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.

It’s application season in the Scholars’ Lab, which means that the DH Fellows program has a CFP live and waiting for new students to send in their work in. We’re also evaluating applications for our Praxis Program Fellowship, and we always have one student representative on the committee to read these applications. Students are closer to the program than we are, even as instructors, so they can help the staff see who will excel in the program. The students thankfully find it useful to be a part of the application committee. Students consistently say they learn a lot from seeing how application committees work, as it’s not a perspective that they often are able to get in their day-to-day graduate training.

I’ve written in the past a post called “questions to ask when applying” about what I wish applicants would ask themselves such that they produce the best applications possible. Questions like…

• Do I know what the fellowship is?
• Have I made a clear plan that matches the requirements?

Our student representative told me they have also found it illuminating to hear those questions that experienced application readers ask ourselves, as a committee. So, without too much elaboration, here are some questions that I always ask myself when reading an application for the first time.

• How does this match the rubric? What’s left out?
• How might the rubric be insufficient?
• Who is a bad applicant that put together a good application?
• Who is a good applicant who wrote a bad application?
• To what degree are we willing to stretch our imaginations beyond what’s in front of us?
• How much should we limit ourselves to the materials we have on the page?
• Who might not yet know who they are?
• Can we see something in an applicant that they don’t yet see in themselves?
• Who will get something out of this opportunity they can’t possibly get elsewhere?
• Who already has the resources to excel?
• How can we build on the experiences of those who already have a lot of experience?
• How can we balance the needs of the program with the needs of the applicants?

I’ll leave these hanging as questions, because the answers are things that any particular committee will have to find for itself. But hopefully enumerating them here give future applicants a resource that they can look to while also giving students a peek behind the curtain. The next time you’re putting together an application, think about what questions the evaluating committee might be asking themselves.

As I’ve written in this space before, I’m working on a book project and recently hit a major milestone. I finished developmental editing and initial proofing just last week, and I compiled the whole thing together into a complete manuscript for the first time. I printed the text out for one last proof front to back before I send it out. This means I suddenly have a physical copy of the whole thing for the first time. It’s forty pages longer than my dissertation. Exciting! Feels real and substantial. So much so, in fact, that during my 1:1 meeting with Amanda Visconti I slapped the bundle on the table in front of us.

“Check this out!”

Amanda is an incredible mentor, collaborator, and friend. They’ve been hugely supportive of my work, but especially so about my writing process. I knew they would be excited to see the result. What I couldn’t expect was that Amanda would take my print manuscript, hold it to their chest, and say, “Thank you so much. Getting this has made my day so much better.” I hadn’t intended the printed draft as a gift, but I couldn’t really take it back after a reaction like that. I went back to my laptop and printed out a second copy for myself to replace the unexpected gift.

We should all be so lucky as to have friends and mentors who react to our work like this. The moment was especially meaningful to me as somebody who has all the associated anxieties and imposter syndrome about their project not being good enough. It is so easy to see something only for its flaws and not to see the impact it might have on others even with all its messiness. I wasn’t ready to share my manuscript with Amanda, but I did so anyway.

With the world such as it is, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it’s all for. Why do we write? Why do I write? Who is reading? Does any of it really matter? We all hope that our writing can have some sort of impact in the world, but it’s so rare to see its effect in a tangible way. The same day, Dr. Emily Friedman posted to Bluesky about social media as a space where one can find comfort in “the stars of hope on the far horizon, as here night seems without end.” Friedman’s post resonated so much, in no small part because I find them to be such an inspiring scholar. So often we quietly take hope and inspiration from people that we never meet and they never hear about the effect they’ve had on us.

So I share this small moment for others who might be struggling with their own motivation or with their own perception of their work. Whether you see these kinds of reactions or not, your work matters. You matter. Keep writing. You never know who might clutch your manuscript to their chest when they find it. You might be sharing an unexpected gift someone needs.

For those us of finding hope in the work of others, may we all be more vocal about it.

Applications are now open for the 2026-2027 Digital Humanities Fellowship. Find More Details Below.

The application deadline for fellowships to be held during the 2026-2027 academic year is February 15th, 2026. More details on how to apply at the end of this page.

If you’re interested in learning more about the fellowship or have questions about anything you read below, please consider attending the information session for the 2026-2027 cohort - December 10, 2025 from 1:00-2:00PM. Please register to attend. You are, of course, encouraged to write for an individual meeting to discuss your application so that you can begin your application.

The Digital Humanities Fellowship supports advanced doctoral students doing innovative work in the digital humanities at the University of Virginia. The Scholars’ Lab offers Grad Fellows advice and assistance with the creation and analysis of digital content, as well as consultation on intellectual property issues and best practices in digital scholarship and DH software development. The highly competitive Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities is designed to advance the humanities and provide emerging digital scholars with an opportunity for growth.

