On June 2nd I’ll be giving a workshop for the PHD+ program here on how to develop a sustainable summer writing practice. This session will be one of the opening discussions for a daylong event that asks PhD students to take their research topic and transform it across a range of different formats: podcasts, websites, and zines. The goal for my part is to collect a number of different writing activities to show examples for how one might experiment with writing practice. For me, sustainable writing can be found through regular work, joy, and playing with constraints. To get there, I suggest students do the following:

• Experiment with different formats for writing. For this I discuss otter.ai.
• Distinguish between the different phases of the writing process and sit down with a clear goal in mind.
• Scale up to a daily practice rather than experimenting to start with tons of words each day.
• Incorporate free writing (hat tip to Sean Michael Morris here for his beautiful approach to the craft).
• Incorporate stochastic practice as a means to jolt your creativity. I’ll use Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck here.

I then close with a short activity that asks students to brainstorm the different components for a practice of their own: format, location, frequency, amount, and method. After jotting a few ideas each for each category, I’ll guide them through a discussion of how to remix these components into something that works for them. Slides follow below. The particular deck theme I used was food themed, which felt appropriate.

A quick one today on how I manage my task list each day and the tools I use for doing so.

For years I have used Slack to manage my working life. If you click a single message you can select “remind me later” and select a date and time. I use this religiously, scheduling out reminders for particular times and dates. If I need to follow up on a thing, it gets a date. If I need more time to reply to a message, it gets a date. You can also schedule reminders for yourself separate from messages. So, if I have an overarching task, it gets a date and reminder. It’s not uncommon for me to open slack and get 10 notifications at 9:00 AM that tell me what I am supposed to be doing for the day. Here’s a glimpse at my reminders for today:

This system has worked well for years. I rarely let anything slip, because I just file everything away as a reminder and snooze if necessary. But Slack recently changed how their reminders work. DISASTER. I can’t fully grasp how to reset the way it manages this system, but now it seems to be giving me double alerts for these notifications in a way that collapses them with DMs. It’s deeply irritating. While I’m sure I could figure a workaround, I decided it was time to disentangle this particular tool from my daily task management.

So, I’m experimenting with a physical notebook for the first time in at least a decade. Here’s my daily notebook for today:

I’ve tried such things in the past but never stuck with them for long, but this run seems to be sticking. In part, I think this is because of how I’ve made working with the notebook part of a daily ritual. Each day’s page is broken into three segments: must do, can do, and waiting. I start each day by looking at the previous day by looking at the previous page to see what needs to be moved over. I’ll then check my inbox and shuffle things around based on how answering email goes. This process gives me a sense of things that are urgent and those tasks that require actions from other people. I typically close out each work day by referring to the page once more and updating things. This process is helped along by the fact that I have found a particular set of pens that are deeply, unironically joyful to use. Working with them provides a meditative tactile sensation that grounds my start and end to each day.

Sharing all this is a tad embarrassing. I have discovered writing in a journal! I have terrible handwriting! Pens are nice! But I can’t emphasize enough what a shift this has been for my working life. It’s brought an embodied ritual to each day that I didn’t have before, and I’ve found it surprising how much energy can come from shifting this foundational part of my working rhythm. So, if you’re feeling stuck, it’s never too late to change. Your process can always find new shape if you give it new tools.

I recently got word that my manuscript for Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change was accepted for publication with Open Book Publishers. As exciting as this is, there is still much work to do. I could not have asked for more thoughtful and generous peer reviewers, but even thoughtful and generous feedback still takes time to incorporate. One reader’s report especially requires a kind of work that used to give me a lot of difficulty when I was a graduate student. The substance of the report was that there were two critical conversations with which I needed to engage more deeply. The reader suggested thoughtfully that I needed to incorporate those conversations that critique the field of librarianship (#critlib especially) if I wanted to claim librarian as an identity. The other critique: my writing on artificial intelligence felt a little thin and needed to be built out. Also very fair. I hadn’t actually anticipated writing about AI, but it does feel more and more urgent the more time passes. Despite my own reluctance I found myself needing to read much more about generative AI.

So, here I have two areas in which I need to read more deeply. Such critiques can feel very overwhelming and abstract, and it is helpful to find ways to make them smaller and actionable. Experience has helped me towards a system that works for me, so I thought I would share a few thoughts here on my workflow for this research and revision process. While each step below does build on the others, I typically think of each phase as a separate component. I try to stick to a single goal when I sit down at my desk (or stand at my treadmill—more on that below).

Gathering

First, I gather a list of citations to explore. I might drop a bunch of links in a word doc, open a range of tabs, or print a stack of texts. The anonymous reviewer above suggested the #critlib Zotero library, which turned out to be an extraordinary resource. Reading through a collection of articles here took me to the Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook. Exploring that resource took me to the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. And working through that material took me on a deep dive into In the Library with the Lead Pipe. In each case, I started by skimming titles and abstracts just to get a sense of what could be relevant.

Reading

I read 2-3 articles per day from the stack created during the gathering phase (after all, one can only take in so much per day). As I go, I typically underline some things, underline and star others, and then underline and star and write CITE in capital letters next to others. At the end, I’ll make a few notes at the top of the article about whether or not the thing seems useful and about where I see the material fitting into the book. I typically do this work on the treadmill, which I mention for no other reason than to note how important it is for me to associate particular kinds of work with particular spaces and practices. In this way, my “to read” pile gradually morphs into a “read but needs to be transcribed” pile.

Lifting and Transcribing

At this point, I shift back to my computer. I have three folders there: “to transcribe,” “to integrate,” and “done.” For each article that I have read, I create a blank word document titled with the name of the author. I transcribe that article’s quotations with page numbers into its corresponding holding document, and I also assemble the actual, formatted citation for my references list. As this point, I am typically done with the actual, full text of the article. It exists for me only as a series of quotations, a citation, and a few notes to the effect of “mention in Chapter Three when you talk about the interview” or “more of an explanatory footnote than an actual citation to Chapter Four.”

Integrating

Only now do I actually open the manuscript itself. Given that is revision work for an actual, already extant manuscript, I typically have a pretty good idea of where things are likely to fit in and be useful. This phase involves integrating the new material into my text, stitching things together, and rewriting whatever components were complicated by the new references. Sometimes, this process is fairly seamless. Other times, this process involves substantial rewriting in light of the way the citations change my thinking about particular ideas. After the initial pass at integration, I make a note about the page numbers where I have revised new material. That way, I have a better sense of which pages to focus on during later editing.

Proofing

In this final phase, I make sure to return to things with fresh eyes. I will read more broadly than just the sections I have surgically edited, and I’ll hope to see where things fit, where they don’t, and what other edits might be needed to make things flow together. But the pages listed in the previous phase help me know where to focus.

Each of these phases feeds the others, so I am constantly moving forward. I feel as though I am making progress, and I also feel as though the big abstract task of reworking my argument to fit more closely into a particular critical conversation is more manageable and more doable. Importantly, each of these segments requires a different kind of work in ways that I appreciate. Transcribing and creating a citation require far less mental energy for me than reading or integrating. I welcome these variations.

Hopefully this is useful for seeing how I go about the revision process. Keep an eye out for Embedded Pedagogies, the text of which will be available print on demand and freely online. I am so grateful for the particular anonymous reader I describe above. It’s been enjoyable to dig into broad areas that overlap with my work but that were not top of my mind. I’ve learned a lot, and I think my work is much stronger for it.

The Train Moves On!

Progress is happening. Much of it reworking what I already did. End of year projects crept in and put this project on the back burner for a couple of weeks. But despite the delay, the train moves forward! And what once was done is now redone!

Servo Motors

For example, the servo motors. The first version worked, sort of. They didn’t move a full 180°, and they were kind of weak.

So I found new motors, bought a couple, and tested them out. That of course, required recreating the servo gear and the whole housing unit.

After many iterations of the servo gear…

I dialed in the tolerances and sizing so the new servo horn/arm fits and stays in place. But just to be safe, I’ll be screwing in each of the servo gears.

Holder

The new servo motor is bigger than the previous. That means the holder needs altering. Fortunately, I designed it measurements so that a quick change of a few select dimensions and the holder fits the new motor snug, but not as tight as a fat kid in the middle seat. Hence the screw.

Also note that I started writing the version number on the object.

I also opened up the back side so it is easier to install the gears, especially the servo gear. I tightened up the tolerances here, too.

(New version on the left.)

And here’s the new gear train all assembled with the new servo. It moves so much more cleanly and smoothly.

And just for fun, here are most of the parts I 3D printed so far.

Moving On

This got me to the point of creating the states. I first needed to calculate how big this project was going to be more accurately.

So I counted all of the hexagons horizontally, and vertically to get a much better calculation than we had used in the past.

