Digital Commons Network^™

"Early Times Around Muscle Shoals City", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

A paper presented to the Muscle Shoals City Kiwanis Club on March 14, 1963, about the establishment of the city of Muscle Shoals. The article includes mention of the indigenous tribes that dwelt in the area as well as the Marion Land Company and associated figures which advertised lots in 1819.

"The Early Beginnings Of Weeden Heights", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

Weeden Heights, a subdivision development east of Florence, Alabama on Old Huntsville Road, was named for John D. Weeden Jr. The origins of the development are briefly discussed in the article.

"The Early Development Of Florence", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

The city of Florence, Alabama was officially founded on March 12th, 1818, with the signing of the Articles of Agreement in Huntsville, Alabama. The article briefly discusses the founding of the city, including the impact of Generals Andrew Jackson and John Coffee, as well as the development of integral roads, such as Circular and Military Road.

"The Early History Of Lauderdale County", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

Lauderdale County was created as one of eight county governments on February 6, 1818, making it approximately one year older than the state of Alabama. The article discusses the early founding of the county, including setter encounters with indigenous people and conflicts.

"Florence Wagon Works", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

In 1889, the Atlanta Wagon Works relocated their plant to Florence, Alabama in order to be able to access the timber of the Appalachian foothills. The article offers an overview of the Florence Wagon Works and the impact of the industry.

"Florence Wesleyan University: 1855-1872", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

A paper presented by William Lindsey McDonald, Conference Historian, at the North Alabama Conference for the United Methodist Church about Florence Wesleyan University, one of the earliest predecessors of the University of North Alabama. Prior to discussing Florence Wesleyan University, the paper also discusses the history of the earliest iteration of the university LaGrange College.

"Florence's First Mayor", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

The article briefly discusses the significance of Alexander Hamilton Wood, the first mayor of Florence, Alabama.

"The Canal Building Genius", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

George Washington Goethals, the engineer who constructed the Panama Canal, was also employed to construct the Muscle Shoals Canal in North Alabama. During the construction of the canal, Goethals lived on Wood Avenue near the University of North Alabama. Multiple historical markers commemorating Goethals' time in North Alabama exist, including the one designating his home, the Florence Walk of Honor, and his mention on the Muscle Shoals Canal Marker.

"The Course Of The Tennessee River", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

The article describes the usual course of the Tennessee River and various geological theories for the direction of its course. In addition, it explores the specific geomorphology of the Muscle Shoals and its impact on North Alabama.

"Eliza Coffee Whose Name Is Memorialized By A Hospital", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

The article serves as a brief biographical sketch of Eliza Coffee, whom the Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in Florence, Alabama memorializes.

"Dr. E. B. Norton", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

The article offers a brief biography of Dr. E.B. Norton president of Florence State Teachers College, a precursor to the University of North Alabama.

"Florence: An Early Cotton Mill Town", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

In the antebellum period and early years of the Civil War, Florence, Alabama was a leading center for the textile industry with five cotton mills, including the prominent Cypress Mills. The article gives an overview of the impact of mills in and around the area.

A lithograph fragment of Cypress Mill is available in the William Lindsey McDonald Image Collection. Other images of mills can be found by searching "mills" in the left sidebar.

Archives As Activism: Using Cuny Archives To Examine And Analyze Social Change, Marci Littlefield

Open Educational Resources

Archives as Activism uses CUNY archival materials to help students examine the relationship between activism, social issues and social change. Students will analyze primary sources such as flyers, newsletters, photographs, student newspapers, and institutional documents and connect them to contemporary social issues. CUNY’s history of activism around, race, gender, educational access, women’s organizing and institutional power provides students with an opportunity to investigate questions about power, collective action, intersectionality and social change.

Click, Listen, Reflect: Implementing Discord In Critical Listening Courses, Kenny Shania Lestari R, Metaria Metaria, Siti Nurhalimah

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

Critical listening requires learners not only to comprehend spoken information but also to interpret and evaluate its meaning. Digital learning environments may support these processes by providing opportunities for repeated access to spoken input, interaction, and collaborative discussion. This study explored how Discord was implemented in a Critical Listening course and how students perceived and experienced its use in supporting their critical listening learning. The study employed a qualitative descriptive design involving 20 students from the International Class Program at Maulana Malik Ibrahim State Islamic University of Malang. Data were collected through classroom observation checklists, field notes, and focus group …

Explore It - A Speculative Approach Investigating The Material Intelligence Of Casein For Future Textile Materials, Malene Pilgaard Harsaae, Ronni Anthony Johannesen, Anne Louise Bang, Tine Hort, Hanne Thaarup Mølbak, Katrin Meinert Maagaard

Textile Intersections Conference Series

In the fashion and textile industries, materials are a prerequisite for the making of products. Extraction and processing of these materials have a huge negative impact on the environment and in addition they spark ethical and social considerations. This paper presents a project where cultural heritage and material knowledge is employed to explore if history and tradition can contribute to intelligently develop novel and flexible casein materials for the future with less damaging impact on the environment. Constituted by speculative design and a material-first perspective, the paper introduces a case of material exploration with casein, which is a milk protein. …

