Howdy!

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Welcome Oxford American readers! I’m so delighted that this project was mentioned in the call for submissions for the Austin Music issue! Documenting the underground scenes that nurtured the creative ecosystem here in Austin in the 1990s is one of my ongoing passions.

This particular project has been on hiatus for a few years, but I am always doing zine things! Lately I’ve been helping build the ZineCat, growing the zine archives at the Austin History Center, helping pull off the Lone Star Zine Fest, collaborating on a project to digitize pre-1995 issues of The Austin Chronicle, making zines, etc.

The first thing I learned after starting this project is that digitization of other people’s zines is not always a great idea. That said, I am planning some new projects in this space and hope to have some fun stuff to report back on later this fall and next year.

Feel free to poke around here, or jump right to the project’s money-shot-so-far: Kate Neptune’s beta test of a network visualization based on a dataset pulled from Discogs metadata about musicians, bands, and record labels in Austin (and San Antonio and Houston). Enjoy!

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The Austin Fanzine Project started as a relatively straightforward digitization and transcription project  intended to improve access to the documents of a recently-historical subculture – the Austin, Texas underground music scene of the 1990s.

The project has blossomed into a sandbox for creative experimentation with digital archives and digital humanities methods and tools. To date the project volunteers have digitized fanzines and posted the resulting downloadable files; researched digital archives best practices and crafted project policies; experimented with crowd-sourced transcription and indexing using new open-source software; and explored ways to virtually visualize the connections in real-life communities via maps, e-books, and audio tours. The digitized material has already proved useful for a variety of uses including a collaboration with the Early Modern OCR Project.

To follow the Austin Fanzine Project’s progress, follow the blog, friend us on Facebook &/or follow us on Twitter.

You can help out by transcribing fanzines from home in your spare time! Check out the transcription interface:

Free PDFs of Geek Weekly are available here:

Thanks for checking us out!