to each other, asking questions, cracking jokes, helping each other out…all class participants, besides Yossarian, are womyn and this is the only stipulation to get involved at this stage.

YOSSARIAN:
Everybody showed up on Monday night at 7, installed Linux on their computers in the first class, and then it was a whirlwind tour of web application building, mostly with me talking while using an LCD projector and madly dashing around helping people to get their programs running. So far we’ve had six classes; like I said above, I think that if we continue in the new year the format will change somewhat. It was the first time we tried anything like this so I’ll be more prepared next time – this one was pretty rough in terms of lack of planning or anticipating problems, if there is a next set of classes I’ll have some ready-made lesson plans and example programs, so it’d be a lot smoother.

Dandizette
Are there plans to run more of these or similar projects you’re involved in?

CHICKPEA:
Heck yea – I hope so! I hope that after this session of classes ends we can all pick up again in the new year, providing people have time/energy/capacity to do so. What form the class will take will probably depend on the people interested…

YOSSARIAN:
It’s unclear at this point what’s going to happen; a friend of mine has been really interested in how things are going and would like to do a similar class focused on server administration (he’s a sysadmin geek). I could easily consider doing another beginner’s class for women if there was interest.

There has also been a lot of interest in the project in both Hacktionlab and London Indymedia circles; one of the inspirations for the class actually came from the training programs run by Brasil Indymedia when they needed a new crop of geeks to run their network infrastructure a few years ago – they educated a whole lot of women, who now run quite a bit of the tech infrastructure for brasil.indymedia.org.

Dandizette: I know that this is not the first incarnation of of Fan History, but can you tell me what led up to the wiki and how it works now?

LH: A long time ago, in a fandom time far, far, away… Fan History originally started as a personal project that was part of Writers University on FanFiction.Net. It migrated to several sites and in several forms, including a fanzine, before it finally ended up as a MediaWiki installed at FanHistory.Com.

Fan History ended up as a wiki using MediaWiki for two primary reasons.

First, for about eight years, from 1998 to about two years after Fan History was founded, I was the only one spending considerable time researching the history of fan fiction. Most of the academics who mentioned the history of fandom only mentioned it on the periphial and their facts often turned out to be wrong when put under a historical microscope. (Star Trek isn’t the first fandom to write fan fiction in the modern age. Wrestling and music actually beat it. Most of it was just published as part of a wider fannish culture, where it was mixed with things like reviews, fan art and more. Man from UNCLE and Doctor Who fan fiction was being distributed as drawerfic before Star Trek was being published.) Putting it out there, on one site that could become extremely visible, was intended to encourage people to do work in that area and to clear up some misconceptions that had been circulating around for several years. (And point of irony, the bigger Fan History gets, the harder it is to find those easy facts like what fan fiction was first, how did this specific term evolve, what were the earliest fandom communities on LiveJournal.)

The second reason was that after having worked on the beginning information for the better part of eight years, I knew it wasn’t a project that one person could ever hope to do successfully. The topic is just too big. One person, or even a small group of people who share similar fannish backgrounds, can’t do it. They just don’t have the perspective and the time. I knew if I wanted this history to go forward, to really begin to grasp the scope of the history of fandom, it needed to be done in a way that the widest variety of people could help with that process. MediaWiki is familiar to a wide variety of people. If you build the rules right, organize it right and create good content, it would appeal to the widest community possible to help document it all.

How does Fan History work? At its simplest, you search on Fan History for a topic in fandom that you think you know something about. It can be a LiveJournal community, a fandom, a term like DubCon. You find the page. You click on the edit tab. You follow the example text already in their and add what you know. Maybe you have a link you think would be useful: You add it in. Maybe you know some influential stories in a fandom: You add them to the list. Maybe you know the date that a mailing list was created, when it closed and why: You add that to the article about the mailing list and the fandom article. Little bits and pieces of knowledge are collected to form a bigger picture.

Dandizette : What made you decide to make it a wiki?

LH: I wanted a wiki with a format that people were comfortable with so that we could get more people involved. I love the topic. I’ve probably written more about it than anyone else in the past ten years. I just can’t do it alone and portray an accurate picture of the history of fandom.

Dandizette: I first heard about Fan History via the geocities preservation project, and I remember all too well the geocities era of fan websites. Do you have any particular favourites from this (pre-live journal) time?

LH: LiveJournal is overblown in its importance in fandom. Fandom was and is alive on Geocities. A number of sites were scrambling to pull their content off and find new hosting. A lot of these fandoms were smaller or less active. That level of activity just isn’t as well known because the community that existed on Geocities post 2003 or so was tied in to communities that existed elsewhere. One such community includes people using mailing lists. Geocities was also big post 2003 for soap opera fandoms, some anime fandoms, small television fandoms, radio fandoms and some music fandoms.