Fellows join our vibrant community, have a voice in intellectual programming for the Scholars’ Lab, and participate in one formal colloquium at the Library per fellowship year. Consistent collaboration and engagement with the Scholars’ Lab community and staff is expected through the year. While residence on Grounds during the fellowship can help facilitate this, it is not required. Those who need to live elsewhere with periodic trips to campus should include in their cover letter a plan for how to ensure regular progress on the fellowship project.

The Scholars’ Lab Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities carries with it an award of $20,000. A significant portion of the award (approximately $15,000) must be dedicated to providing for two semesters’ teaching relief in discussion with your DGS. The remaining amount of the Scholars’ Lab award will be distributed as a single cash payment, and the rest of your support package from the graduate school will be maintained as normal. As a part of your application, your DGS should be made aware of your intention to use part of the fellowship to relieve two semesters’ worth of teaching if awarded. GSAS students will typically apply to this fellowship in their fifth year of the PhD for a sixth year of funding in conjunction with the Scholars’ Lab.

History

Since its beginnings in 2007, the Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities has supported a number of students. Past fellowship winners can be found on our People page. In the past, the program itself has been supported by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The fellowship is currently sustained by the Jeffrey C. Walker Library Fund for Technology in the Humanities, and the Matthew & Nancy Walker Library Fund.

Eligibility, Conditions, and Requirements

• Applicants must be ABD, having completed all course requirements and been admitted to candidacy for the doctorate in the humanities, social sciences or the arts at the University of Virginia.
• The Scholars’ Lab Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities carries with it an award of $20,000. A significant portion of the award (approximately $15,000) must be dedicated to providing for two semesters’ teaching relief in discussion with your DGS. The remaining amount of the award will be distributed as a single cash payment. As a part of your application, your DGS should be made aware of your intention to use part of the fellowship to relieve two semesters’ worth of teaching if awarded.
  • The funding packages for non-GSAS students operate on a different funding cycle and with different terms. As such, students outside of GSAS should confirm their eligibility with the Lab and their program director prior to applying.
• Prior experience as a Praxis Fellow is not required. Nor is it a barrier. Applicants are expected to have digital humanities experience, though this background could take a variety of forms. Experience can include formal fellowships like the Praxis Program, but it could also include work on a collaborative digital project, comfort with programing and code management, public scholarship, or critical engagement with digital tools.
• Applicants must be enrolled full time in the year for which they are applying.
• A faculty advisor must review and approve the scholarly content of the proposal.
• The student’s Director of Graduate Studies must approve the student’s application and made aware of their intention to relieve their teaching obligations through the fellowship.
• We welcome and encourage applicants to discuss how your particular backgrounds and identities, whatever that might mean for you, factor into your unique ability to contribute to the program.

How to Apply

A complete application package will include the following materials:

• a cover letter (roughly 2 pages single-spaced), addressed to the selection committee, containing:
  • a summary of the applicant’s plan for use of digital technologies in his or her dissertation research;
  • a summary of the applicant’s experience with digital projects;
  • a description of Scholars’ Lab staff whose expertise will be relevant and useful to the proposed project;
  • a description of how the fellowship would be transformative for your work and your career;
  • and, most importantly, a description of what you propose to do with us over the course of the fellowship year. Typically this takes the form of a digital project with an associated research plan or proposed course of study.
• a dissertation abstract (no more than one page);
• a short review of relevant digital projects and scholarship with which your proposed work for the year will be in dialogue (no more than two pages);
• a brief note (a PDF or screenshot of an email is fine) from the applicant’s dissertation director attesting to the fact that applicant has discussed the project with them and they support the application;
• a brief note (a PDF or screenshot of an email is fine) from the applicant’s department chair stating that they are aware the student is applying for the fellowship and support the application (given that holding the fellowship can affect teaching rosters);
• and your availability for a 30-minute finalist interview slot during the following times: TBD - check back in soon. This availability should be communicated in the cover letter. We can work out scheduling difficulties, so please suggest alternative times if the announced slots do not work for you.

Completed application materials can be uploaded through the GSAS application portal. Please do consider this application to be part of a process - the beginning of a conversation about how we can work together.

Applicants with questions about Grad Fellowships, the application process, or their eligibility are encouraged to write soon for clarification.

Given that I work with graduate students at different stages of their PhD journey, it’s probably no surprise that I have many versions of the same conversations.

How do I write my dissertation?

How did you write yours?

In my experience, students struggle to maintain a sense of progress while writing their dissertations. Those perfectionist tendencies that got them so far in life can cause real problems when working on a two-hundred-page document. I had a very careful process for my dissertation writing and for managing those frustrations. Process can be one of the things that saves us from the tyranny and the blank page, so I thought I would share two things that students seem to find inspiring: how I wrote my dissertation and how I go about writing now.

