Page Conventions: How We Build a Page

• Stimpunks is created by and for neurodivergent and disabled people.
• We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people.
• We serve our loved people so we can keep on livin’ through the onslaught.
• We presume competence, and we believe in self-determination.
• One in four U.S. adults have a disability.
• Our community receives only 2% of US grant funding.
• Only 19% of us are employed.
• We have to challenge the norm and change the narrative.
• The place where we belong does not exist. We will build it.
• We bring voice into empirical constructs and translate voice into academic comprehension.
• Staying alive is a lot of work for a disabled person in an ableist society.
• Direct support to individuals is the most effective approach to alleviating the barriers and challenges that prevent neurodivergent and disabled people from thriving.
• We reframe, because we’re not broken.
• The long-term well-being and empowerment of Autistics and members of other neurocognitive minority groups hinges upon our ability to create a paradigm shift – a shift from the pathology paradigm to the neurodiversity paradigm.
• Spare us from the mold.
• Stimpunks is an essential resource for educators.
• “Timeless Learning” is a fundamental text of progressive pedagogy.
• We must critically examine our classrooms to build neurodiversity-friendly spaces.
• Progressive, human-centered education is compatible with neurodiversity, the social model of disability, and human dignity.
• Neurodiversity is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.
• Words have the power to change attitudes toward autistic people.
• We prefer identity-first language, not person-first language.
• I’m autistic, not a person with autism.
• Autistic is an important part of my identity.
• I’m a disabled person, not a person with disabilities.
• Disabled is an important part of my identity.
• The label “disabled” means so much to me. It means I have community. It means I have rights. It means I can be proud. It means I can affirm myself in the face of ableists. It means I can be myself and so much more.
• Identity first language is common among neurodivergent and disabled self-advocates.
• The words autistic and disabled connect us with an identity, a community, and a culture. They help us advocate for ourselves.
• “Disability” and “disabled” are indicators of culture and identity. Thus, “disabled person” is an accepted term.
• There is a clear preference for identity-first language among autistic people.
• Language is a place of struggle.
• Language matters.
• We have a moral imperative to connect with the communities we serve and use the language they prefer.
• Our needs are human needs, not special needs.
• We choose the margin, because design is tested at the edges.
• Reframing ourselves and others is hard and important work necessary to all other work.
• Disability and neurodivergence are broad umbrellas that include many people, possibly you.
• The neurodivergent umbrella includes a diversity of inherent and acquired differences and spiky profiles.
• Neurodivergent is an umbrella term that is inclusive and not exclusive – this means mental illnesses are considered neurodivergent.
• Neurodivergent is an umbrella term for anyone who has a mind or brain that diverges from what is seen as typical or normal. ⁣
• Neurodivergent is a term created by Kassiane Asasumasu, a biracial, multiply neurodivergent activist.
• Neurodiversity is a different term created by Judy Singer, an autistic sociologist.⁣
• Identifying as neurodivergent is up to the individual and we don’t gatekeep or enforce the term. ⁣
• Self diagnosis is not just “valid” — it is liberatory.
• We respect and encourage self-diagnosis/self-identification and community diagnosis.
• Our website can help you understand your ways of being.
• If you are wondering whether you are Autistic, spend time amongst Autistic people, online and offline.
• If you notice you relate to these people much better than to others, if they make you feel safe, and if they understand you, you have arrived.
• It is time to celebrate our interdependence!
• The notion of disability in our society is underscored by a bizarre conception of “independence”.
• Collaboration allows us to create genuinely safe spaces for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people.
• To face the challenges of the future, we’ll need the problem-solving abilities of different types of minds working together.
• Pluralism is our reality.
• The focus of the story we need is connection.
• Whether neurodivergent, disabled, or an ally, being a Stimpunk means reframing.
• We center the edges in service to all bodyminds.
• Challenge the norm and change the narrative by reframing.
• Reframe these states of being that have been labelled deficiencies or pathologies as human differences.
• We are not okay.
• We are here, we are angry, and we are only going to get louder.
• This is our movement.
• We’re going to rewrite the narratives.
• Autistic children need us to support them as architects of their own liberation against the schools and clinicians and institutions and police and prosecutors who would crush and destroy them.
• Not having the vocabulary to understand yourself and your loved ones is a tragedy.

• Accordions expand/infodump on a topic without interrupting the main flow.
• Accordions labelled “What is…” provide definitions, context, and further reading.
• Accordions labelled “In other words…” explain things in different ways, including easy read, one idea per line, and plain language summaries.
• One line inline definitions are offered.
• Explanatory items are grouped into “What does this mean?” blocks.
• Related items are grouped together on a colored background with a group title. This makes it easier to tell what’s in a group and skim past it.
• Pick colors for groups based on colors in included media, if any.
• Pick colors for groups of accordions based on themes like rainbow.
• Lots of whitespace.
• Every page/screen has something breaking up the text.
• Selective bolding of key sentences facilitates skimming.
• A table of contents is provided near the top of each page.
• Headings are used approximately every 5 screens (on a laptop) or less.
• 20 headings max.
• Put a “coming up” table of contents after 10 headings.
• Consider putting a “Bodymind Break” section after 10 headings.
• Spacers are used as pause points, fermata.
• Spacers are used before headings to accentuate the break.
• Long scrollytelling stories signpost to what’s ahead.
• Break up text with pull quotes, blocks, bullets, bolding, backgrounds, images.
• Use lists to present one idea per line.
• Make it so people can just read the headers, table of contents and get the gist of the page/section.
• Make it engaging and visual.
• Write in a conversational style.
• Add in jokes and feelings.

