A MAKE magazine cover and page used as decor at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif., May 2009.
I recently completed a first version of a research paper on MAKE magazine, the DIY publication for “makers” who like to create anything from home garden gear to robots to open-source cars. It was a fun project, including an analysis of the text of the magazine and a visit to the Maker Faire last May in San Mateo, Calif.
This was the first time I’ve conducted a research project on magazines without access to paper copies of the issues I examined. I subscribe to MAKE, but wanted to include more than just the few issues I’d received in my analysis. I thought it might be helpful to write a bit about the digital research process for other folks who might undertake the same kind of project.
First, I was fortunate that MAKE offers a subscription add-on that permits access to a digitized archive of all of the magazine’s issues to date. I didn’t even have to pay extra for this access. The online archive is an exact replica of the print magazine, including the ads; I believe the digital edition is produced by Texterity. Without this exact digital replica, I wouldn’t have attempted this project.
I was able to page through the online copies of the magazine just as I would have the paper copies. Though the digital edition was easy to access and free with my subscription, the possible shortcomings of this approach are probably evident: 1) difficulty in taking notes and saving material to quote in the analysis; 2) reading online vs. reading print; and 3) organizing my material without having papers to shuffle into a neatly ordered pile.
Sharing inspiration at the Maker Faire, San Mateo, Calif., May 2009.
Thanks to a couple of strategies, I was able to work around all of these potential issues easily. First, I used outlining software Inspiration and the social bookmarking site Delicious to help me retain material I’d want to return to later. When I came across a passage I thought I’d want to quote, I retyped it word-for-word into my Inspiration outline, reorganizing the material later to suit the analysis as it developed.
The online edition of MAKE did not have a highlighting, annotating, or bookmarking feature, unfortunately. However, I managed to still save links to specific pages by choosing its “Share” option, clicking on Delicious, and saving a link to the particular page I wanted to my bookmarks there. I was also able to add a brief note about what was of interest on that page to the Delicious notes box. I also tagged every page I saved from the online edition with “makepages” so I could easily view them all in one list on Delicious.
Reading the magazine’s digital edition instead of its print edition was more difficult for me physically. This project finally caused me to take the plunge and invest in a bigger monitor – a 24″ LCD screen – for my desk at home. My 15″ MacBook Pro screen just didn’t cut it for my straining eyes. Luckily for this low-budget researcher, I found one at Costco for less than $200. It was a huge relief to be able to fit two pages on the screen at once and still be able to read the text, not to mention a timesaver to avoid all the zooming in and out. We don’t always think about these physical realities of research, but as we move increasingly to digital approaches, the ergonomic aspects of our work become more important.
Finally, I’ve been able in the past to photocopy magazine pages and order them for easy reference as I wrote my analysis. This time, though, all of the ordering had to be done in my outlining software. Shuffling bullet points around in Inspiration to find the best place for a specific piece of data was fast and easy. Whenever I lost track of a good quote or wanted to find more information on a specific topic, all I had to do was use the digital edition’s search feature to locate it again quickly.
A "Subscription Station" at the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif., May 2009.
Overall, I think the project turned out well. My familiarity with Inspiration and Delicious made it run much more smoothly, and I wouldn’t hesitate to use digital magazine editions for research like this again. I’m also proud of how little paper I used for this project. I think that magazine research using digital editions, despite the still-unfamiliar interface, will end up being more efficient and greener, especially as digital editions improve and become more widely available. I’m excited to see how digital editions might change the ways we work on research on magazines.