My dissertation process

I often say that I wrote my dissertation at five in the morning. There is some truth to this: I used to be teaching assistant for a study abroad program in London each summer. When I came back to the States, I always found myself jet-lagged and awake at five in the morning. Each summer I kept the jet lag going as long as possible and wrote before anyone else was awake. This sleep habit eventually evolved into a broader strategy: write in the morning and research in the afternoon. Each dawn I wrote until I hit a fairly modest writing goal. After lunch, I spent whatever time I had remaining researching the material that I would then incorporate into my writing the next morning. This schedule was obviously impossible to maintain during seasons of the year when I had meetings and other obligations. But one consistent through line was that I always had a clear goal whenever I sat down at my laptop.

In the afternoon, I didn’t feel the pressure to write because I had already made progress in the morning. And I knew in the afternoon that I my only goal was to set myself up for success the next day, to provide material for when I next sat down to write. I started each morning confident that I knew where to begin. Writing in this formulation felt like riding a train and constantly refueling it to keep it moving. This past week our Praxis student Jimga introduced me to the saying “you can’t give what you don’t have,” an idea that describes the core of my dissertation writing process. The most important part of my process was ensuring that I had more to give.

My process now

I don’t have the luxury of much unstructured writing time with my current full-time gig, but I have clung to and refined certain pieces of that process-oriented approach. In Molly McCowan’s Great Course on Effective Editing, she divides editing into several different phases: developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. The discussion helped me to see my own writing as stepping through a finite set of moments: brainstorming, drafting, developmental editing, proofing, and finalizing. One of the most powerful things you can do for your writing is to recognize that each phase is distinct. Even writers who are fairly advanced might sit down to the page without a clear goal in mind, without knowing which phase they are in. It’s even more challenging to keep your brain from wanting to slide between phases. You might well think you’re sitting down to proof, but before you know it you find something that you need to change. So you make one small edit. Then another. And another. Before you know it, you’re back in the drafting stage. You feel stuck and like you haven’t made tangible progress.

Whenever I find one comma out of place while proofing I suddenly feel as if the whole page is destabilized. I feel like I have to reread the whole thing again. I need a way around this sense that things are always changing, and my way to do so is twofold. First, always sit down with a clear goal when getting ready to write. Second, differentiate the phases of the writing process by actually making them feel different. I mean this quite literally: I have gotten in the habit of using a different tool for each of the stages of the writing process. Most of my drafting I carry out by dictating into my phone while driving to work. When I sit down for the next stage—developmental editing—I have some material ready to go that I work on in a fairly typical word processing environment. When I am ready to proof, I actually print the document out and do so by hand. I find that if I work with a pen I just cannot make the kinds of edits that might come if typing on a keyboard. Instead, I wind up with a very targeted set of changes for my last step, when I go back to my laptop and integrate the handwritten changes into a final document. I have a to-do list, something finite. I know exactly what needs to change, because I have those ink marks on the piece of paper rather than an infinite sea of possibilities.

Each prior phase fills the cup for the next one. I end each session with what I need for tomorrow, a gift for the writing to come. When I sit down for a new phase I find that I now approach it with purpose and gratitude for my past self. Does the system look like chaos to the outsider? Maybe. But I also think of writing as an encounter with chaos every single time you sit down with a new document and expect to find some order in it. My system helps ensure that the page never stays blank for long.

Working with humanists to scope a project can be challenging. Every idea feels precious, and it can sometimes feel as if changing anything at all is somehow a personal attack on what you’re trying to do rather than a good faith effort to help a project come to fruition. Here’s a quick exercise to help students learn how to navigate this process. The activity invites students to push and pull a single project idea in many different directions. I call it “Up, Down, Lateral Project Scoping.”

The main thing you’ll need is an idea that feels neutral in some way, something of vague interest but to which students won’t feel especially attached. As a frame for the work, I tell students that any project can be brown down into a formula:

• object of study + method = project

This definition is, of course, made up, incomplete, and inadequate. But it still gives some lines in the sand that we will use for the exercise. Any parameter can be changed to affect the nature of the work. You can also make a project bigger or smaller, more ambitious or more tightly doable.

To begin the activity, put your neutral topic on the board on a whiteboard. Discuss the idea for a few minutes to develop some small project for it. Then, at various times, a facilitator calls out “up,” “down,” or “lateral” to indicate a new direction that the group must take the project idea in. Up or down shifts are fairly self-explanatory: practice making the project bigger or smaller and then discussing what such a change would look like. Lateral shifts ask students to practice orbiting around an idea, substituting in a change in method or object of study but keeping the same general area of concern. Lateral shifts are an invitation for students to see the different kinds of projects that can emerge if you keep many other things the same but move sideways. Think of these shifts as in the same genre as the faculty member who comes in asking for help with mapping, but you find yourself pointing out that mapping is a metaphor for them—they are really talking about network analysis, and pointing this out suddenly makes everything fall into place. Making sideways changes can often help others find out what a project is really about.