Bacterial Cellulose As Biofabricated Textile Material: Biotinkering And Trajectories Of Textile Materialisation, Ziqian Yu, Valentina Rognoli

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Bacterial cellulose (BC) is increasingly studied in material design and biodesign as a biofabricated material shaped through cultivation, harvesting, and processing. In fashion contexts, however, BC is often identified as a leather alternative, particularly in sheet form. While this framing has supported its integration into design practices, it constrains BC's textile potential. This paper investigates how BC becomes textile material through multiple materialisation trajectories rather than through a single substitute material form. The study is a comparative analysis of sixteen cases, framed by Material-Driven Design (MDD) approach. Fourteen external design and interdisciplinary cases provide the comparative basis, while two hands-on …

From Textility To Embodied Experience: A Practice-Led Generative Approach To Textile Ich Engagement, Mi Lin

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Engagement with intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is increasingly framed as experiential rather than representational. However, textile ICH—particularly structurally complex forms such as Miao Piling Embroidery—is still often presented through documentation and visual display, limiting access to its embodied, processual, and perceptual dimensions. This paper develops a situated, practice-led generative approach that explores how textility can be translated into generative and embodied experience. Using Miao Piling Embroidery as a case study, textility is defined here as a conceptual construct that synthesises material, making, structural, and cultural connotations, understood as a system of relations including unit formation, layering, and repetition. These relations …

Reya: Reuse Yarn. Product, Process And Practice, Elizabeth Gaston

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Reya: Reuse Yarn is a practice-led research project that investigates scalable methods for reducing pre-consumer waste in commercial knitwear manufacturing. Positioned within a circular manufacturing framework, the study re-evaluates knit as product, process, and practice to generate new insights into sustainable production. The research addresses the environmental and economic impacts of deadstock yarn, particularly low-value synthetic blends that are typically discarded due to limitations in quantity, aesthetics, and material consistency. Drawing on interdisciplinary knowledge from knit and visual colour psychology, the project employs a Knit Thinking methodology, combining tacit material understanding with explicit technical knowledge through iterative, material-led enquiry. The …

The Impact Of Differentiated Post-Consumer Textile Waste Sorting On The Homogeneity Of Recycled Yarns, Magdalena Kohler, Holger Cebulla

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Post-consumer textile waste (PCTW) is increasingly characterized by complex multi-fibre blends, posing significant challenges for fibre-to-fibre recycling. This study investigates the influence of sorting, cutting, and tearing processes on nep formation and the resulting yarn quality during mechanical recycling. A three-stage sorting approach based on fibre composition and stitch density was developed and combined with systematically varied cutting and tearing processes. The results show that both input material characteristics and recycling parameters affect nep formation. In particular, thermally melted cut edges from garments containing polyacrylonitrile were identified as a potential source of neps. The findings highlight the importance of differentiated …

Designing With Evolutive Colors: A Proof Of Concept For Bio-Based Dye Integration In Textile Design Digital Workflow, Clarisse Barbot, Camille Fuzier, Bertrand Loïc, De Visscher Emile, Panayotis Mavros

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Current industrial textile production relies on petrochemical dyes. This dependence has led to growing interest in bio-based alternatives, although their adoption remains constrained by technical and cultural factors. In particular, bio-based dyes do not meet typical industrial standards for stability, diversity of colour choices, and reproducibility. Textiles dyed with bio-based colourants tend to exhibit colour changes under light exposure. Current design software systems were built with the conventional expectation of stability of petrochemical dyes in mind, making them ill-adapted to bio-based dye behaviour and thus hampering their industrial adoption. To address this gap, we propose the prototype of a novel …

Sketching Fast, Sketching Slow: Extending Sketchnoting Practices With E-Textiles, Anna Blumenkranz, Barbro Scholz, Irene Posch, Verena Fuchsberger

Textile Intersections Conference Series

As design researchers, we are often challenged to make sense of qualitative data without losing its nuances and situated character in the process. Sketchnoting is a widely used technique for transforming data into personal and memorable summaries. Typically practised with pen and paper, it involves a combination of drawings and text. However, what often remains underexplored is the formative role of materials in shaping sketchnoting practices, leaving open questions about the kinds of knowledge different materials enable to articulate. This paper explores e-textiles as a medium for sketchnoting, examining how their temporal, materially composite, interactive properties influence processes of data …

Hooked: Programmable, Capacitive Sensing Through Crochet As A Medium For Garments With Tactile Interaction, Juliette Hars, Josie Hughes

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Soft capacitive sensing in wearable textiles has many promising applications such as health monitoring, rehabilitation, or intelligent sports garments requiring sensitivity and sensory stability. Existing approaches either rely on rigid or semi-rigid components that compromise conformability, or on conductive yarn arrangements whose sensing geometry is fixed by the textile structure and difficult to adapt at design time. Crochet is an additive, stitch-by-stitch construction process which offers a largely unexplored route to programmable sensing surfaces, in which electrode geometry, baseline capacitance, and sensing range can be tuned directly through fabrication. We present a means of programmable capacitive sensing through crochet, enabling …