A lot of the big fandoms didn’t move from Geocities to LiveJournal so much as they moved to multifandom fan fiction archives like FanFiction.Net, to mega fansites and archives like Gossamer,Trekiverse, MuggleNet, The Leaky Cauldron, AnimeNewsNetwork, to official sites 50 Cents site, Warner Brother’s message boards, Stephen King’s site, etc.

That said, I don’t know if I have a favorite site so much as a general class of sites. Geocities was home to some of the best X-Files fan fiction stories ever. Ditto for Star Trek: Voyager and Babylon 5. I’ve spent hours reading stories from those archives.

Dandizette: What else is in the pipeline for Fan History. Are there other projects you are working on now?

LH: From an admin view point, we’re working on several projects. We’re hoping to have a new skin installed in the next month or so. We’re working on improving the representation of sports fandom on Fan History. At some point in the next three months, we’ll be adding about 20,000 stub articles about various sports teams. We’ve also been working at creating articles about stories and we hope to continue to add articles in that area. It is a lot of little things that should help us to provide a more comprehensive picture of the history of fandom.

Magazines are flailing due to high production and distribution costs, two pitfalls that zines, by nature, avoid. But this isn’t to say that zines have remained unchanged since their heyday. After an explosion in the early to mid 90s, zines were arguably usurped by Livejournal as the independent (and navel-gazing) media du jour.

It is no longer simply a case of strolling into a local record or book store to peruse the zine rack. Aside from at your local (and sometimes rare) zine festival, finding zine networks or distributors can prove a bit tricky. For all their scarcity, zines are becoming hard to avoid in the mainstream media: books are being publishing, art galleries are hosting exhibitions and even newspapers are waxing nostalgic about zines. Is this a real resurgence or just a case of the media jumping on a bandwagon? According to Melissa, co-founder of Cherry Bomb, it is mostly the latter:
“the main change that I’ve noticed is the mainstream is starting to get interested, e.g there have been more books published talking about zines and zine culture , and also various public & academic libraries in NZ have started creating zine collections.”

Cherry Bomb existed as a dedicated comic and zine shop in Auckland, New Zealand from July 2004-November 2007. Moving online has proved a much different venture according to Melissa:
“It was sad in lots of ways to transition from our physical space to our online store. I felt like we had really built up a little community, we were a hub for people to come and meet at, a place where they could hold political meetings, parties, gigs, film screenings etc.”

“Our store acted as a very visible, political and creative statement in Auckland city, and there was something really nice about people being about to physically browse the stuff we had, and talk to us about it. Online however does have it’s advantages – it’s cheap (no rent to pay!) and makes it very easy for people all over the world to find out what you’re about….. The best thing of course would be to have an awesome website AND a shop space, but maybe that’ll come about in the future.”

This new-found attention paid by the mainstream media to zines haven’t exactly revolutionised those networks that still fly under the radar. Two recent examples of mainstream coverage do nothing to challenge this. Simon Reynolds claimed in a recent Guardian article that: “(a)lthough it’s hard to quantify, it feels like the fanzine is making a resurgence in the face of digital culture, just like that other analogue format, vinyl”. Despite this, the article focuses primarily on one-off art projects rather than self-made magazines. Harmony Korine (best known as the screenwriter of Kids) has released a book (called imaginatively The Collected Zines) of zines he created between 1992 and 1999, partly to stem the trading of the original publications at ridiculous prices on eBay. Neither of these events seem to indicate a major resurgence beyond the art gallery world.

Zine distribution networks are still out there, making the most of both email and postal connections. Marching Stars is a zine distro that stocks between 60-70 zines but, aside from a shift towards Paypal (rather than sneakily hidden money in the post), founder Lizzy hasn’t noticed any major changes over the last few years:

“There were a few UK distros that sold international perzine type zines which I LOVED and 2 closed and one went on indefinite hiatus (still hasn’t reopened) and I saw a gap. There’s Manifesta, which sells perzines with a feminist type slant, but most of them are from the UK and I have so many favourite zinesters who are international. I felt that someone should be making their zines more easily available in the UK, no-one was, I figured it was something I could do, so I started marchingstars.”

One difference Marching Stars has noticed is that there are fewer zine review listings amongst the back pages, a theory backed up by the recent decision by Xerography Debt to stop printing zine reviews. This decision was made because a blog provided a more timely way of providing zine reviews and the now co-exists alongside the printed version of the zine.

“The blog is fast and reaches a number of people, but certainly not everyone and it can be exclusionary”. (Davida from XD).

XD have also formed a partnership with distributor ‘Microcosm’ to try and offset some of the demands on the zine and allow it to stay in print:

“They will have no editorial control, but will help co-ordinate support and try and flow some new zines our way. Their mission and that of XD are actually very similar, so it is a perfect partnership. In this case, the zine and the distro are trying to actively support one another.”

On a larger and international scale, the Queer Zine Archive Project ensures obscure zine titles remains available across the world. While the QZAP’s main objective is to ensure zines are archived and future-proofed, new zines can also be distributed via the archive website.

