— A cataloguing project to activate the Mute magazine archive
Image: Mute’s first call for contributions 1994. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Call_for_contributions_mute_1994_01.pdf
Corpus Mute is a cataloguing project for making the Mute magazine archive using modern open scholarship workflows. The goals are to catalogue, explore, connect, and distribute Mute's writing and projects. The workflows use software tooling from the following areas — linked open data (Wikidata), knowledge graphs, open science infrastructures, and digital sovereign infrastructures. The results of the Corpus Mute endeavour will be accessible from well-established open scholarship platforms, including — OpenAlex, Wikidata, Zenodo, Archive.org, Library Genesis and many more.
The project aims to profile and give recognition to all who helped create Mute and generously gave their ideas, energy, and hard work: The editors and staff; contributors; those in our network — individuals, projects, and organisations; and to our supporters and funders.
Mute is actively looking for supporters and partners. Please reach out if you're interested in a conversation about the archiving project.
Coordinator: Simon Worthington, co-founder Mute [email protected]
- Cataloguing: Mute's publishing, projects, and networks
- Host events: 'Publishing Parties' — exploratory re-publishing gatherings
- Coordination: Organising a volunteer working group
Support the Corpus Mute project by purchasing a copy of the Mute Print Archive, by making a donation, or contributing sponsorship.
The Mute Print Archive is a limited edition of all fifty-one issues of the print issues of the magazine, covering twenty years of publishing from 1994 to 2014. The set includes the famous FT broadsheets, through the glossy magazine series, to the pocket book volume.
The archive is available in four price bands:
- Contributors and supporters:* 1200 € (=50% discount);
- Standard: 2400 €;
- Sponsors: 4000 €;
- Distributor discount: 1440 € (=40% discount).
*Supporters: If you had some sort of working relationship or involvement, as individuals or institutions, over Mute's working life then you're a supporter :-)
Postage and packing is extra, plus any taxes or import duties.
See https://archive.metamute.org/ for purchasing details, a full list of print issues, and more information. Prices are shown in regional currencies. Please email [email protected] for institutional invoicing or other enquiries.
Note: For Global South regions pricing is available based on purchasing power parity (PPP) indices — see: Eurostat data. PPPs convert different currencies into a common unit which equalizes their purchasing power and eliminates differences in price levels between economies. (Eurostat) Please get in contact directly for prices.
We use Liberapay to accept donations. Donations can be made a one-off payment or as recurring subscriptions.
Sponsorship is welcome. Sponsors are encouraged to purchase the Mute Print Archive — Sponsors edition at a price of 4000 € which can be purchased here. Sponsors will be included in our special sponsors page.
Direct sponsorship and in kind sponsorship and partnerships are also welcome. Feel free to support a publishing party event!
See the budget page for information on the planned project expenditure requirements.
The costs listed are the minimal overheads needed to run the project.
Currently the project does not receive any grant funding. (Sept 2025)
Volunteers are needed to support the project.
Help is needed with cataloguing and other supporting roles: design, writing, event organisation, community organising, and coding.
We are organised as a working group. If you would like to join the working group please check out the Matrix chat room, or join the weekly open meeting to find out more, or get in contact — e-mail: [email protected].
Training is provided from a peer-learning network for cataloguing, linked open data, knowledge graphs, and metadata.
See open tasks on Codeberg Git repository.
The working group has weekly online video conference meetings or you can join the ongoing discussion in the Matrix chat room.
Meeting schedule: STARTING 1st OCTOBER 2025. UTC 16:00, every Wednesday on Jitsi video conference platform.
See the event schedule for the next meeting and subscribe to the calendar feed.
Meetings are open to all. The meeting videos and transcripts will be archived online.
- Design a data model for magazine issues and articles for use in knowledge graphs and LLMs. The first iteration would be a skeleton data model, built bottom up, to understand what could be included. The data model would be built in a Wikibase instance
- Catalogue magazine issues with basic metadata in Wikidata, Wikibase Cloud, and Wikimedia Commons
- Create sample persistent identifiers and evaluate their use: ROR, DOIs, ORCIDs, ConfIDent, etc.
- Upload all magazine covers to Wikimedia Commons
Current status: Pre-release
Below are some sample views into Mute's open scholarship data records. These are the types of repositories that the project will distribute to:
- Zenodo - sample article
- Wikidata - top level organisation record
- Wikimedia Commons - media uploads
- Research Organization Registry (ROR) - organisation Persistent identifier
- Code - on Codeberg Git repo
- Matrix chat room - public
- Project tasks and work log - please volunteer
- Mastodon - [email protected]
- Contact: Simon Worthington #bookliberationist - [email protected] - @[email protected]
Content and code open access and open-source (c) Mute Publishing and the authors.
Content: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Code: GPL 3.0
