Untangling the Value of Online Fiber Communities

This research explores the cultural and financial elements of online fiber communities, particularly by Ravelry. Studies of cyberculture only selectively attend to corresponding material culture, and there is too little research on the ways that online outlets preserve and disseminate historical practices. Scholarship on digital publishing and distribution of information should include the way fiber crafts are disseminated online. Knowledge of either digital culture or hand-crafts is incomplete without accounting for knitters’ increasingly intrinsic reliance on information and communication technologies, as well as sticks and string. This project, then, is contextualized by the history of knitting.