Projects, like the US-based Trading Network seek to do for self-publishing what BookMooch and others have done for literary types. Inspired by postcardx.net project and similar in function to the now-inactive Zine Recycling Centre, The Trading Network encourages people to send random mail to others with similar creations on offer. This includes but is not limited to zines.

So, while this might not be the revival predicted in some quarters, there are plenty of reassuring signs of healthy and creative underground publishing networks.

Directories such as Zine World and Broken Pencil publish online guides as well as regular printed issues. Factsheet 5, a pivotal zine resource, also seems to be back in action. And sometimes, if you are lucky, there are Zine Fairs.

This feature originally appeared on Dandizette, A Pulp Magazine for Media Perverts

Photo by Flickr user holisticgeek

The Queer Zine Archive was started in 2003 as a way of preserving and promoting queer DIY publishing, making queer zines available across time and space. From an initial 15 zines, the QZAP has continued to expand and recently celebrated its 5th birthday! Check out the website to find out about recent additions to the archive, ways to contribute, info about new projects (including the QZAP:Meta zine) and other ways to support this awesome archive.

Founders, Milo and Christopher were kind enough to answer some questions about the project.

Why did you decide to make an archive of queer zines? Was it always going to be a web-based archive?

QZAP
When Chris and I first met in 2001, we discovered that together we had upwards of 300 queer zines that we had collected out of our own interests or via trades. We began a discussion of how important we thought they were both personally, and also because of what they represented – a look at queers’ lives, stories, and histories that are seldom visible through mainstream media. We kicked around various ideas of how to best preserve and share these documents and decided that putting them online was the way to go. In the way we’ve built QZAP, these zines can transcend borders, and have become accessible to many more people than those who might have originally seen them.

Had you been involved in other zine projects before this? As a creator? Distributor?

QZAP
We’ve both been zinesters for many years. In the 1990s Chris was the creator of a zine called “Abrupt Lane Edge” and helped produce other arts publications. He also participated in several queer zine events over the years such as SPEW 3 in Toronto. I worked on a couple of zines previously, but really got my start in 1999 with a zine called “Mutate.” So far I’ve done 10 issues and additionally have made several one-off zines, a vegi cookzine called “SoyBoi: Queer Adventures in My Vegetarian Kitchen” and currently self-publish a zine called “Gendercide.” Additionally, most members of the loose QZAP collective are all zinesters in some form. When we have interns or volunteers, we ask them to make zines as a requirement to better understand the material that we’re working with.

I know the archive went offline for a while earlier this year because of technical complications. Can you tell me a bit about the technical basis of the project, both originally and what you’re using now?

QZAP
The Queer Zine Archive Project has been based as much as possible on free open-source software. We originally started out of our home on a Pentium 3 computer running OpenBSD. We quickly moved to a Linux-based server that was housed in a closet at a local cyber-cafe. When the cafe went out of business, we moved to a data center in Texas. After our crash, have relocated to a data center in Los Angeles.

Currently, the server is running on Debian Linux with Apache 2, MySQL, and PHP. Our website infrastructure is built on Joomla!, and the current archive is based on Gallery2.

In our workspace where we scan the zines, we run dual-boot Macintosh desktops (Mac OS X and Linux) and use Ubuntu, GIMP, XSANE for scanning, and have just started working with a closed-source library cataloging system to help us keep track of our titles as well as aid searching what we physically have in the collection.

Philosophically, we use F/OSS software because it is representative of what many zinesters have done over the years. It’s inexpensive, modifiable, and accessible to most people with a little know how.

Do you work most closely with zine creators or is there a network of distributors/collectors who contribute zines?

QZAP
A combination of the two. Many individuals will send us their zines to be included in the archive, and we have also received five large donations from people’s zine collections each containing fifty to one hundred zines each. While we started out with just 300 or so, we now have well over 1000 queer zines. The oldest document in our collection dated back to 1973 and is from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The most recent came in the post last Thursday. We have zines from more than a dozen countries and in several languages.

Is the project still primarily archival or is there a distribution aspect of it now that people are adding newer zines?

QZAP
We see ourselves as an archive with an educational mission. Our purpose is to make queer zines available for research and personal enjoyment, but we don’t discount the fact that in some ways we might be seen as a digital distro. That’s not our intent, and we try to follow the US “Fair Use” doctrine as close as possible.

Have you notice a flow on effect of archive-type projects? Do you get lots of people contacting you asking advice?

QZAP
We’re fairly well connected to other zine libraries and archives around North America, but for the most part each one has it’s own way of structuring itself.We try to help folks as much as possible with their projects, but mostly we encounter librarians and archivists who work with more institutional archives (Public and academic libraries.) Part of the reason we use F/OSS software is so that others can see and use the tools we do to make their own projects, whether they’re archival in nature or not.

What are the future plans for QZAP?

QZAP
We’ll keep scanning zines, and are slowly working toward establishing a physical space where people can come and view or check out the zines and documents.

This interview cross-posted with permission from Dandizette.net