I plugged these numbers into a spread sheet, and iterated over a few hexagon dimensions in order to see how big this map can be, or how small it needs to be. Two factors weighted the dimensions the most: 1) the maximum size that the laser cutter can cut, 2) the size of a doorway. I figure that I can cut the map out in multiple pieces, so the size of the laser cutter is not too much of an issue. But if this thing needs to travel, then it definitely needs to fit through a doorway. So that is really the limiting factor, because it will need to travel at some point in it’s existence.

Our original dimensions called for a map that was nearly 4 feet by 3 feet. Too large for the laser cutter, and too large to fit through a door.

A good size ended up being a hexagon that is 20mm from side to side, which creates a map about 30 inches long and 23 inches wide. A common, indoor doorway in the US is 30-32 inches wide. Such a table will definitely slide through at 23 inches wide.

All posts in this series:

• Part I - Critical Making Project 2026
• Part II - Jump on the Gear Train
• Part III - Gear Train Assemble
• Part IV - Back on the Train

Funding provided through a generous grant from UVA Arts Council.

Professors HATE This One Weird Trick for Summarizing Your Research

There’s an old story, almost certainly apocryphal, about former British Prime Minister John Major asking Boris Yeltsin to describe the Russian economy in one word. Yeltsin said it was “Good.”

Seeking a bit more detail, Major asked Yeltsin if he could describe it in two words. Yeltsin replied, “Not good.”

Major finally asked for a three-word summary. Yeltsin’s response? “Not good enough.”

While the exchange is most likely a myth, there is something irresistible about its structure, and it was rattling around in my head during a recent session of my dissertation seminar.

During the break, I asked someone to sum up their partner’s dissertation in one word. They said: “Empathy.” I relayed the Yeltsin joke and we decided to test whether the structure held up in summarizing academic research. Two words: “Not empathetic.” Three words: “Not empathetic enough.” Gabby, whose research is about depictions of madness in modernist literature, thought about it for a second and said: “Yeah, that’s actually not a bad summary.”

We started going around the room with it. Spencer, who is working on trans bibliography, offered “hermaphrodite” as her one-word summary, which yielded “not hermaphrodite,” and then “not hermaphrodite enough.” Applied to my own dissertation, which focuses on contemporary poems written from the perspective of animals, I get:

Animal.

Not animal.

Not animal enough.

Which, for a 3-word summary of what is supposed to be a book-length scholarly work investigating the strategic deformation of syntax, figuration, and sound that poets undertake in order to make language register as issuing from a nonhuman consciousness, is pretty good.

The question, of course, is to what extent “not X enough” is actually a useful model for summarizing research and to what extent it just feels like it works because the rhythm is satisfying. But I do think there’s something real going on in the unfolding of X, not X, not X enough. So many research projects, across disciplines, are fundamentally about some quality or condition that is absent, insufficient, or misrecognized. The three-word version locates a gap, names an inadequacy, and implies a standard that hasn’t been met. It’s a tiny argument. It can’t work for everything. But it’s a fun test and I’d argue it extends even beyond academic research to artistic projects more broadly.

So, does this method work for summarizing your research or current project? Does it not work? Does it not work well enough?

I blinked and realized that Amanda Wyatt Visconti and I have been at the Scholars’ Lab for nine years as of April 24, 2026. Time flies. We typically celebrate by eating or drinking something sweet in the Lab (I’m still vibrating from the cream soda we had half a decade ago). We weren’t able to do so this year, so I thought I would share a quick post to mark the last nine years.

Nine things I’ve learned

1. Drink a glass of water and put both feet on the ground.
2. Don’t over-engineer things.
3. Slow down and appreciate.
4. Some things get easier. Some will not.
5. Write it down. It will be helpful for someone. That someone might be you.
6. Snacks always help.
7. Be explicit about what you need and what you don’t.
8. There are limits.
9. Structures give shape. Structures can be changed.

Nine memories to hold onto

1. Amanda biting into a lemon after eating miraculin.
2. The moment when each student steps into their own expertise.
3. Shane saying, “agenda item: be better friends.”
4. When I cried at the Afton overlook because I wouldn’t have to commute for work anymore.
5. Biscuit baking lessons on zoom with Jeremy and Amanda.
6. The support each colleague gave when I needed it.
7. The satisfaction that comes from seeing a student graduate as a DH practitioner, especially when you met them as a prospective student.
8. Those who are gone. Ryan. Leigh. Scott. Rebecca. Effie. Stéfan. So many others for different reasons.
9. All the unjust things. All the people working to make it better.

Nine things I’m grateful for

1. Our students. They’re the best.
2. Our colleagues. They keep me coming back.
3. To still be here, doing this.
4. Everyone who has taught me.
5. Those who are still here.
6. Those who made space for me when I burnt out.
7. Eliza, Ben, Ava.
8. That I was given a chance.
9. Every accident that brought me here.

It’s not lost on me that so many others deserve to be in stable employment who are not. I’m very lucky to have a job in this world on fire. So, I will close with gratitude and a determination to pay it forward to the next folks in line.

At the beginning of the spring semester, each of the Praxis fellows was asked to run a pen-and-paper workshop introducing the rest of the fellows and staff to a digital method. No screens, no code, just the low-tech materials needed to think through a concept with your hands.

The driving philosophy for my workshop came from a quote by Richard Bach: “We teach best what we most need to learn.” I found this a clarifying provocation because instead of asking myself thorny, stressful questions—What will I teach? What do I know well enough to even be able to teach? What will be interesting to the other fellows and staff?—I was able to begin with a simpler one:

What do I need to know?

That was easy. I need to know how to curate and organize works of literature into coherent clusters and how to present those clusters to an audience. The structure of my dissertation is somewhat unusual in that it isn’t organized into chapters based on individual authors—for example a chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, a chapter on the works of Ted Hughes, a third on Gwendolyn Brooks. Rather, my chapters are conceptually themed around three kinds of poems I believe to be undertheorized: poems written from the perspective of animals, poems mourning the death of an animal, and poems detailing an animal encounter. Because these are undertheorized categories, there is no obvious starting point, no established canon to lean on. One of the central challenges of this work is determining what poems to include and how to present them to a reader. Hence my workshop.

A Word Teeming with Life

I decided to begin with a brief etymological history. (Based on my previous blog post, you may sense that this is a common pattern for me, and you would be correct.) The word anthology can feel dead and tiresome, especially in the context of an English department, where it quickly becomes synonymous with The Norton Anthology of English Literature—the ubiquitous teaching tome that conjures up associations of imperialism, hierarchy, and canon-formation. But it felt important to go back to the original anthology, a word whose origins are quite literally teeming with life.

Anthology comes from the ancient Greek anthologia (ἀνθολογία), meaning “flower-gathering”—from anthos (ἄνθος), “flower,” and legein (λέγειν), “to gather or collect.” The word traces back to a specific act of curation: around 100 BCE, the poet Meleager of Gadara compiled what is considered the first true anthology, a collection of epigrams by forty-six Greek poets. He called it The Garland—Stephanos (Στέφανος)—and in his introduction, he compared each poet to a different flower, weaving them together into a literary wreath. From its very beginning, an anthology was never just a heap of texts. It was a garland—something deliberately woven, where the selection and arrangement were themselves creative acts.

I shared this with my fellow fellows to begin reframing the kind of work an anthology can do. The anthology is not a neutral container. It is an argument about what belongs together and why.

Aesop’s Fables

I then introduced the anthology-making exercise. I gave each pair of participants a set of eighteen Aesop’s fables—but only their titles and associated morals, printed on cards. I chose not to include the full text of the fables at the wise suggestion of Brandon Walsh, which saved on reading time and allowed me to include enough fables to make the anthologizing meaningful. Participants were asked to select, cluster, order, and title an anthology from this set of cards.

The decision to strip the fables down to title and moral started me thinking about metadata. In this exercise, what is normally considered metadata—the title, the summary moral—was itself the data, given that participants didn’t have the fables themselves to read. This necessarily informed how they constructed their anthologies. Several groups clustered the fables based on the morals, sorting them into thematic categories like greed, deception, or flexibility. But I noticed that these morals are open to interpretation. Given the cryptic nature of some of the fables, it is fully possible for a single fable to have several competing morals, all of which would in turn affect how it was categorized. Is “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a fable about a thirsty crow attempting to drink from a pitcher too narrow for its beak, about cleverness, persistence, or desperation? The answer depends on the anthologist, and each reading produces a different garland.

Titling conventions themselves proved significant. One participant (Shane, unsurprisingly) included only fables featuring dogs (and the dog-like) and titled his anthology “Canidae.” It made me realize how contingent such an anthology is on the metadata available. If the titles of the fables were different, if they foregrounded the morals rather than the characters, could such an anthology even exist? The exercise revealed something I hadn’t fully articulated before: that the categories we use to organize literature are not found but made, and they are made from whatever information is legible to us at the moment of sorting.

Wireframing

The second part of the workshop asked participants to take their anthology and imagine it as a website. Using markers and blank paper, each pair sketched wireframes for three pages: a homepage, a browse page, and a single fable page. The shift from editorial decisions to design decisions turned out to be more disorienting than I expected—and more productive. Suddenly the question was not just what belongs together but how does someone move through what belongs together.

