Zine Analysis Guide: Qualitative Analysis of Zines

Journey Lines surfaces QTBIPOC cycling stories and priorities that foreground mutual safety and space-taking, according to spacing.ca.

According to spacing.ca, contributors were paid and the launch was held in spring 2025, which affects ethical practice and consent design for analysis.

• According to spacing.ca, editors paid contributors $150 each to produce pieces, a concrete budgetary detail relevant to compensating participants (payment announced by co-editor Jess Nachman).
• According to spacing.ca, the zine launched in spring 2025 and the interview was published on July 23, 2026, dates that anchor timeline-based coding and follow-up research.
• According to spacing.ca, designer Sylver Sterling brings 9 years of community-oriented design experience to the project, which shapes the zine’s visual language.
• According to contributor quotes in spacing.ca, the zine’s contributors assert "We keep ourselves safe, " a theme you should code under mutual care and safety rather than only road safety.

Answer: Journey Lines is a participatory, arts-based zine project that amplifies QTBIPOC cycling experiences and launched with paid contributors and a spring 2025 in-person event, according to spacing.ca.

According to spacing.ca, the three co-editors (Rachel Wang, Sylver Sterling, and Jess Nachman) conceived the zine after receiving a LUSH Charity Pot grant more than a year before publication, and they intentionally paid contributors to avoid extractive practices.

According to spacing.ca, contributions are multimedia: written pieces, visual illustrations, linocut, and soundscapes linked by QR codes, which requires multimodal ingestion for analysis.

According to spacing.ca, dominant themes reported by editors and contributors include mutual safety practices, taking up space on roads, cross-movement solidarity, and contested relationships with police, which should guide initial codebook design.

Answer: Researchers should treat zines as multimodal, participatory data that require ethics, multimodal transcription, and community-centered coding, according to spacing.ca.

• According to spacing.ca, compensation of $150 per contributor changes consent expectations and supports non-extractive research workflows.
• According to spacing.ca, multimedia elements (soundscapes and QR-linked audio) require synchronized transcription and annotation, not just plain-text coding.
• According to spacing.ca, themes such as mutual safety and cross-movement solidarity should be elevated in codebooks rather than forcing zine content into preexisting cycling safety categories.

Answer: Journey Lines shows that zines are rich multimodal data sources that require participatory ethics and multimodal analysis workflows, according to spacing.ca.

According to spacing.ca, concrete details such as $150 contributor payments and the spring 2025 launch change how researchers document consent and compensation in their protocols.

If you want a reproducible workflow for zine analysis that handles PDFs, audio, images, and collaborative coding, try integrating AI-assisted ingestion, transcription, and thematic and cross-segment analysis into your project plan with Evidano.

Start your project by uploading your zine assets, designing an initial inductive codebook from contributor quotes, and scheduling community validation sessions. Try Evidano for free.