This is cross-posted from the Skeuomorph Press blog. If you want you can forget the prose below & just go straight to the whitepaper.

With the help of a grant from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, over the past year a team from Skeuomorph Press and the CU Community FabLab have undertaken a study of humanities-oriented makerspaces around the US. While the past decade has seen a rapid growth of spaces dedicated to hands-on experimentation and teaching with historical technology, humanistic media, and related approaches, the humanities makerspace movement has not been well studied as a movement, or a community.

We summarize the goal of the SHMLM study as:

SHMLM analyzes the humanities’ maker turn by surveying the research, pedagogical, and public service missions of existing humanities makerspaces; identifying commonalities among such efforts across disciplines, technologies, and organizational structures; comparing their activities and institutional identities with comparable contemporary STEM- or arts-focused makerspaces. This project lays the groundwork for more robust communication and professionalization among such initiatives, building shared resources about the impact of humanities makerspaces that can be used for organization, advocacy, and fund-raising by scholars building and sustaining such programs.

Our whitepaper, “Surveying the Humanities MakerLab Movement,” is now published at Humanities Commons. We offer a special thanks to those who responded to our survey, those who agreed to be interviewed, and the makerspaces that hosted research visits. We hope this whitepaper is an important step toward understanding this burgeoning community of practitioners across fields and institutional contexts, and we hope lays the groundwork for further study, community building, and collaboration.