One of the most interesting wireframes came from Shane, who designed a single fable page that presented two fables simultaneously. At the top left of the page, a small illustration accompanied the first line of “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” reading right-side up. But the next line down was the last line of “The Fox and the Grapes”—printed upside down, beginning from the bottom of the page. The two fables were enmeshed, line by line, so that as you read downward through one fable you were also reading upward through the other, the right-side-up text and the inverted text meeting in the middle. Even the pairing was deliberate: the contentment of the country mouse set against the fox’s sour dismissal of what he cannot reach.

To sharpen the design conversation, I borrowed a technique I’d been advised to try (also from Brandon): after the initial wireframing round, I asked participants to create a deliberately bad wireframe, then swap it with another group to fix. It is easier to talk about good design in the context of bad design, and the exercise gave everyone a shared vocabulary. But Shane’s wireframe complicated things beautifully. The group that received it didn’t want to “correct” such a fun and original idea (and who could blame them?) Their fix was to simply present the two fables one after the other, essentially normalizing the layout. It was the responsible design choice. It was also, in some way, a loss. Watching it play out, I realized the exercise had surfaced a genuine tension at the heart of digital presentation: between accessibility and experimentation, between making something usable and making something that rewards a different kind of attention.

This, I think, is the crux of the digital anthology problem and the reason I designed this workshop. The editorial and the digital are never really separate; they shape each other. The way you organize a collection changes what kind of interface it demands, and the affordances of an interface change what kinds of organization are even possible.

Anthologies Reimagined

But why stop at a website? The wireframing exercise opened a door in my thinking that I’m still walking through. If an anthology doesn’t have to be a book—if it can be a website with its own navigation and architecture—then what else could it be? What would an anthology you could walk around in look like? What if it weren’t a book to flip through linearly but something more like a room in a house you could dwell in. Where the poems on the walls changed depending on which door you entered through, where proximity meant something, where you could sit with a cluster of texts the way you sit in a corner of a room?

I don’t have answers to these questions yet. But I think the workshop helped me understand why they matter. Meleager’s original garland of poems was a wreath, a circle with no fixed beginning or end and where each flower touched the ones beside it. Somewhere between the garland and the Norton, we flattened the anthology into a line. The digital gives us a chance to unflatten it, to think about what it means to arrange literature not just sequentially but spatially, relationally, experientially.

We teach best what we most need to learn. I walked into that workshop needing to think more carefully about how the structure of a collection shapes the experience of reading it. I walked out with eighteen fables, four very different garlands, a handful of good (and bad) wireframes, and a vision of an anthology as a room. That feels like progress.

I. Have. A. Website. ✨ https://winnieepm.github.io/ ✨

As this academic year is coming to an end, I don’t have a dissertation to defend yet, but I did publish a public website freely hosted on GitHub Pages—it’s been three years in the making. What took so long, you ask? A combination of reasons, with two that stand out. One, I couldn’t make up my mind about the method for making it or the design. Too many choices, possibilities, tools to try, strong opinions, use-cases. Two, I chose to code my own website, and self-learning coding while you’re a full-time doctoral student in the humanities brings its own significant systemic and personal challenges: there’s no reward for the quirky extra major, at least not immediately. So, why do it at all?

I chose to explore minimal development stacks because building them forced me to learn how they work. At what point is HTML and CSS alone not enough? Why do you need a framework? What decisions draw projects to content managers or static websites? When is a database required?

The ubiquity of websites, especially for professionals today, ticked my curiosity to learn how they worked to produce an online presence of a person IRL, but popular options like Wordpress, Wix, and Squarespace, offer limited out-of-the-box theme options to display and manage your content. Also, it will typically cost you to access their full library of design and layout resources to make a personalized website that uniquely represents you and stands out. Each of these also require constant updates to ensure the site’s safety and functionality, which means your website can easily break, or be exposed to cyber attacks, if you fall behind updates.

Though the CMS (content management system) route makes sense for many, I had questions about web sustainability, development, and design that drove me instead to pure HTML/CSS pages, and static site generators (SSGs), for making myself a website I could style and organize at will locally. SSGs take in textual content written in markdown, your designated layouts, and data, they then process all these files locally to produce a version of your website in a set of HTML files ready for hosting. This simple production pipeline makes for fast, flexible, and design agnostic webpages that are so small in file size they can fit in a 1GB flashdrive.

But the benefits come with a steep learning curve. It requires great learning effort, if you’re unfamiliar with coding, and a significant time commitment. For collaborative projects, creating different user access levels and credentials is not supported and would require coding a custom solution. You also need to use a code editor for updating the website, which is something not everyone is comfortable doing or needs to learn.

I built and continue developing my own portfolio website using the 11ty framework, an SSG based on JavaScript that has become popular in the past years because it’s easy to set up, compared to others like Jekyll, and it makes no decisions on how to style your projects out of the box. Honestly, I wasn’t aware of how long it would take me to learn all the things I’ve come to learn up until this point, but I also don’t regret it because I have been able to support other digital projects just because I have spent enough time banging my head against the wall to setup up and customize 11ty. If I had to do it all over again, I would, though I’d focus more on simplifying my goals and tasks, rather than setting out to accomplish really ambitious projects that constantly feel out of reach while you’re working on them.

Anyway, I made my website. It’s live, it’ll keep growing, and it’s mine.

It’s that time of the year when the DH Awards goes public with the results of their annual cycle. The process is, of course, only a snapshot of the field and limited in all those expected ways. But I am astonished each year, chronically online as I am, to find that there are so many projects out there that are new to me. Each season is a delight as I page through the many different links offering new work, unknown-to-me scholars, and fresh ideas. Reading this year, I thought that the list could make for a useful way of constructing a DH teaching activity. Here are a few ideas for how you might use the DH Awards to teach your students:

• Take five; pick one. Students pick five projects to examine in detail, using a rubric you provide in advance. In session, they each quickly present on one topic to the group. You follow up with a general discussion to which the students can bring all five pieces they examined.
• Dig into a year. It’s not uncommon for scholars to designate particular years as uniquely important for their fields of study. In this activity, students pick one year and examine the projects showcased in the DH Awards closely. What was distinctive about this year? What trends do they see? What seems curious?
• Look over time. Ask students to consider how representation of the field has changed over time as articulated in the DH Awards. Probably easiest to narrow their focus to a single category for this one. Does anything rise up? Fall away? Remain steady?
• Consider what’s left out. Invite students to look critically at the awards process. Can they think of any topics or kinds of scholars who are consistently left out?
• Design your own. Encourage students to speculate on their own award cycle. What kind of work would they want to promote? What do they value? How could they design a shoestring award process to help facilitate that every year? What kind of collaborators would they need to implement it? How much labor would it entail?

For extra flavor, I might offer analogous or contrasting exercises with Reviews in DH or Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. Maybe that’s a future post. Endless thanks to those who provide volunteer labor to keep DH Awards going. I always appreciate the project as a service to the community. I always learn something each awards season, and hopefully the above activities give some ideas for how they can teach your students as well.

I’m very belatedly joining the Praxis Fellows blog after more than a semester of meaning to write this post and not writing it. Let me start with the word that has been keeping me busy instead.

Prosopopoeia

Pro-so-po-PEE-a. It comes from the Greek prosopon (“face,” “mask”) and poiein (“to make”), and it means, roughly, to give a face to something that doesn’t have one—or more precisely, to give speech to something that cannot speak. (The Greek word for “make” is also where we get the word “poem”—literally “a made thing.”) When a poet makes a dead person talk, that’s prosopopoeia. When the poet makes the wind talk, or a river, or a nation— prosopopoeia. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the rhetorical toolkit, and one of the strangest: the fiction that things which have no voice—or rather, a voice which we are not accustomed to listening for—can be “given” one by the writer.

What I’d like to do in this post is walk through a few examples of prosopopoeia to give you a sense of why this figure fascinates me and why I think it matters so much.

A courtroom ghost

Let’s begin in a Roman courtroom. In 56 BCE, Cicero was defending a young man named Marcus Caelius Rufus against charges of political violence. Cicero’s strategy was to reframe the whole prosecution as the scheme of a scorned lover—Clodia Metelli, a powerful patrician widow who had been Caelius’s mistress. To discredit Clodia, Cicero did something audacious: he announced that he would summon from the dead her own ancestor, Appius Claudius Caecus—the famous blind censor who built the Via Appia, Rome’s first great road—and let him address her directly.

What follows is one of the most celebrated prosopopoeiae in classical rhetoric. Cicero assumes Appius’s voice directly and has him thunder at Clodia: Woman, what business have you with Caelius? What business with a young boy? The address is deliberately humiliating. The Latin word Cicero uses, “mulier” (“Woman!”), strips Clodia of her patrician dignity. The jurors know these are Cicero’s words, not Appius’s, but when placed in his mouth they take on, almost by alchemy, a new kind of power. Prosopopoeia, in this instance, is able to create a sense of moral authority, seemingly out of thin air.

