Research with AYAB Knitting Machine Users

Anthropological project

Holly, at a selfie taking station at the National Museum of Computing, Bletchley.

bio

Hello! I’m Holly Zijderveld, and I’m an anthropologist enrolled in the MSc program Global Ethnography at Leiden University in the Netherlands. I am currently planning an ethnographic research project into the All Yarns are Beautiful (AYAB) project. You can see more about my specific research interests below! I am a pretty experienced hand-knitter who is getting started with machine knitting, and growingly interested in technology and its history.

research interests

Cultural anthropological/ethnographic research looks at people and social life. One thing anthropologists look at is how people interact with the world around them, including other people, animals, and objects.

My research looks into how people use AYAB and knitting machines, as well as the community around the AYAB project. I’m also really interested in the history of women in computing, for example!

I am really interested in how developers and users of AYAB interact with their knitting machines and the AYAB technology. If you’re a developer on the AYAB project and/or you use AYAB with your knitting machine, I would love to speak with you about it! I’m interested in users/developers from all over the world, so don’t let that stop you from reaching out!

contact

If you are a user/developer of AYAB and you’d like to speak to me about my research, then please email me at h.zijderveld@umail.leidenuniv.nl. You could also message me on discord if you use it, my user is @midnight4225.

If you have questions about me & want to check certain things about the project, you can email my supervisor, Elsa Charlety from the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.

current status of the project

initial planning | research proposal | fieldwork | data processing | final writing | sharing

I am currently in the fieldwork phase of the research! This will extend until 31st March. I am looking to talk to users & developers of AYAB in this time.

I will be in the San Francisco Bay Area in Feburary, and I will be in Berlin for some of March. If you are based in any of these areas and use/develop AYAB, then please let me know! If not, lets talk online.

privacy/ethics disclaimer

All information shared with me in this project is confidential and will be handled anonymously, unless otherwise explicitly stated. All photographs will be subject to specific consent before shared. You have the right to retract any information shared with me from the research project, even long after you say it. All information will be stored locally off the cloud, or on carefully guarded paper. I will only collect your data with your specific informed consent.

If you have any questions about data privacy, feel free to ask before we start talking (or at any point!).

Last updated: 31/12/2024, 09:35 Grenwich Mean Time