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.