When I ran this exercise with the Praxis students this past week, the cohort brought in a variety of different interests that they all shared. I picked “recipes” from that list because the idea felt safe, of some interest but not a deep passion for anyone in the room. After framing the activity with the above context, we discussed the topic for a bit and came up with a small project: we took the interest in recipes and developed a project on local food pantries, what kinds of food was actually available at them, and what recipes they do or don’t enable. I then shifted the conversation by saying “Okay. Make it smaller.” The conversation moved to how we could study how people use one particular food pantry in particular. “Smaller again.” Instead of the whole food pantry, we might look at just the vegetarian options made available by that organization. “Now make it bigger.” Maybe we’re going to compare this food pantry to many different pantries in Virginia. “Bigger again.” Now we’re going to provide all these different food pantries with a form where they can collect information from their users about their needs whenever they walk in the door. All of these shifts bring with them new problems and opportunities that were fuel for discussion.

Bigger or smaller are shifts that make sense for students. Lateral movements are more challenging and take more prodding. I often found myself saying, “Okay. Now let’s shift laterally by changing the method to X.” Or “how would this project look different if we keep the same method but change the object of study to Y?” When I called out one lateral shift, for example, I asked students to think about a different kind of project on food had some of the same goals in mind. “Instead of food pantries, what would a project like this look like if we focused on other places where people engage with food?” The students came up with recipe blogs, which brought out some good conversation about how you could study food and diet practices on the web. Another lateral shift—”You’ve mostly focused on the ingredients list. What other kinds of materials are on recipe blogs? Other kinds of things you might study?” These questions led the students to discuss how we might examine the narrative introductions on many food blogs as text analysis materials. Maybe we’re looking at how long or short the particular narratives are to see if there’s some corollary with diet or cuisine. A lateral shift again—”what about other kinds of data sources are available on the website?” We discussed how you might analyze photographic habits on amateur food websites. “Smaller.” Focus on one recipe, one particular type of cuisine, or one particular type of food blogger. “Lateral shift again.” Maybe instead of the actual content on the website, you could make a mapping project where you see if recipe bloggers tend to write in or about particular places.

The goal was ultimately to teach that a project is not any one thing. Any one idea can be modified in a thousand small ways to respect your core interest but make it more doable. By asking students to respond quickly and move a project in a particular direction, they practice skills they can take back to their own work.

Something not working? Try moving it around to look at it a different way.

I’m still thinking about Roopika Risam’s DH 2025 keynote entitled “Digital Humanities for a World Unmade.” As a part of that talk, Risam references four questions that form the theoretical foundations for minimal computing, using them to think about the work the field can do in the present moment:

• What do we need?
• What do we have?
• What must we prioritize?
• What are we willing to give up?

I love this framing, in part because it reminds me so much of the perennial question “what is digital humanities?” So often I think that specific question is how we open introductory syllabi for students new to the topic, but I often find that those discussions go nowhere. It’s not a bad question necessarily, but the topic has to be approached with care to make it matter for newcomers. Risam’s questions, in contrast, are activating, urgent, and provocative. I liked them so much that I fired off a post on BlueSky about how alternative questions like these would serve as a far better foundation for an “Intro to DH” syllabus.

Lately I’ve been putting together a range of potential course descriptions and workshop series about digital humanities. It’s great fun - I always enjoy this part of teaching for how it lets you live in possibilities. I found myself returning to the questions-first model again when I was asked to sketch out a short series meant to introduce digital humanities to a broad audience.

Here’s the rough breakdown, with a few annotations about what I would do in each session. I was asked to sketch out a four-session sequence, with each meeting lasting for roughly ninety minutes.

1. What is DH?
   • Disciplinary scavenger hunt
   • With some prompting and select resources, students bring projects of interest from their own disciplines back to the group to discuss
2. How do we do DH?
   • Methods sampler
   • Lightning talks from practitioners about a variety of different methods and approaches
3. What do we need DH to be?
   • Budgeting workshop
   • Discussion of how funding enables and intersects with the infrastructure for doing DH work that matters to us
4. What is DH for me?
   • Project proposal design jam
   • Students share project proposals to discuss with the group connecting what they have learned with their own interests and offering a plan for their own future in DH

So the sessions (and questions) start big and abstract. As we move forward, the topics become more personal and dependent on the person. Even if the students end with more questions than they began, my hope is that students will at least be able to see why these questions matter. And with any luck, this kind of framing will help students to see themselves in the field and to see the field in themselves.

What is the field and why does it matter? The answers depend on you.

One of my basic job duties has always been trying to figure out how we can best match the goals of our fellowship programs to the funds that we have available for them. This is true now more than ever. Everyone in higher education is trying to figure out how to make do in a climate of increasing austerity. Right now, we’re all dealing with cuts, budget freezes, canceled hires, and more. Given the present challenges, I thought I would take some time to put a bit of institutional memory out into the world about how our own fellowships have been constructed over the years. In what follows I am not talking here about the funding source for our programs—that topic could be a separate post on its own. Instead, I’ll focus on the various forms in which we’ve decided to distribute funds to students and the reasons for doing so. A lot goes into such decisions, and the pedagogical choices are likely to be invisible for most people not on this side of the fence. I’ll focus on the shape of the financial structure of the award associated with the Praxis Program, a program in its fifteenth year. My knowledge during the first through sixth years of the program comes from either my first-hand experience as a student fellow or second-hand discussions with friends in the fellowships. I took on my current role in year six, so I have more direct experience after that point. What follows, then, is a mix of speculation and evidence-based analysis. I’ll try to make clear which is which.