Imagining Open-Source Ecosystems For Experimental Weaving: A View From The Adacad Project, Laura Devendorf, Deanna Gelosi, Etta Sandry

Textile Intersections Conference Series

This paper describes and reflects on a series of activities, performed from 2024-present, that looked to grow an open-source ecosystem centered around [Anon. Software], a tool for what we began to call experimental weaving. We describe how we came to see experimental weaving as a term that can capture approaches and applications for weaving beyond common characterizations that center disciplinary affiliation or professional identity. We sketch the boundaries and sites of experimental weaving as it relates to our project and offer insights on common needs and challenges our project presented for these groups. We conclude by envisioning broader ecosystems for …

Beyond Softness: Examining How Vocabulary Marginalises The Material Narrative Of Native British Wool, Zoë Fletcher, Nicci James

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Softness has become the dominant metric through which wool is evaluated in knitwear design. This paper argues that such language privileges fibres associated with Merino and marginalises native British and regional wools with distinct breed-specific qualities. Drawing on practice-based research, material experiments with native British wool yarns, and literature on wool fibre and supply chains, we examine how existing terminology fails to support design engagement with these materials. In response, we propose a five-part framework, Place, People, Process, Properties and Practice, to support a more nuanced wool literacy. Developing richer vocabulary for native British wool is not simply a matter …

Designing Garments As Processes: Material Transformation, Temporality, And Care In Contemporary Fashion Practice, Zuzana Šebeková

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Recent discussions on sustainability in fashion have highlighted the limitations of approaches centred on material choices, technological innovation, recycling, and circular systems, which often fail to address the underlying issues of overproduction and overconsumption. In response, this paper proposes a shift from product-centred sustainability toward process-oriented approaches that engage with the temporal life of garments. The paper analyses a bachelor-level fashion design project as a case study of designing garments as processes. The project explores garment development through bio-based coatings, compost-induced degradation, cracking, repair, and material renewal. These processes introduce transformation, instability, and variability as intrinsic design conditions rather than …

Textile Commons Of Care: Intergenerational Mending And Temporalities, Sam Bennett, Gabriele Ferri

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Visible mending is increasingly recognized as both a functional and creative craft practice and a form of material intelligence, where knowledge emerges through tactile engagement. This paper adds an additional layer that visible mending in community, where the act of mending is also visible, functions as a materially grounded practice of ongoing care through which knowledge and learning are distributed across people, textiles, and time. Drawing on a multi‑sited qualitative study, including a nine‑month global mending cohort, a visible mending workshop, and interviews with experienced menders, the paper examines how care aesthetics helps clarify the social and epistemic dimensions of …

Threading The Line: Switchboard Labor, Bodily Knowledge, And The Textile Traditions Of Telephone Operating, Yuhanxiao Ma

Textile Intersections Conference Series

This paper positions telephone switchboard operating as a textile tradition in the full disciplinary sense: a practice organized around embodied skill, the transmission of bodily knowledge through community, and the production of relational connection as material output. Drawing on feminist labor history, textile theory, and Daniela Rosner’s framework of critical fabulation, it argues that the systematic erasure of switchboard labor by electromechanical automation constitutes a form of textile loss: one structurally identical to the suppression of feminized craft work in computing history. The paper then presents the design logic of This Is Vera, Hold Please, a performance installation in development …

Textile Intersections 2026: Material Intelligence Exhibition Catalogue, Afroditi Psarra, Liza Stark, Sasha De Koninck, Larissa Kunstel-Tabet, Katharina Sand

Textile Intersections Conference Series

Catalogue of the Textile Intersections 2026 exhibition, Material Intelligence, presenting textile design research that explores intelligence through material behaviour, textile structures, more-than-human agency, material cycles, computation, craft and material commons.

Understanding The Political Profile Of Long Island’S Central American Electorate: A Case Study Of Long Island’S Majority-Latino Towns, Brett J. Patrick

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

As Salvadoran and Guatemalan migrants settled en masse across Long Island from the 1980s to the 2010s, seven Latino-majority towns emerged, each with distinct voting patterns that diverge from broader national Latino trends and from one another. This study examines how and why these Central American communities vote by integrating precinct-level election returns with the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey data. Using variables such as income, population density, education, citizenship status, and language, it identifies correlations between demographic conditions and partisan vote share. This approach reveals how socioeconomic factors shape political behavior within Salvadoran-American and Guatemalan-American enclaves in Nassau and …

"A Brief History Of Florence, Alabama", William Lindsey Mcdonald

Research Articles

A brief history of Florence, Alabama from its origins with the Cypress Land Company on March 12, 1818. McDonald highlights the industrialization of East Florence and notable residents, including four Alabama governors, Dred Scott, members of the US House of Representatives, and W.C. Handy the Father of the Blues.