In mid-January 2025, I participated in the IMLS-funded Data Speculations: A National Forum on Library Digital Stewardship for Copyrighted Contemporary Culture. A fair bit of time was spent upfront establishing Chatham House Rule for the proceedings, so I can't credit the speaker, but at one point a presenter quipped, "I am the sin eater," with regard to their role in acquiring corpora for scholars to use, by working through some arguably legal gray-area corners of the internet, so the scholars themselves could keep their hands clean.

The following week was the inauguration, and I had enrolled in a week-long embroidery workshop in order to improve my embroidery skills before teaching Data Visualization with Textiles in the spring, and to stay far away from computers and the internet during what would certainly be a tumultuous time.

I did a few different projects during that time, but the one that became the major focus of my attention was a piece called "Sin Eater", which I wanted to give to one of the Data Speculations co-organizers, Sarah Potvin, the following week when I was giving a talk at Texas A&M.

An embroidery that reads 'I am the sin eater'

This piece is a lot of turkey stitch for the text, done on scraps from a woven cotton dress I'd made. I wanted the lettering to be fuzzy, because the law around this mode of text acquisition is kind of fuzzy, too. Between the colors and the letter-shapes it's not necessarily the most readable thing, but I can argue there's a reason for it (other than the fact that it was a learning piece): these activities are valuable, but time-consuming and absolutely not legible in either an academic or library context.

Close-up of turkey stitch before and after cutting

After I finished the lettering, I had a little time to spare before giving it to Sarah, so I added the logos for Sci-Hub and LibGen (both of which have proper logos and not just wordmarks, and I didn't want more letters on the piece). I embroidered those using backstitch, in colors that made them fade into the background (actually deliberately!), and they may be more visible from the back side.

Back of the embroidery, with Sci-Hub and LibGen logos somewhat more visible

As a final touch, I embroidered the phrase "dead elephant" (a tribute to the to-be-sunsetted HathiTrust Research Center) in binary at the top. If I could do it again, I'd have done the spacing differently, but so it goes.

I was still embroidering binary the morning of my visit to Texas A&M, but was able to give it to Sarah in person before leaving!

Sarah Potvin with 'I am the sin eater' textile