A silent urn’s subversive speech

If the Cicero example shows prosopopoeia as a deliberate rhetorical strategy, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” shows how the figure can be a force of destabilization—how the question of who is speaking can even become unanswerable.

You probably know the poem’s famous last lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But here are the closing lines, in the version most modern anthologies print:

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

With the quotation marks around the phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” it seems quite clear that the urn is given a chance to speak and offer its profound metaphysical proposition on the nature of beauty and truth. The trouble is that those quotation marks do not appear in transcripts of the poem made by Keats’s friends, nor do they appear in other printed versions. This has led to major critical disagreement over how much speech can really be attributed to the urn. Are the lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said by the urn with the rest attributed to the lyric speaker of the poem or is the urn meant to be saying the entirety of the last two lines? Without any quotation marks indicating who is saying what, is the “ye” in the final line addressing the speaker of the poem, the readers of the poem, the urn, or the painted figures on the urn itself?

The instability of the speaker gives way to an instability of tone. Is the statement about beauty and truth a profound metaphysical proposition? Or is it a comic overstatement representing the naive and narrow point of view of the urn? The shifting quotation marks across manuscripts and editions are the material trace of a question prosopopoeia always raises: when we give speech to something that cannot speak, whose voice are we really hearing? And how exactly are we meant to hear them?

The sled dog, the bee, and the pig

This is where my dissertation comes in. The first chapter focuses on what I’m calling “animal persona poems”—contemporary poems written from the perspective of nonhuman animals. These poems occupy a strange position relative to prosopopoeia. Strictly speaking, they’re dramatic monologues: a poet assumes a character and speaks as that character, the way Browning speaks as the Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess.” But the character is a sled dog, or a bee, or a pig. And the fact that the character is an animal changes everything about how the ventriloquism works.

Consider Timothy Donnelly’s “Malamute,” from his collection The Problem of the Many (2019). The poem is written in long, winding, syntactically complex sentences—each stanza essentially one sprawling clause accumulating subordinate phrases. Every verse paragraph opens with the same refrain: “When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs.” That past tense is crucial. This isn’t a dog speaking in the moment; it’s a being that once inhabited a dog’s body and now reflects from some other vantage point. The dog pulled the sled with the other dogs “who didn’t know I didn’t know”—it conceals its disquiet, its not-belonging, while the elaborate syntax enacts an interiority far exceeding anything we’d attribute to a naturalistic animal consciousness. The poem doesn’t pretend to offer transparent access to a dog’s mind. It foregrounds its own artifice.

Or take “As Bee,” by Paula Bohince. Here the speaker is a bee—polite, reflective, stoically aware of its own brevity. “This is my first and only spring on earth. / I get it.” The bee wonders parenthetically about its own mother—”(did I have one?)”—which captures both biological reality (bees don’t have individual mothers in any meaningful sense) and deeper emotional uncertainty. What strikes me about this poem is the “As” in the title, which marks the poem as a performance, a speaking-as, not a speaking-from.

And there’s Margaret Atwood’s “Pig Song,” from You Are Happy (1974) which features a sequence called “Songs of the Transformed” in which nine speakers are animals who have been changed by “Madame.” The pig describes itself in grotesque imagery—”a greypink vegetable with slug / eyes, buttock / incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip”—and then turns on its captor: “Madame, this song offends you, these grunts / which you find oppressively sexual, mistaking / simple greed for lust.” The poem’s final lines crystallize something about prosopopoeia itself: “I am yours. If you feed me garbage, / I will sing a song of garbage. / This is a hymn.” The pig will mirror back exactly what it receives, and the mirroring becomes sacred utterance. The voice given to the degraded creature becomes the vehicle for its resistance.

The paradox

What connects all these examples—the Roman courtroom, the Grecian urn, the sled dog and the bee and the pig—is a shared paradox. Speaking for what cannot speak or what cannot be thought to speak is simultaneously an act of imaginative generosity and an act of appropriation. The voice that emerges always belongs to two speakers at once—the ostensible speaker (the ancestor, the urn, the animal) and the real one (the orator, the poet). And the uncertainty about whose voice we’re really hearing is prosopopoeia’s deepest feature.

For my dissertation, this paradox becomes especially charged when the subject is an animal. Animals do have voices—they bark and sing and grunt and click, not to mention the huge range of gestures and non-speech acts they perform. They communicate, even if we can’t fully understand what they’re saying. So the poet who writes in the voice of a dog or a bee isn’t conjuring speech from silence, the way Keats does with his urn. The poet is replacing one kind of utterance (the animal’s actual, opaque expressiveness) with another (human language). The animal already has a face. The poet is putting a new one on top of it. And the most interesting animal poems, I think, are the ones that know this—that build the awareness of their own ventriloquism into their formal structures.

More to come. My dissertation explores what happens to poetic language when it tries to cross the species boundary, and part of what excites me about being a Praxis Fellow is thinking about how digital methods might shape that inquiry—how you curate a corpus of poems, how you present and sequence them, and what it means to build a digital environment that lets readers encounter those poems rather than just read about them. In my next post, I’ll write about a workshop I recently ran in which participants assembled their own anthologies of Aesop’s fables and then designed pen-and-paper wireframes for how they’d present them as websites. Until then, thank you for reading.

Winnie E. Pérez Martínez’s post on the Scholars’ Lab blog this week got me thinking. In “Breadth and Depth, a Self-Centered Dialectic,” she revisits how we discuss breadth and depth as two approaches to digital humanities professional development. In this framing, one that I have put forward myself, we can think of careers in DH as operating on two axes. On the one, we are expected to know a little about a lot of things. On the other, we are directed more towards narrow, specialist-level knowledge about a smaller subset of methods. Breadth vs. depth. Few careers really ask us to go entirely in both directions. More practically, we tend to specialize in a couple areas within DH and develop passing familiarity with many more.

For me, the dichotomy between breadth and depth was a way to help students map their career plans onto the different skills they might acquire. I thought of it as a way to free yourself from the need to be expert in everything. In her post, Pérez Martínez expertly shows how breadth and depth actually inform and lead to one another. There can be no one right way in. If you start deep, you might find yourself broadening, and starting wide can help you to focus in. What most resonated about Pérez Martínez’s post, though, was the way in which you can see an exceptional scholar and practitioner wrestling over whether they are enough, over whether they could ever develop the necessary skills they need to feel complete. Those anxieties never really go away. I feel them too. I recognized myself in Pérez Martínez’s post, and I couldn’t help but sense that the breadth against depth framing seemed to be having the opposite effect I would want, heightening anxiety rather than mitigating it.

Pérez Martínez proposes a broadening of the axes I had envisioned. Breadth and depth move beyond just X and Y, curling in upon themselves until they start to push outwards. The moment reminded me of the age-old dichotomy of “hack” vs. “yack” in DH work and how Laura Braunstein offered “stack” as an important third term. In addition to coding and technological critique as key parts of DH work, Braunstein’s intervention elevates “the often invisible technological, social, and physical structures within which scholarship is produced and disseminated.” For Braunstein, DH work is more than just the sum of what we do, it also consists of the structures we put in place to enable that work. In the same spirit and inspired by Pérez Martínez, I have been wondering what breadth and depth leave out, what they gesture towards within and beyond the teaching that we do.

Put another way, what is education if not just content? One point of comparison here is L. Dee Fink, whose Taxonomy of Significant Learning illuminates the various components of teaching.

Caption: L. Dee Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning as shared on Florida International University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Fink’s Taxonomy usefully illustrates all the things that lie beyond the subject matter in the courses we teach. Learning is more than consuming books, articles, or topics. Teaching is more than passing along skills and methods. If we think of DH merely as skill building, we live too much in the upper right of the circle. We leave out the rest of what makes DH experiences—and DH learning—significant for so many of us. We ignore the transformative mentoring that shows a variety of career options. We miss the collaborative practices that can change how we view our work in dialogue with others. We do not account for how true interdisciplinarity changes our perspectives on our own research processes. We need a new term to trouble the dichotomy between breadth and depth that can capture a more capacious view of what it means to practice digital research and teaching, one that goes beyond subject matter, methods, and skills.

I find this particularly urgent in the age of generative AI, a complicated set of technologies that threatens to instrumentalize education beyond recognition. What counts as methodological training if you can vibe code your way to a launched digital project? What counts as digital pedagogy if our students are secretly using chatbots as study partners? How do we make room for conversations about professional development that do not reduce people to a tidy axis of skill acquisitions?

What lies beyond the breadth and depth of what it means to be a digital humanist?