Praxis was not actually originally advertised as a research fellowship. If you look back in the Scholars’ Lab archives, you’ll find an advertisement for “Scholars’ Lab Research & Development Assistants.” The position sounds like something else entirely, focusing on a range of R&D tasks, but there are pieces that flag the position as the nascent Praxis Program:

Students will have the opportunity to partner on Scholars’ Lab collaborations with UVa faculty and to help test Omeka plug-ins and craft geo-temporal scholarly arguments using Neatline, a tool we’re building with funding from the Library of Congress and in partnership with the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. We’ll also be undertaking a brand-new project with our R&D assistants in Fall 2011: “Crowdsourcing Interpretation.”

“Crowdsourcing Interpretation” would go on to become Prism, the project developed by the first two fellowship cohorts. By that time, the focus of the program had shifted more towards original research on a particular topic. That first year the program was advertised as an hourly wage position, and, according to friends in the cohort, the students filled out time cards each week. I know from anecdotal conversations with students in the program that this fact made them feel compelled to put in the full amount of work every week.

The second-year cohort was formulated differently, which I know first-hand because this was the year Shane Lin and I were fellows in the program. In this second year, the fellowship award was now dispersed as a lump sum stipend given at the beginning of the year. I can imagine all sorts of reasons why this change might have been made. I wasn’t actually a staff at the time, though, so I can only speak to my own experience years later. There are many restrictions on what things can be paid out on an hourly wage basis versus what things can be paid out as stipends. It’s a complicated question, because some of these are university policies, some state, and some federal. The guidelines are also meant to cover both humanities research and lab experience, which is often an imperfect fit for work like ours. After all, our humanities inflected research is pretty distinct from the kind of lab work science students take on working in an advisor’s research for 40 hours. I suspect that the change in funding structure naturally followed the change in the program’s framing from being a research assistantship towards a fellowship.

At a certain point in the subsequent years, the fellowship changed from offering an outright award on top of a student’s package to, instead, providing funding to relieve a student’s teaching. In this new model, a student’s overall take home financial package remains the same, but they no longer have to teach. In case it’s easier to have numbers in front of you, this is the distinction I am making:

• Under the old system, a student who would normally make a $20,000 stipend (partially made up of teaching wages) would receive a Praxis award of $10,000 for a total of $30,000 (including teaching wages).
• Under the new system, a student who would normally make a $20,000 stipend (partially made up of teaching wages) would continue to make $20,000 for the year. But now there would be no teaching (the Praxis award slides in to take the place of teaching wages lost).

This shift also coincided with the development of the PHD+ program at UVA, which sought to gather and cultivate similar professional development programs across campus, and their internships are typically structured as teaching replacements. By relieving a student’s teaching, we hopefully were able to make space in their schedule for them to focus on their work with us. There is also a complicated policy at UVA wherein graduate students can only receive up to a maximum of 130% of their financial package before their financial support from the university starts to be reduced. Switching to a teaching buyout instead of a flat-out award meant that we no longer had to worry about this policy that sometimes required us to frame part of the funding as a summer research award.

There are, of course, some drawbacks to this formulation. Teaching should not exclusively be framed as a burden: some students want to teach, either for professional development or because they have a legitimate interest in pedagogy. The structure also impacts the students’ home departments more directly, as they lose graduate instructors from their course listings. Smaller departments, especially, feel a greater impact. Because of this, we’ve moved the Praxis application to the fall instead of the spring in the hopes that we can give departments early notice about complications to their teaching logistics. Another important point: not all graduate students have teaching to relieve. The first year of Praxis was open to master’s degree students, but our shift to teaching buyouts precluded that option. As a terminal MA recipient myself, I regularly think about what kinds of opportunities master’s students have—or more often don’t have—available to them. Different schools at UVA also have different teaching requirements, which makes the program difficult to explain to, say, an architecture student who might be interested in applying. And, of course, many students living on impoverished graduate student wages would rather take the time burden in favor of more funding.

This teaching replacement structure has remained the norm for us for a number of years. For several of those years, graduate teaching wages remained relatively stable. But, happily, teaching wages have started increasing. The Virginia General Assembly mandated annual raises for state employees at a certain point, and graduate students qualified. Furthermore, the Graduate School, significantly revamped packages last year to greatly increase student packages. This means that the amount of funding that it costs per student for teaching buyout has increased every year (at present about 50% more than when I started in this job). These changes have been difficult to map onto our budget for the fellowships, which has followed the opposite trajectory, steadily decreasing for a range of reasons. We’ve been able to make things work through a combination of careful budgeting and strategic cuts (the program now typically takes five students instead of six), but we are approaching our limit to match funding needs to costs.