Thin Description and Data Visualization

We find that Love’s feminist articulation of “thin description” as a human observational practice is more in line with our commitment to embodied knowledge making practices that highlight how technologies and research methods reflect the social positionalities of the humans who employ them.

Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

…we might also consider the value of forms of “thin description” (Love 2013) that focus more on observing surface features of a wide range of texts rather than on interpreting the many layers, contradictions, and hidden forces animating a single text: what we may lose in depth and nuance of interpretation with this approach, we can gain in breadth and copiousness of evidence.

Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

Instead of seeing ourselves as gathering textual quotes to support a persuasive narrative argument, we saw ourselves first and foremost as building a database (in our case, a Google spreadsheet) that we could then query in order to explore a range of possible stories we might tell.

Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

Ultimately, we take as axiomatic that all methodologies of textual analysis involve ideologically loaded processes of selection and reduction.

Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

Today’s literary-historical scholar can no longer risk being just a close reader: the sheer quantity of available data makes the traditional practice of close reading untenable as an exhaustive or definitive method of evidence gathering. The same argument, however, may be leveled against the macroscale; from thirty thousand feet, something important will inevitably be missed. The two scales of analysis, therefore, need to coexist. (Jockers 2013, 9)

Thin Description and Data Visualization – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

Multimodal Performance

We also see multimodal composing as a way to reveal some of the embodied process of our “dialogic collaboration” (Lunsford and Ede 1990) as scholars. As Lunsford and Ede have long argued, the process of collaborative writing need not proceed by strictly dividing up work, where each author is solely responsible for their own part. Rather, in a dialogic collaboration, authors engage in dialogue with each other throughout the process from the very earliest stages of invention to the very final stylistic edits, such that it becomes impossible to clearly identify where one author’s contribution begins and the other’s ends. Importantly, Ede and Lunsford emphasize dialogic collaboration as a robustly multimodal process in which spoken conversation plays a key role: “If you can imagine the words talk . . . write . . . talk . . . read . . . talk . . . write . . . talk . . . read . . . written in a large looping spiral—that comes closest a description as we know it” (Ede and Lunsford 1983, 152). Our process has been much the same, though we might sometimes replace the word “write” with other verbs such as “compose” or “code” or “perform.” Importantly, Lunsford and Ede argued that collaborative scholars should make space in their work to document their modes of composing, and they practiced this by telling detailed and engaging stories of the conversations they’ve had and the places they’ve gathered over years of “writing together” (Lunsford and Ede 2012).

Multimodal Performance – Methodological Play – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

Weaving the Web

In addition to the emphasis on how web composing helped expand audiences for student writing, Huntington Lyman (1999) gave voice to a particularly crucial reason for encouraging student participation in composing for the web: working with multiple media forms allowed even those students who aren’t the strongest writers a greater potential range of rhetorical expression. As he writes, “hypertext’s easy incorporation of images and sounds has the potential to involve students who are strong in the non-verbal intelligences. . . . Hypertext helps integrate word, image, and sound, allowing students to draw on their strengths and discover new possibilities in their writing” (58). Although the notion of multiple “intelligences” can at times be used in overly reductive ways, Lyman’s emphasis on the value of using web media to engage students with diverse learning needs in composing with a wider range of modalities remains an important argument for digital pedagogies today.

Weaving the Web (Act 4, Page 3) – Conversing With Computers – 100 Years of New Media Pedagogy

White Space

You know how all your designer friends are always talking about white space? You basically can’t have too much of it. Almost every time you want something to stand out, one of the best ways to do that is not through lots of formatting, but through a smart use of white space. Done properly, the point you’re making will stand out on its own. Maybe you can just use a bit of minimal formatting to make it really pop, but it shouldn’t take much.

Make better documents. – Anil Dash

Spray Them With Bullets

A related technique is to spray them with bullets. Bullet points are a super powerful way to make content more skimmable for an audience, and perform a useful forcing function in making you edit your points down to be concise and roughly consistent. One less-obvious benefit of using bullet points is that it can often reveal to you as an author whether the information that you’re providing is all in the same category. In prose, it can be easy to sometimes drift off-topic into unrelated topics, but with bullets, if you’ve got a list that has items which are very evidently out of place, it can be more evident.

Make better documents. – Anil Dash

Pay attention to sequencing and order

Especially in a world when some of the people attending your event, or participating in your meeting, will not have had time to review the whole thing in advance, assume that you have to front-load your key points at the beginning of the document. And within a particular page or slide, assume that you have to put the most pertinent info at the top, with supporting points below. If you’re not ordering things by importance (because you want to set up a chronological flow, or because you’re organizing by some historical categorization you’ve inherited) make that explicit in the text that your audience sees. Otherwise half your audience will be lost right at the top, wondering in their minds why these items are in an inexplicable order.

Make better documents. – Anil Dash

Give people wayfinding

People want to know where they’re at in the story. This doesn’t have to be fancy, you don’t need a full timeline bar like a YouTube video. But a quick outline of progress (and, if you’ve got a particularly long document, recapping your position in that outline as you go) can help ensure people that they understand their place in the overall conversation.

Make better documents. – Anil Dash

Close by reiterating your mission and goals

You can never go wrong by restating first principles in the closing of your message. Remind people about alignment on purpose, and ideally alignment on values. This sets up for a constructive conversation, and clarifies the priorities that you all share in having a dialogue in the first place. You’ll never go wrong thanking your audience or reminding them about past collaborative successes, either.

Make better documents. – Anil Dash