Codex 1: Thematizing DIY

Editorial Statement

“Do It Yourself” is not an academic rubric, which is one of the reasons we picked it as the first theme for the first issue of the journal. It is an enormously popular topic outside academia, and

We were also taken by the notion because it is the way in which this journal has been originated and run. Except for a very limited bit of research funding (running well into the hundreds of dollars), the issue is the product of our own initiative and work. The authors of the original articles were contacts, friends, or friends of friends. The projects that resulted from the original essays originated from us – largely English graduate students with (for the most of us) little or no experience in web design, with at least our fair share of creativity and analytical ability.

The playground/sandboxes of the essays are as important as the essays themselves. They were conceived by an extraordinarily gifted group of graduate students in literature, creative writing, and journalism during a class on scholarly publication in the digital era. (You may see the class website here.) The class was an intensive semester of discussion about scholarly publication in the Humanities in the era of New Media.

The connections between the theme and individual articles are varied and very loose, as befitting a journal invested in playing with the academic essay theme. One organizing principle across all the projects was playfulness: the desire to create a graphics and interactivity that would entice readers not usually given to reading scholarship, artists’ statements, and so on.

a . The Kuppers essay

Credits for codex 1

Mark Amerika, Michele Battiste, Benjamin Berger, Alessandro Cerruti, Deborah Celizic, Erin M Costello, Larissa Cunningham, Ofer Eldad, Alissa Fehlbaum, Daniel Gershman, Alexandra Hay, Mark Hevert, Eric Izant, Rebecca Jewell, Anders Kelsey, Nicholas Kimbro, Petra Kuppers, Marc Laughton, David N Levine, Clayton Lewis, Stephen Lewis, Shan Mohiuddin, Derrick Mund, Mason Peck, Joshua Price, Jason Rostoker, Robert Schwander, Benjamin Thevenin, Mark Winokur, George Yancey, Kristopher Young, Tom Zamir