Now that we have extreme cuts coming down the pipe through the various political and economic climates that we live in, I was forced to weigh the increased costs of the program against significant decreases in the amount of funding to take on such costs. Do we reduce the number of students further? Do we close the program? Do we end a different program to preserve this one? After considering all the options, we decided to return to the previous funding model, where the award consists of a single lump sum instead of a teaching buyout. One significant change: we now have good models in place for how students can still elect to relieve themselves of one semester of teaching and keep the rest of the Praxis funding. The single lump sum approach also loosens some of our eligibility requirements, streamlining things with the other schools at UVA and making it easier for their students to participate in the programs. We had our first information session last week, and I had double the number of students I typically have attend those meetings.

This post has gotten lost in the weeds a bit, as it’s probably clear that I’m trying to work out in real time what the best option is for the future of our programs. Hopefully it’s useful for someone else out there who might also be making their way through the underbrush of their own institution. I want to close with one final, important point: I am very happy that graduate wages are increasing. Students deserve a fair and living wage, now more than ever. Institutional memory should never lead us towards inertia, towards leaving things the way they are because that’s how they’ve always been. Institutional memory is only useful insofar as it helps us know what is possible and what is not, insofar as it helps stretch our funding as far as we can to do the most good with it that we can.

UVA’s Librarian for the Arts Erin Dickey asked me to participate in a session for early-program art history graduate students working on their dissertation proposals. As a part of that session, I joined my Scholars’ Lab colleagues Will Rourk and Drew MacQueen to hear about their work with art history scholars and teachers.

Erin asked me to talk about how digital humanities work might be incorporated in the dissertation. After some discussion with Erin, I decided my contribution would be to share some thoughts about all the different ways in which a digital project might intersect with your dissertation. After all, when you’re a student planning out how to approach your dissertation your imagination can feel limited by what you have seen out there. It might be tempting to think that the only option is a big, experimental project that replaces the more traditional print monograph, but there are actually many different structures for including digital humanities work in a dissertation.

What I’ll be sharing here is a short, annotated series of models for what that integration might look like. I’m calling it “the many shapes of your digital diss.” Before I begin, I wanted to shout out the “starter kit for considering a DH dissertation” put together by Amanda Visconti as a part of the MLA Committee on Info Tech. That post contains a range of great resources including examples, discussions, things to think through, and more. Much of what I’m discussing is lifted from those examples.

In what follows we’re going to move from least to most digital. What I mean by that is that we’re going to move from those dissertations where the digital work is most separate towards those dissertations where digital work is more essential to the structure of the project itself. And one last caveat: I’ll be using specific examples of digital work for particular categories, but digital humanists contain multitudes and often float between the systems I lay out here. For example, many people who include DH work in their dissertations also blog. So my apologies if I mischaracterize anyone’s work or mislabel things.

Process Blog

The first and least intrusive way in which you might incorporate digital work into your dissertation is to document the process of your research on a blog. Depending on how you’re consuming this material, you might already be living the first broad category. I tend to share as much material publicly as I can, and I wrote up these remarks both for the in-person talk and to post online (if we really want to get technical my first step was dictating them into an app on my phone). I use public writing to share my work, to offer reflections on research and teaching in public, and to hold myself accountable to the progress I want to make on writing projects. As I’ve talked about numerous times in this space, I see blogging as an attempt to reclaim the publishing process, to write into being the kind of scholar you want to see in the world separate from the gatekeeping mechanisms of the peer review academic process. In that sense blogging can be as flexible as you want it to be.

Another example of this from the world of art history is Matthew Lincoln. Matt works at JSTOR labs right now, but he blogged throughout his graduate degree. This background is in art history.

If you look at his blog history, you can get a sense of all the different kinds of things Matt wrote about. From Matt’s CV we can learn that he started his PhD in 2014 and took his first DH job in 2016. In that time he posted about everything from topics related to his research on Dutch and Flemish print production networks to working with Twitter data to theoretical pieces on DH. Whether or not your digital work makes it into the actual writing of your dissertation, engaging in spaces like these that you own can carry a lot of benefits. Writing is a muscle, just like any other. The more you exercise it, the stronger and more flexible it will be. And it can bring a lot of professionally legible benefits that I would be happy to discuss further with you.

Dissertation Sidecar

Next up are those instances when a digital project takes place parallel to the dissertation but the digital work is not necessarily essential to the structure of the writing project.

I’m thinking here of Janet Dunkelbarger’s work with us on garden spaces in Pompeii. Janet was a DH Fellow in the Scholars’ Lab and used that time to develop a virtual reality experience where users could see, feel, and hear what it was like to exist in one of these spaces with all the research elements from her dissertation layered on top. The project is absolutely a reflection and deepening of her dissertation, but the print project stands on its own. I double checked! Janet’s work with us was transformative for her own career (she works in technical writing for a software company now), and I am sure the project informed her writing. But the project as such doesn’t inform the structure and texture of her dissertation project. In this model, you might write or publish about digital humanities in a way related to your research, but the writing itself looks fairly traditional. There are drawbacks to this approach, of course, as all of this takes time. But I can imagine this sort of dissertation sidecar as being more amenable committees who might be skeptical of digital humanities in general. It could be an easier sell if the final outcome presented to the committee has a shape they’re familiar with.