I would introduce a third term for DH professional development: “breath.” Breadth and depth ask us to think about what we can and cannot do, about the subject matter and methods of DH work. The terms ask us to think about the limits of our knowledge and our inability to pursue universal expertise. Breath asks us to reframe the conversation entirely. It is an invitation to pause and re-embed our work in the body. How do we feel about our labor? Who are the working souls in DH and how do we engage with them? How do we work or overwork our own body to the point of breathlessness? What is the lived experience of our labor that transcends the skills or methods? What are the affects—the joys, frustrations, traumas, triumphs—of DH work that cannot be captured by thinking in terms of skill acquisition? How do our energies map onto a living, breathing community of thinkers and doers beyond the work on the table in front of us? Where do we fit in?

Breadth and depth ask students to think about where they could be, professional development by way of spatial orientation. Breath invites students to consider where they are, to think of themselves as real people with real needs that need attending.

Over the weekend, one of the amazing student Technologists, Link did a clean and reorganizing of the resin 3D printer station. The printer gives off some nasty fumes, so she was able to procure an air purifier set up just for such printers. Unfortunately, the model available doesn’t directly connect with our Prusa SL1S. Link put the air filter in place, but had to resort to duct tape to get it ti connect to the resin printer. It didn’t work.

So when I came in this morning and saw the need for an adapter to the adapter, I knew what I was going to do today!

I spent some time thinking about the best options. An insert with magnets? But how does the original adapter stay put on the new adapter?

Well, there are screw holes, how about using them? Yep, that’s the ticket. Basically replicate the bottom of the original adapter so it can screw to the new, then add a whole bunch of magnets!

And it worked on the first try! I had to double up the magnets in order to make it strong enough to stay on, and the gasket printed in TPU could be a little bit thicker. But it was a great success!

The models are available on Printables.com for download and 3D printing.

On the heels of the knowledge gained from the last post figuring out the gear train numbers, I set out to model the gears and a holder.

And immediately I was confronted with an issue with my calculations.

The Problem

At the end of all my learning and calculating, I decided:

It looks like 36mm (servo) —> 12mm|36mm —> 12mm (pinion) 
has smaller gears and gives good enough range.

One thing I forgot to consider is the length of the servo horn that is used to connect the servo to the gear. I could do without it, but trying to design and print such a small toothed hole has issues. I have seen others try and filament 3D printing does not provide fine enough detail to mesh well with the servo gear. So using the supplied horn attachment makes things much easier.

The problem, is that the horn is about 22mm in length. If my gear is only 36mm in diameter, then the horn would stick out into the gear’s teeth!

Another sidetrack bump I had to overcome was the getting the dimensions of the servo horn. The dimensions I could fine online were unsatisfactory. So I measured one myself!

And went ahead and 3D modeled it and put the 3D model and diagram files up on printables.com for anyone to use.

With all of that info, I can then recalculate the gear train dimensions so it fits with the servo horn.

The Correct Gear Train

Servo motor → 46
              ↓
             20 (same shaft as) 46
                                ↓
                               20 (pinion)

Sidetracked Again!

The first day of modeling, I decided to jump the Fusion 360 train and try onshape.com. It’s a web based 3D modeling and CAD tool. It has been around since 2015, and is gaining ad time lately in many of the YouTube.com videos I see, so I thought I’d give it a try. I was prepared for some learning curves and to spend some time learning a new system, but two things got me to throw in the towel after a full day of working with it; 1) I couldn’t figure out how to do something pretty simple that would take 2 minutes in Fusion 360, 2) I didn’t care for the interface; it felt too unprofessional. If TinkerCad.com is the elementary school version of CAD, it looked like Onshape.com was the 9th grade version. I did love that it was browser based. And making double helical gears was a breeze! There’s a handy built in menu for all kinds of gears. Fusion 360 on the other hand is big L in gear making. You have to import 3rd-party scripts and I can’t get any of the fancy gear scripts to work.

Like many things, it was the fact that I could get things done much faster with the tool I already knew, and I was accustomed to the interface that led me back to Fusion 360.

Making the Gear Train

I had previous attempts at designing the gear train, but I decided to start from scratch since Fusion 360 doesn’t have an easy way to just change the size of gears when using the gear script plugin thing.

Servo Gear

So, first I designed the servo gear. Pretty easy to create a 46 tooth gear with the gear script plugin thing.

I designed a cut out, or inset, for the servo horn to fit inside. This is the easiest way to attach the gear to the servo. 3D printing these gears with filament would not have enough resolution to print the fine teeth needed to interface with the tiny default gear on the servo shaft. Much easier to use the included horn.

Combo Gear

The combo gear was pretty easy, too. Just make another 46 Tooth gear, then make a 20 Tooth gear and stack them on top of each other.

I set the diameter of the hole through the gear at 4.2mm. That’s big enough for a M4 bolt to go through, with just enough tolerance to allow the gear to spin but not wobble.

Pinion Gear

Another very simple gear to model. There’s nothing special about this, just a 20 tooth gear with a 4.2mm diameter hole.

Rack

The rack is pretty straight forward. I created a 20 tooth gear, then used one of those teeth to copy down the length of the rack.

Gear Holder

This was a little bit tricker. The gears were all prototyped in one go. The first print was great. This part took 7 tries so far.

I started by creating a new Assembly in Fusion. Then adding in the gears and aligning them as needed. I went with a stacked approach so as to keep the footprint as small as possible. I had previously modeled the servo motor, so I was able to add that in as well.

It was tricky to get the servo aligned with the servo gear, and then get each of the gears aligned with the ones the mesh with. In realized that if a part has the sketch turned on, then that shows up in the Assembly file. I used that to create a construction line on the servo gear and put a point where the center of the combo gear should be aligned to. Then I did the same on the combo gear to align the pinion. Then adding the holder, servo motor, and rack.

It was a lot of back and forth between the designs for the parts and the assembly to align everything correctly. But in the end I think it lines up well.

Spacers

After the first version, I realized that the gears needed spacers to keep them in place. The holder is wider than the gears. So modeling and printing a couple of spacers is pretty easy.

Somewhat Working

I connected everything up, bolted in the gears, and plugged it in. And it works… mostly.

As the video shows, the gears work, somewhat. There is a bit of jittering, which may be due to the code just rotating the gears back and forth. A more normal behavior would be moving from one angle to the next and stopping there. The servo is also not moving at a full 180°. More like 100°. This is only about 111mm of travel, not the 150mm we’re hoping for. It might be time to consider better quality servos. Perhaps some that move 270°.

It is also a pain to swap the servo motor. Perhaps a redesign is in order.

Missed the first two posts?

• Part I - Critical Making Project 2026
• Part II - Jump on the Gear Train

Funding provided through a generous grant from UVA Arts Council.

This week I started figuring out the gear train and rack and pinion needed to move the states. I have tried in the past to get AI to do this for me, but the results from ChatGPT and Copilot are all over the place and offer varying results every time I ask. I decided to use AI to learn the math instead of trying to get it to figure it out for me. Instead, I’m learning the math behind the problem to work it out myself.

Be forewarned, there is lots of math!

TLDR;

What helped immensely was GearGenerator.com

And a spreadsheet that AI generated to calculate the travel distance of a rack based on the pinion diameter and number of rotations.

With help from GearGenerator.com I created a gear train which starts with a 36mm gear attached to a servo motor that meshes with a 12mm gear which is on the same axle (or combined) with a 36mm gear that then meshes with a 12mm pinion.

But how did I get this this answer?

Well, let me take you on a journey to how I figured this out and understood the problem.

What am I trying to do?

Each state will move up and down based on the data given. Prof. Rich Ross and I want this to be a pretty dramatic difference between the lowest and highest states, so we decided on 150mm of movement. After much deliberation and looking at various options, Yashu and I decided that a rack and pinion would be the easiest way to accomplish the goal. What is a rack and pinion? It’s simply a gear that moves a bar with gear teeth. It turns a rotational movement into a linear movement. The round gear is the pinion, the bar with teeth is the rack. )

We figured the servo can rotate the pinion and move the rack attached to the bottom of the state up and down. (See last week’s post with a video of the test case.)

First Gear

The first question we needed to answer was; How far does the rack travel based on the size of the pinion?

The formula to figure this out is

\( T = Dπ \)

T is the rack travel distance, D is the diameter of the pinion, π is yummy and 3.14159265359…

It’s basic middle school geometry. The travel distance is just the circumference of the gear.

But our servo motor only goes 180-degrees, or half a rotation, or half the circumference. So we’ll have to keep that into consideration.

\( T = {Dπ \over 2} \)

The smallest size gear we want to use is probably 12mm. I just pulled that number out of the air (but actually, we’ll use it because I already know it works within all the parameters and constraints for the project 😁 ).

A pinion gear with a diameter of 12mm will cause a rack to travel \( T = 12π = 37.699mm \) But since our servo can only do a half rotation, the rack travel length is \( T = {12π \over 2} = 18.85mm \). I want the rack to travel at least 150mm. So a 12mm gear is not going to work.

In order to get the rack to travel 150mm from a single gear, we can calculate that

\( T = {Dπ \over 2} \)

\( {2T \over π} = D \)

\( {2(150) \over π} = 95.493mm \)

We would need a 95.5mm diameter pinion!

