1. Things I have learnt from the Scholars’ Lab folks:
• How to brew the perfect cup of coffee.
• It is okay to love speculative fiction as a grown adult.
• Silent presence can be as welcoming as words.
• Imposter syndrome is here to stay. But that’s okay.

2. Things I have learnt from my Praxis cohort:
• The joy of lazy consensus.
• Stuffed toys are acceptable gifts for adults.
• The words ‘Lesbian’ and ‘cannibalism’ can be used in the same breath.
• My childhood obsession with the Little Mermaid was more damaging than I could have imagined.
• The corrupting influence of power is lost on Project Manager Emmy.

3. Why Praxis works:
The ‘digital’ in DH may be what attracts grad students, but two months in, it’s the people that make you want to stay. Seeing glimpses of the relationships built over years shows students what it means to truly practice the humanities. To acknowledge one’s own humanity and grapple with its needs, and to learn how to navigate the networks of identities within us at each given moment.

4. Things that I may or may not steal on my last day as a Praxis Fellow:
• Shane’s book on miniatures that I initially thought was about miniature painting.
• Brandon’s poster of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Shapes of Stories.’
• Amanda’s giant baguette.
• Jeremy’s general air of nonchalance.
• Ronda’s hair.

Two months into this fellowship, I have prayed in the following places:

• The Grad lounge
• Brandon’s office
• Shane’s office
• Amanda’s office

The first time, it felt strange. I had barely known everyone for a week. I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I didn’t want to seem like I was putting on a show of religiosity. I didn’t want to be stereotyped and put into a box.

Each time I asked if I could pray in the Scholars’ Lab space, those around me were extremely accommodating, offering to leave the room to give me privacy. That made it feel like even more of an imposition. I felt too conspicuous, too seen. The kinder everyone was, the more uncomfortable I felt. I couldn’t make sense of it. Why did this kindness make me feel like an outsider?

Soon enough, the afternoon prayer started eliciting other uncomfortable thoughts. Once, as I unfurled my prayer mat, I wondered if the DH tools we discovered would ever support Punjabi or Urdu (my research languages). Shane and I had spent an entire morning trying Tesseract’s OCR software on images with Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi text, but the invariable result was gibberish. A few weeks later, when I wanted my name in both English and Urdu on our Charter website, Jeremy said he’d figure out if and how that was possible. I nearly told him to forget I mentioned it. I remember noticing how brown my skin was as I prayed that day.

The experience of double consciousness each time I pray in the Scholars’ Lab is a stark reminder that I don’t fully belong in the ‘Digital’ Humanities. I have to be accommodated for, adjusted to, and worked around. It doesn’t matter how sincerely the Scholars’ Lab staff welcome me into their physical space. As soon as we face a laptop screen, I am stripped down to an anglicized, areligious, apolitical version of myself. For the computer only recognizes these fragments. Here, too, it has become the job of the SLab folks to stretch themselves in unexpected ways to make me whole again: by trying to find digital platforms and tools with Right-To-Left (RTL) language support; by hunting down essays on Global DH and Minimal Computing; by dredging up their own insecurities and limitations in conversations to assure me of my place in DH.

The message is clear: It takes the kindness and effort of individual DH scholars to make space for me within systems that were not designed for people like me. Grateful as I am, it is not kindness I want, but the chance to be an equal collaborator. To create and share knowledge across the linguistic communities I belong to.

In a recent paper, Masoud Ghorbaninejad, Nathan P. Gibson and David Joseph Wrisley have discussed the Anglocentric nature of current DH infrastructures that largely ignore the “digital habitus”¹ of RTL language users. They state that “knowledge is not just cultural content embedded in language; it is also infrastructure that allows that content to be represented, circulated, and preserved for the concerned communities.” Of the many tools I have discovered these past few months – Omeka, Voyant tools, MALLET, Tesseract, to name a few – not a single one supports Urdu or Punjabi in any meaningful way. As a multilingual South Asian and a student of Muslim literatures, each interaction with these tools involves two things: (1) silencing the very voices within me that have already undergone violence at the hands of the English language, and (2) a fervent hope for alternatives.

(Thank you Brandon for the title!)

I shall confess from the get-go that I am a fairly reluctant entrant into the world of DH. I have spent much of my life wondering how “the internet” works and where all our data actually goes when we save it on various drives and clouds. I have felt - like many others, I’m sure - that I simply don’t have the gene (or genius?) that makes one “tech savvy”. How ironic for an educator who claims that learning is for all to hold such views about themselves! This realization compelled me to take my first tentative steps into the Digital Humanities and apply for the Praxis Program. It Is here that, for the first time, the wonderful folks at the Scholar’s Lab held my hand and nudged me forward into a fledgling friendship with Git and HTML and other such monsters lurking behind my computer screen. Mike and Sulley were right, it seems: this laughter is so much more generative than terror! I now live in a world where curly brackets actually have meaning and a novice like me can dream of creating beautiful web pages.

Now that the Djinn of digital discomfort does not loom so large, however, I wonder more and more about the space technology occupies in our quotidian routines. Many passing thoughts from the last two decades have suddenly resurfaced. Chief among them is the relationship between virtual space and our religious and spiritual lives. I think back to the first time I was gifted a digital Qur’an. It was a palm-sized device with a backlit screen, a few small buttons for navigation, and the entirety of God’s word in Arabic (with Urdu translation!). A small speaker at the back allowed one to hear pre-recorded recitations of individual chapters. Ten-year-old Amna had never seen such a wonder! What soon followed the amazement, however, was utter confusion about the ethical rules of handling such a device. Was I required to make the necessary ablutions one does before touching a physical copy of the Qur’an? Could I leave it on the floor or place it near my feet? If the device was not charged, or the display screen got damaged, would it still have religious value? How would one dispose of such a thing?

With the advent of smartphones, the demarcation of sacred space is even more complex. The phone doesn’t care if you download the Pentateuch, the New Yorker, or a Judith McNaught novel; nor is it bothered by a Liberty Mutual advert interrupting hymns in a YouTube video – is the chant ‘Liberty, Liberty, Liberty’ really all that different from that of ‘Allahu, Allahu, Allahu’? People are getting married over WhatsApp video calls, but somehow one cannot perform the Ban -Yatra over Zoom.

When I shared the first draft of this post with Brandon, his response further knotted my thread of questions by raising the issue of augmented reality: “What would happen if you took a physical copy of the text and made some sort of second, intermediate space? A digital experience that supported, expanded, or complicated the sacred text that remained intact on the table in front of you?” I’ve since been daydreaming about all the different possibilities. Imagine holding your phone up to verse 22 of Surah Maryam (that describes the birth of Jesus) and seeing Caravaggio’s “Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence.” Or seeing a model of Babri Masjid when your camera points at Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. They could be instances of inter-religious dialogue or of mass moral outrage!

It’s been weeks since Brandon’s questions, and I still have no adequate answer. What’s clear, however, is that virtual space is not merely an extension of the physical, nor does it follow the same rules. Is it the Realm of the Malakūt made visible? Am I simply experiencing Durkheimian anomie? Who knows? What I can say with certainty is that, for the religious mind, each interaction with the digital world demands that we reconfigure our notions of sacrality – and our relationship with it – in this new dimension of existence.

(This blogpost is (hopefully) the first in a series that explores my anxieties, suggestions for intervention, and tangential ruminations about the interaction of DH and digital space with religious modes of thought.)