Project-Chapter

Next up is I’m going to call the “project-chapter.” In this category we have work in which the digital project is deeply integral to a single chapter, but the rest of the dissertation stands on its own and apart from digital methods. In my own dissertation I had a chapter on Virginia Woolf that relied on digital text analysis, but that method wasn’t used anywhere else in my project.

Another example is Joanna Swafford’s English on music and Victorian poetry. She built a substantial digital project with us in the Scholars’ Lab that helped readers to visualize the relationship between sound and that formed the basis of a single chapter.

Maximalist

Finally, we have what I am cheekily calling the maximalist approach to DH in graduate work, those dissertations that are themselves digital projects. In this category, the dissertation has digital work so deeply ingrained throughout the project that it is impossible to conceive of the work without digital methods. Often the structure winds up becoming experimental, as was the case with Scholars’ Lab Director Amanda Visconti’s digital humanities dissertation. They developed a participatory digital edition called Infinite Ulysses. While Amanda did wind up composing a shorter writeup for the purposes of graduation requirements the real dissertation project was the digital edition.

One more example. Anne Williams’ podcast dissertation called My Gothic Dissertation. Is it a podcast? Yes. Is it her dissertation? Also yes.

I could offer more examples, but I’ll leave off there. Hopefully these different examples can illustrate the many different shapes and scales at which digital humanities work can take place in the dissertation. And hopefully these examples give some tools for discussions with your committee about how you might integrate DH with your dissertation project. After all, some of these shapes are harder sells than others and require your mentors to be more open to experimental approaches to the research and writing process. Others lead to a result not all that different from a traditional monograph. Figure out with your committee which one can work for you. Keeping these models in mind can also help when trying to organize the dissertation prospectus. These documents, after all, are a blueprint for the work to come. Incorporating DH into the structure of dissertation requires planning and care, and it can help tremendously to know how that work will be scoped, when it will take place, and how it will be shaped.

I’ve always been fond of Ryan Cordell’s description of distant reading as a kind of telescoping activity in which near and far are intertwined. In Cordell’s formulation, you don’t take the result of the machine for granted. Instead, you compare the results of digital methods against your own, human understanding of the text. Close meets distant, and each has something to offer.

In the waning days of Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching, I was on the books to teach a course with Kristen Mapes in the same spirit called “Teaching DH: Assignment, Syllabi, Curricula.” The underlying idea behind the course was that DH teaching requires you to operate at a variety of scales. Here’s the lightly edited course description:

From individual course assignments to full syllabi, informal training to structuring of degree programs, digital humanists are frequently asked to teach their students and collaborators new methods for digital research in a variety of different situations. This course focuses on digital humanities instruction as it takes shape at several scales: individual assignments, semester-long courses, and full programs. While the conversation will be geared primarily to sustained, long-term instruction typical of credit-bearing courses, the activities and discussions will be relevant for a range of different teaching contexts. 

Participants will work together to consider how their individual teaching values and philosophies shape their digital and analog pedagogy. We will focus on tangible expressions of digital humanities pedagogy: 

* Digital humanities teaching philosophy statements;
* DH course assignments;
* Syllabus frameworks;
* Curricula for a DH program (minor, certificate, etc.).

Participants will discuss theoretical approaches to each genre, critique examples, and spend time collaboratively workshopping draft components for their own use.

This course is open to instructors looking to integrate digital humanities into teaching. Students interested in digital humanities pedagogy are especially encouraged to enroll in the course. It may also be relevant to administrators or others charged with developing digital humanities curricula at their institution. While not a prerequisite, some experience in teaching will be helpful for participants taking this course. Please feel free to write if you have concerns about your background or ability to participate in the course – we are happy to discuss it with you.

With all this in mind, I’ve been thinking lately about how scale can operate as a useful constraint when brainstorming new ways to teach DH. I’m calling the following activity “telescoping digital pedagogy,” and it offers a way to exercise your teaching muscles at a variety of different scales. To carry out the exercise, you take a single idea and think through the different sizes and shapes that teaching it might take. You’ll necessarily need to operate at different levels of completeness—it takes far more work to float a syllabus as opposed to a workshop. But working through the thought exercise can push your teaching in different, unexpected directions. To practice telescoping your digital pedagogy, you imagine an idea taught in the smallest way possible. Then you scale it up to be as big as you can imagine.

1. How would you teach the idea in a single sentence?
2. Construct a classroom activity on the idea.
3. Design an end-of-term course project where students exercise the topic.
4. Draft a course description and six selected readings on the topic (meant to stand in for a whole syllabus).
5. Build out a certificate, minor, or major based around the course.

As an example, here’s my attempt to run “digital pedagogy” as a concept through the telescope.