The footprint of the smallest state is about 45mm square. So everything has to fit within that area. So the largest a gear can be is about 40mm. We’ll need a different way to do this.

One option is to use multiple gears. We can use multiple small gears to create the same effect as one large gear. How does that work?

Second Gear

Well, if we just have two gears and one is smaller than the other, then if we turn the small gear one full rotation, the bigger gear will turn less than one full rotation. If the bigger gear is twice the size of the smaller gear, then for every 2 turns of the small gear, the big gear will turn once.

small turning large

The opposite is true, too. If the big gear rotates one full revolution, the small gear revolves twice.

Large turning small

The ratio between the sizes of the gears is called the gear ratio. The gear ratio is derived from the diameter of the gear doing the revolving divided by the diameter of the gear connected to the moving gear. We can call these the driving gear (the one attached to a servo or some other source that generated the movement) and the driven gear. So we get the formula:

Ratio (R) = Diameter (D) of driven gear (n) / Diameter (D) of driving gear (g)

\( R = {Dn \over Dg} \)

If the ratio is greater than 1, then the output is a slower turning gear, a reduction in speed.

If the ratio is smaller than 1, then the output is a faster turning gear, an amplification of speed.

Start with a smaller wheel, the bigger wheel turns slower. Start with a bigger wheel, the smaller wheel turns faster.

We also write the ratio like this R = Dn:Dg

OK. Next, how do we figure out the gear ratios for the gear train, and how many do we need?

Let’s take two gears, one is 36mm in diameter and the other is 12mm.

If the 12mm gear is the driving gear (it is connected to the servo), then the ratio is \( R = {36 \over 12} = {3 \over 1} \) or 3:1. The ratio is greater than 1, so the output is a slower turning gear.

One way to look at it is to read the ratio from left to right. A bigger number is faster than a smaller number. R = 3:1. 3 to 1. This is a decrease. From speed 3 to speed 1. Slower.

But if the driving gear is 36mm, then the ratio is \( R = {12 \over 36} = {1 \over 3} \) or 1:3, the output is a faster turning gear.

Read from left to right. 1 to 3, is an increase. From speed 1 to speed 3. Faster.

If we stick with a 12mm pinion, how many times does it need to revolve in order move a rack 150mm?

The circumference of a 12mm pinion is

\( C = Dπ \)

\( C = 12π = 37.699mm \)

so

\( {150mm \over 37.699mm} = 3.9789 \) revolutions

A 12mm pinion needs to rotate about 4 times in order to move a rack 150mm.

So if we have a second gear turning the 12mm pinion, how big does it need to be. Recall that the servo gear will only be able to rotate half of a rotation. The gear ratio, then, needs to be 0.5:4. Half a rotation to 4.

\( {12 \over x} = {0.5 \over 4} \)

Doing some cross multiply,

\( 12(4) = 0.5x \)

\( {48 \over 0.5} = x \)

and we get that x = 96. Whelp. Back to a 96mm gear. This is because the servo gear only rotates halfway.

Third Gear

So, I ask myself, “Self, if you know the pinion size and how many rotations it needs to complete, how do you calculate the other gears in the train if you don’t know exactly what sizes and how many are needed?”

I replied, “You know, that’s something that I don’t know.”

Well, I asked Copilot, too. (Copilot took into account previous conversations where I told it the gear ratio was 0.5:4 and an earlier example using 36mm and 12mm gears. And it uses gear Teeth instead of Diameter, but these are the same thing.):

(motor) 36
        | (ratio of 3)
        ↓
       [12 same shaft as 36]
                          | (ratio of 3)
                          ↓
                (pinion) 12

(input shaft) 30T
              ↓
              12T -- same shaft -- 15T
                                    ↓
                          (pinion) 30T

Fourth Gear

OK. That’s cool. Now to ask Copilot to figure it all out for me.

“Copilot, walk me through each step of how to calculate a gear train to drive a pinion 4 rotation with a servo motor generating 0.5 rotations and the largest a gear can be is 40mm, and using the smallest number of gears possible, and the gears should be easily 3D printed.”

[(A)40T Servo]  
    |
  meshes                        Stage 1 (40→12)                      
    ↓ 
[(B)12T same shaft as (C)36T]  
                        |
                      meshes    Stage 2 (36→15)
                        ↓
                 [(D)15T Pinion]

Nice! If we have a 15mm pinion rotating 4 times, that moves the rack

\( T = π × D × 4 \)

\( T = π × 15 × 4 = 188.5mm \)

I plugged these calculations into a spreadsheet (rack_travel_calculator.xlsx) to help me play around with the gear sizes. I wanted something smaller than 40mm.

It looks like 36mm (servo) —> 12mm|36mm —> 12mm (pinion) has smaller gears and gives good enough range.

That’s a 3 × 3 = 9 total ratio. Better than the 8 needed.

12mm pinion rotating 4 times moves a rack

\( T = π × D × 4 \)

\( T = π × 12 × 4 = 150.796mm \)

That’s just perfect, but in a gear train, the pinion actually rotates 4.5 times, so the rack will move 169.646mm. Even more perfect!

Gear train

OK. Now with the math and numbers all figured out, and the some additional tips from Copilot about layout, it’s time to start modeling a gear train!

Phew! That was a lot! Next week, 3D model the gear train!

Funding provided through a generous grant from UVA Arts Council.

Read Part 1 - The Beginning

Introduction

Beginning in 2023, the Makerspace has funded a graduate student, usually in the humanities, to design and complete a physical project that represents or comes from their humanities research. Named the Critical Making Fellowship, the previous projects were Alexa Luborsky’s “Diaspora Poem” (2023), and Holly Zhou’s “Memory Maps” (2024 & 2025). This years Fellowship began as a collaboration with Statistics Professor Rich Ross and Makerspace Manager Ammon Shepherd. Generously funded by an UVA Arts Council Grant, the 2026 project was able to hire Yashu Tang for the Fall 2025 semester to get the process started. Below is the write up of the project and contributions from Yashu.

Project Overview

This project aims to visualize electoral voting patterns in previous presidential elections using an interactive data-sculpture. Each state is represented with a cluster of hexagonal cells equal to the number of electoral votes allocated to the state.

The state-block will have two actions in response to input data:

1. light up blue or red depending on the party of the winning candidate and
2. raise or lower itself proportional to the margin of victory.

The data on state-level electoral votes is from UCSB’s American Presidential Project website.

Data

The data has already been scraped from UCSB’s website and contains data on the 1924-2024 elections. They are stored in the election data folder on the shared drive, with a separate .csv file for each election year. Files are named with the convention Election_####, e.g. Election_1968. Years with atypical electoral votes have been noted in the data description document, which can also be found in the election data folder.

The data columns are as follows:

State: State where the data was collected

Total: total votes tallied for the state

Popular_D: Number of popular votes won by the Democratic candidate

Prop_D: Proportion of total votes received by the Democratic candidate

EV_D: Number of electoral votes won by the Democratic candidate

Popular_R: Number of popular votes won by the Republican candidate

Prop_R: Proportion of total votes received by the Republican candidate

EV_R: Number of electoral votes won by the Republican candidate

• If a 3rd party candidate won electoral votes, the votes will be recorded with similar conventions as above, with “_3rd” as the suffix.

EV_Outcome: Column with electoral vote outcomes. Data is stored with integer values of electoral votes, followed by the party they were cast for, separated by spaces. E.g. 3 D 0 R 0 I, where 3 votes were cast for the Democratic candidate, and 0 for the Republican and Independent/3rd party candidate.

Margin: Margin of victory, calculated using

MOV = (Raw margin of victory) / (Total votes in state)

where the raw margin of victory is the difference in popular votes between the first and second place candidates in the state.

Hardware

The state-blocks will be 3D printed by Ammon at the Makerspace and mounted on a similar 3D printed rack-and-pinion mechanism to achieve the raising and lowering.

The vertical movement will be powered by 180-degree rotation Servo motors. They were chosen because their degree of rotation can be specified in code. This allows for an easy transition from the MOV value in the data into Servo motor directions. The Servo motors will be connected to the Adafruit 16-channel PWM bonnet, and a brief tutorial on connecting and using the bonnet can be found here. For this project, the bonnets will use the 3x4 right angle male headers, so the Servo motors can all interface to the pi.

The light-up portion of the project will be completed with the 5050Neopixels, whose product specifications can be found here. A pdf of the specs will also be in the shared drive. The pin configuration can be found on page 5 of the pdf. When connecting the Neopixel to the bonnets, the signal pin should connect to pin 2 (DIN), the power pin should connect to pin 3 (VDD), and the ground should connect to pin 1 (GND).

• It should be possible to chain multiple Neopixels by chaining pin 4 (DOUT) to pin 2 (DIN) on another Neopixel, but I haven’t had a chance to test it.

Software

There is some Python code for powering the Servos simultaneously. This is on the Raspberry Pi and should be stored in the “Code” folder. The packages used for powering the Servos and Neopixels must be used in a virtual environment. On Thonny, you can go to “Run”, then “Select interpreter”, then choose the venv that is in the “Code” folder. Not much has been done for the software portion of this project.

February 2026 update

Further consideration about the project led us to expand the vision of the project. Instead of being tied to electoral data, the map will be able to use any two data points to compare states. The LEDs will not be exclusively red or blue, but RGB LEDs will be used to allow a range of colors.

As of February 2026, the hardware side of things has improved a bit. California was chosen for the test case as it is the largest with the most electoral votes. This would test the capability of the inexpensive 180 servo motors to move the 3D printed states.

Originally, it was hoped to use the output of data from the R statistical program to generate the 3D models for printing. The resulting hexagons from this workflow were inconsistent.

An additional issue, was that the generated file created a map with states at varying heights. We are going to account for this in the hardware by moving the states up and down, so they all need to be the same height.

Modeling each state by hand in Fusion 360 is the solution.

Fusion 360 was also used to model the servo holder and a rack and pinion gear set to move the state vertically.

To test the set up, two pieces of plywood were cut to house the gears and the state. Temporary supports were 3D printed to hold the two pieces of plywood together.

A test case using California can be seen in the video below.

Funding provided through a generous grant from UVA Arts Council.

Read Part 2 - Jump on the Gear Train

A great Valentine project to brighten the day for your special someone.

Materials Needed

• Carboard
• LEDs
  • Assorted Red, Gree, Blue, Yellow, White
  • Color changing
• CR2032 battery
• Yarn (any color)
• Copper tape
• Masking or clear tape

Step 1 Cut Out Cardboard Shape

Cut a heart shape out of cardboard. You can do any shape you want, though.

Step 2 Apply Copper tape

Make a “track” of copper tape around one side of the heart. The rails of the track should not touch. One is for the negative, the other for the positive part of the circuit. Leave a piece unstuck. This will be used for the “button”.

Step 3 Poke holes for LEDs

Poke holes in the heart for the LEDs. You can do as many or as few as you want. This one is labeled with - and + to make sure the LEDs are placed correctly.

Step 4 Insert LEDs

Push the LED legs through the holes. The short leg is negative ( - ) and the long leg is positive ( + ).

Step 5 Secure LEDs to Copper Tape

Bend the legs of the LEDs so that the negative leg lays flat on the negative rail and the positive leg lays flat on the positive rail. Tape them down so the stay in contact with the rails.

Step 6 Make Battery Holder and “Button”

Use cardboard or cardstock to make a ring the size of the battery. The ring should be at least three times as tall as the battery.

Fold a piece of cardboard or cardstock to fit like a bridge over the battery ring. The positive ( + ) side of the copper tape will attach to the underside of the bridge to act as a button.

Step 7 Secure Battery and Button to Heart

Use Masking tape to secure the battery ring and bridge (button) to the back of the heart. The button should rest on the negative ( - ) rail of copper tape. The positive ( + ) rail of tape should be attached to the bottom of the bridge.

Test the LEDs by pressing the button. They should all light up. If not, check to make sure all of the LED legs are touching the correct rail and are firmly taped down.

Step 8 Wind with Yarn

Finally, wide yarn around the heart until all of the cardboard is hidden. Secure the yarn on the back by tying a knot.

Press the button on the back to make the LEDs light up!

What would it mean to design a digital archive that doesn’t simply preserve the past, but actively looks both backward and forward—one that helps us think differently about how the past and future speak to each other?

This question kept coming up as I began building Folkloric Futures, an Omeka-based digital archive that brings together Caribbean folklore, literature, visual art, and community storytelling. From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to create an archive that treated folkloric figures as static artifacts or neatly categorized traditions. These stories are alive. They change depending on who tells them, where they’re told, and why they’re remembered.

Folkloric Futures started as a way to test that idea in practice.

I’m a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia, and my academic research focuses on Caribbean literature and speculative storytelling. My dissertation looks at how folkloric Caribbean figures like the soucouyant, douen, jumbie, and moko jumbie move across novels, oral traditions, and visual culture—and how those movements shape ideas about identity, belonging, and survival. But I kept asking myself a bigger question: what would it look like to take those ideas out of a dissertation and build something people could actually explore, use, and contribute to?

This project is my attempt to answer that.

Why folklore—and why speculation?

There’s a line from Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau that I return to often: “Their eyes had seen so much that they no longer distinguished between dream and reality” (from Creole Folktales). For me, that line captures what folklore does best. These stories don’t offer neat explanations of the past; they give people ways to live alongside it.

Caribbean folkloric figures are full of contradictions. The soucouyant is frightening, but also powerful—an older woman who sheds her skin and moves through the night as fire. The douen is a child spirit who lingers at the edge of the forest, both vulnerable and unsettling. The moko jumbie towers above the crowd during Carnival, part guardian, part performer. These figures carry history in ways that are felt rather than explained—through fear, humor, warning, and care.

Speculation gives me a way to work with that complexity. Instead of asking, “What is this figure?” speculation asks, “What can this figure do?” What stories does it carry? What futures does it hint at? What happens if we design an archive that allows those meanings to shift rather than settle?

Designing an archive that tells stories

At a basic level, Folkloric Futures is a digital archive built in Omeka. It brings together literary excerpts, oral histories, visual art, and creative reinterpretations of Caribbean folklore. But very quickly, I realized that the hardest part of the project wasn’t collecting materials—it was deciding how the archive should feel.

Most digital archives aim for visual consistency and neutrality. This one couldn’t. These figures don’t belong to a single mood, palette, or structure. So instead of designing one uniform template, I let each figure shape its own page.

The soucouyant’s page uses deep violets and ember-like gradients to suggest heat, night, and movement. The douen’s page is quieter, built around forest greens and shadow, echoing stories of childhood loss and ecological liminality. The moko jumbie’s page is bright and vertical, drawing on the energy of Carnival and the figure’s role as a watcher from above.

These choices aren’t just aesthetic. They’re a way of letting design do some of the storytelling work—guiding how people encounter each figure before they ever read a word.

Metadata, but make it human

Metadata turned out to be one of the most surprising parts of this project.

Folkloric figures don’t stay in one place. Their names change across islands, and their meanings shift between generations. Trying to force them into fixed categories felt like losing what mattered most about them. So instead of treating metadata as a rigid checklist, I started treating it as something closer to a set of prompts.

Instead of asking only where a figure comes from, the archive makes room for multiple origins. It doesn’t settle on a single interpretation, but allows overlapping themes and contradictions to sit side by side. In this way, metadata becomes another storytelling layer—one that reflects how folklore actually moves through the world.

Ethics as something you build in, not add later

Because Folkloric Futures works with living traditions, ethics could not be an afterthought. Early on, I wrote a project charter to guide decisions about collaboration, credit, and care.

That meant committing to a few core ideas:

• contributors are collaborators, not data sources
• artists deserve material compensation
• people should control how their stories are shared
• accessibility matters, especially for oral and low-bandwidth storytelling

These principles shape everything from submission forms to design choices. Ethics, in this project, isn’t a separate section—it’s part of the infrastructure.

Teaching as part of the archive

Folkloric Futures is also a teaching project. In Spring 2026, I’ll be running a workshop series that invites participants to experiment with archives, oral storytelling, mapping, and creative worldmaking—using both digital tools and low-tech alternatives.

The goal isn’t technical mastery—every workshop includes a low-tech version by design. It’s about helping people see archives as places where stories can be questioned and expanded. In this way, teaching feeds back into the archive, and the archive becomes something shaped by ongoing learning rather than a finished authority.

What building in public has taught me

Working on this project has changed how I think about archives. I’ve learned that design decisions are never neutral, that aesthetics shape interpretation, and that building in public requires patience, iteration, and accountability.

Most of all, it’s reinforced my belief that speculation isn’t escapism. In Caribbean storytelling, imagination is often a survival strategy—a way of carrying history forward without being trapped by it. Folkloric Futures tries to honor that by creating a digital space that doesn’t just preserve stories, but invites people to think with them.

Because an archive, at its best, doesn’t just hold the past. It helps people live with it.

In my discipline, art history, the slide show is not only an intrinsic part of teaching, but it shaped the discipline’s methods from its inception. Practices through which art historians are taught to understand art – like visual analysis and comparative analysis– rely on one or more reproductions of artworks to be available to students in the classroom. Photographic slides have been used in art history since the early twentieth century. Then why are most art history sideshows so plain? Why, now that technology has advanced, have the conventions of the art history slideshow stayed largely the same?

Outside of academia, video is one of the main ways people consume information. Currently, this is largely through online video. Online educational programs vary greatly in quality and accuracy, but many educated individuals who operate outside of academia have taken to platforms like YouTube to share their knowledge and their analysis on a variety of topics. Some of my personal favourite video essayists hold undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. They often start their videos by addressing a current topical issue or event as a departing point to present different philosophers’ ideas and concepts. While these videos use some academic practices – like citing sources on the top right of the video, or providing a bibliography in the description – their presentation style is definitely not academic. Their videos contain elaborate costumes, makeup and sets; their presentation style is highly emotive: they use humor, plot twists, and personal experiences to make complex topics more approachable. On Youtube, maintaining viewers’ engagement and retention is paramount for the monetisation of a channel. This is often achieved by favouring material that emotionally, rather than just intellectually, engages the viewer. Video essays can be long, sometimes multiple hours. The audience is almost by definition assumed to be a distracted one. Viewers are doing chores, or cooking, or on their commute. To keep them interested and listening, one needs to find ways to not only make the content relevant to them, but create emotional resonance and construct exciting visuals and sound design to highlight important moments. This highly emotional way of presenting differs from academic rigor, expectations of objectivity, and separation between the self and one’s field of study.

While in certain academic fields – largely feminist, queer, black and other minority studies – this requirement has been challenged, it is still an underlying practice in disciplines like art history. Yet, we all spend years of our life studying and researching this material because we love it, because we find it interesting and relevant. So why is it so difficult to communicate passion and enthusiasm in public facing presentations?

I believe there are at least two practices from the YouTube video essay that could translate to the academic presentation: encouraging emotional engagement, and providing variety. In regard to emotion, for example: Where can I script a joke or acknowledge the humor of an aspect of my research? Where can I leave out a conclusion or some information, to surprise my listener with it later? Where can I reenact a moment of my research when I found out something exciting or unexpected? Where can I peel back the curtain a bit on the process of my research, so that the listener feels involved in the narrative I’m presenting, and not just a passive bystander? Importantly, how can I use the tools at my disposal to create these moments of emotional engagement? Where can I hide something on the next slide, as to not give away my findings before I get to them? Where can I include a photo that brings up a good anecdote from my time in the archive, or at the collection?

Variety and dynamism can also be accomplished through the slides. Why am I the only one talking? Do I have audio or video clips that I can use? Can I call onto someone in the audience to answer a question? I often find it difficult to not sound monotone when I’m presenting. Embedding audio or video or planning for moments of interaction with the audience could help to break up the sound of my voice. There are also ways to make slides more dynamic and visually interesting without making them look unprofessional. If I need to talk over an image for a long time, how can I animate it in some way? Can I zoom in onto details of the painting as they come up in the talk? Can I show Calder’s mobile sculpture move? Can I play a video of the performance with the sound off as I’m talking about it?

The workshop I’m planning in Spring is an attempt to think about emotional engagement and diversity in the slideshow presentation as a group, without being prescriptive on which methods to adopt and when. I am aware that our cohort works in a variety of fields and from multiple identitarian positions that affect how we are perceived in a professional setting. Some of us can take more liberties when it comes to academic speaking and some of us cannot. But I am interested in finding out what people think about this comparison. Which methods of the video essay can apply to the academic presentation with the slideshow? I plan to use clips from videoessays to show some of these techniques. I’ll then play a clip of an academic presentation, and ask the people in the room to draw a storyboard of it. Storyboards, where a drawing of a shot and notes are put side to side, are very similar to the slide and script style of preparing for a talk. However, they force one in the position of the audience member instead of the presenter. They allow us to think in more detail about framing, and movement, and how to direct the attention of the viewer. I hope this exercise will inspire the group to think about some ways in which the slideshow can improve our ability to communicate our research to a variety of audiences.

My wife and I are expecting our second child in just a few weeks, which means that I am gearing up for a new and chaotic phase of life. As a part of the preparation, I’m doing everything I can to keep things running smoothly for student programs in the Scholars’ Lab while I’m out. I set up a process for doing so when I took leave two years ago for our first child, so I’m not exactly working from scratch. Here’s how I’m preparing for my leave this time around to make things easier for my coworkers who will be keeping things going in my absence.

Give notice early

Everyone has different interlocking reasons for when they give notice to their team. Those reasons might be medical, personal, or professional. Given my own particular circumstances, I let my immediate collaborators in the Scholars’ Lab know fairly early, several months before I would be out. With this knowledge well in advance of the due date, my collaborators knew that I was taking steps to accommodate my absence. I also notified students who would be impacted. The dates I chose to take these steps were selected carefully in conversation with my supervisor, who helped me decide who needed to know and when.

Identify areas of responsibility

One of the first tasks in preparing to unplug for two months was to list my tasks, differentiating between major ongoing initiatives and smaller one-off items. This process helped me to create a to-do list such that I can make progress on my leave in a controlled manner. Otherwise, one can get lost in an anxiety spiral feeling like there is already more to do. I identified the Praxis Program, the DH Fellowship Committee, and our summer programs as primary initiatives in need of continuity.

Wrap up what I can

For smaller projects, I sprinted over the past two months to finalize whatever I could. Rather than working with a particular student on a weekly basis, for example, I set a date for a multi-hour meeting where we could make significant progress on their project. I set early writing goals for myself to meet deadlines in advance. And I took advantage of the slow down between semesters as space in which I could get ahead.

Establish points of contact for what I can’t

Some projects and initiatives will inevitably roll over through my leave. Working through my list, I worked with my supervisor and coworkers to identify people whom might be willing to take on specific pieces of my work. This process always involved asking my collaborators a series of questions: what do they need to feel comfortable? What can they do? What do they feel uncomfortable with? Who else might make sense for particular tasks?

Document everything

So much of the work I do exists in my head. Workflows, points of contact, procedures, norms. I tried to write as much of this down as possible so that someone stepping in would know exactly what to do and when. Winnie E. Pérez Martínez has been exceptional at working on this with me as a student worker, especially in regard to clarity and formatting. Winnie has a special talent for taking an enormous brain dump from me and assembling it into a coherent, less intimidating guide. I have learned a lot from her!

Put guardrails on future commitments

If possible, I tried to stop planning major commitments that would take place a couple weeks before the due date. At the very least, when I agreed to something, I made it clear that I might unexpectedly withdraw with little notice. I am also giving a couple weeks buffer before scheduling new commitments after I return in April. After all, babies have their own schedules in mind, and postpartum life is enormously challenging and complex. It’s impossible to know what our lives will be like for the next several months, and I tried to be honest about these facts with everyone involved.

Caveats

Everyone deserves the time and energy that parental leave allows to refocus on their personal life and meet the needs of a difficult transition. Everyone deserves coworkers kind enough to help them make space for their family. But I also know this is not the norm. I am enormously fortunate and privileged to have such support. That being said, I hope that what I’ve outlined above can be helpful even for those who do not possess such a robust support system. In those cases, this post might offer a rough guide for how to advocate, push back, and find small space for what you need in infrastructure that might not otherwise allow it.

This is a guest post by Makerspace user, Yifan Liu. During the 2025 Fall semester he developed and created a number of amazing cityscapes.

3D Print Tutorial: Cityscapes

By: Yifan Liu (yl3gm), UVA Graduate Medical Student

Creating a 3d Model

1. Open the online software Map2Model. You will be presented with the following interface.
2. Enter which city or area you would like to model search bar. Then select an area of the map to be modeled.
   
3. Adjusting settings: There are many customizable settings that can be adjusted in the right-hand menus. Below are a few example settings that I commonly choose.
   • Base:
     • Map size: 152mm
     • Base layer: 4mm
     • Topography: Disable if modeling a relatively flat area to reduce complexity
     • Frame: Off
   • Features:
     • Roads
   • Include footpaths: Enable if you want to include detail of hiking trails or parks for example. Disable if you want to reduce file size and processing time
   • Road Types: Play around with disabling different road types for effect or reducing complexity - Grass: Off - Buildings:
   • Buildings Scale: 1.2x – 1.5x - Sand: Off - Piers: Off
4. Press “Generate Mesh” to generate a 3d model of your selection
5. Click the dropdown menu next to “Export 3MF”. Click “Export STL”
   • Note: you can also export as 3MF to retain features like roads, water, and buildings as separate objects.

Editing and Refining (optional)

You may notice that some structures in the model are not correctly detailed or rendered. If you want to add more detail, import your model into a 3d modelling software. For this example, I used Blender. More detailed instructions on how to use Blender can be found online.

1. Download or create 3d models of desired buildings. Adjust to correct scale and position and place over existing building on model.
   
2. Delete undesired geometry or vertices on cityscape.
3. Export file as an STL for slicing and printing.

Slicing

1. Open STL file in PrusaSlicer
2. Adjust settings by going to “Print Settings”:
   • Print settings: 0.20mm Structural
   • Brim: 4mm
   • Infill: 10%
3. Multimaterial Printing: (optional)
   • Click on the STL object and click on Multimaterial printing on the left-hand menu icons
   • Use the Smart fill tool to paint the desired colors. I prefer to paint water features blue and all other features white.

Printing

1. After slicing export your file to the desired printer. If using Multimaterial printing, use either Kermit (Prusa MK4 MMU3) or Big Bird (Prusa XL).
2. Load and select desired filaments on printer. Make sure to check that the correct filament is paired with the correct extruder.
3. Print and wait!