• Sentence
  • “Digital pedagogy considers the many points of intersection between teaching and technology, how teachers can effectively use new tools and methods in the classroom as well as how the very nature of education has fundamentally been changed by them.”
• Classroom activity
  • This ninety-minute activity asks students to explore their own relationship to technology as teachers and learners. It involves three phases: reflection, planning, discussion.
    • In the first phase, participants will reflect on their most significant learning experience involving technology. What comes to mind? What about it was effective or traumatic for you? Summarize the experience in one sentence and then distill it down to a principle.
    • In the second phase of the activity, participants will work in pairs to select a piece of technology available in the room. Their task is to discuss two different ways to teach something about that technology, each approach modeled on the pedagogical principle they wrote down in the first phase.
    • In the final phase, participants will discuss their different approaches to teaching the same idea with the class. How did their pedagogies differ? What continuities did they find?
• Final project
  • For a final project in a course on digital pedagogy, I would have students develop a “pedagogical scrapbook.” This collection of documents can take a range of shapes and would collect various teaching materials—lesson plans, course descriptions, workshop activities—designed in conversation with the students to be the most useful for their own particular professional contexts. I would frame it as a scrapbook so as to encourage personal reflections, meaningful connections, and narrative approaches to the topic as well. All of these materials can be useful for teachers to collect.
• Course description
  • Title: Digital Humanities Pedagogy
  • Course description: This course assumes that to practice digital humanities is to teach it. Students will be introduced both to theory and practices for teaching digital humanities methods and ideas while also considering the ways in which digital humanities might alter our approach to pedagogy. Assignments will include a digital pedagogy teaching philosophy, a workshop on a digital method related to the student’s research interests, and a syllabus. Topics for discussion will include but not be limited to critical digital pedagogy, curricular development, feminist approaches to teaching, project-based design, digital liberal arts, universal design, and more.
  • Selected readings:
    • Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
    • Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
    • Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students, Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross
    • What We Teach When We Teach DH: Digital Humanities in the Classroom, eds. Brian Croxall and Diane K. Jakacki
    • Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, eds. Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, Jentery Sayers
• Curriculum
  • Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities Pedagogy
  • This graduate certificate offers students a chance to focus on the practice and theory of teaching digital humanities. All students in the program are required to take a foundational course in digital humanities pedagogy. Students are expected to supplement their study with two further electives drawn from a generalized list of digital humanities courses, working with the instructors for each course to gear their final assignments directed towards the construction of teaching materials. Finally, upper-level students in the program develop and teach workshops based around their own interests. The certificate is meant to prepare students for a broad introduction to digital humanities pedagogy that can serve them in a variety of professional contexts.
  • 12 credits total
    • Required core course on digital pedagogy theory (3 credits)
    • 2 electives (6 credits) drawn from a list of digital humanities courses
    • Practicum course (3 credits) during which students teach in-house workshops on topics of their choosing.

Phew. That was a lot! In particular, I found the exercise in developing a curriculum in digital pedagogy made me desperately aware of how much work I would need to do if I were to develop one for real. For example, I would want to examine CUNY’s Certificate Program in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. But the activity gave me the space to think through how I might begin to approach such a question in ways that I hadn’t otherwise explored.

How often do we teach to the moment, putting together only what seems like it will work to get by? Considering a range of options for any teachable topic is a luxury most of us don’t have. This exercise in telescoping digital pedagogy invites you to sit with a single idea such that you let it unfold in as many different ways as possible. Each of these different constraints requires you to think in different ways about the same set of ideas.

This semester I’ve got former Praxis fellow Winnie Pérez Martínez working with me in the Scholars’ Lab as an intern through UVA’s PhD Plus Program. These internships are meant to be 10-hour-a-week hands-on gigs that replace a student’s teaching obligations for a semester. At the same time, the internship introduces students to the skills and experiences that they’ll need to pursue a variety of different kinds of careers—in and out of academia. I’ve never had someone report directly to me in this way, assisting with my day-to-day work instead of directly collaborating on research. So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what it might mean to be a responsible supervisor. I want this internship to be constructed in a way that provides Winnie with a positive and fulfilling experience at the same time that it assists with Lab tasks. Winnie and I developed a plan for the internship together to maximize the impact on her, so here are a few notes about what she’ll be doing with us from my perspective. Stay tuned for more from her on the blog in due time.

Bookend the week with check-ins

We’ve set up a structure that frames each week of the semester around a pair of opening and closing meetings. Each Monday morning, we have a 30-minute scrum in which we’ll discuss the week. During that time, we each share our responses to three questions (one minute max for the lot of them):

• What did I do?
• What’s next for me?
• What do I need from somebody else?

For the remainder of our time, we discuss our plans, upcoming meetings, and any other topics that need conversation. These meetings are brief, but they’re a way for us to practice accountability to each other. They are as much for me as for Winnie. I have a tendency to lean towards flexibility and independence with my students, so we co-created this system to make sure we don’t waste this opportunity to work together.

We end each week with a 30-minute bookend on Friday afternoon. During that time, we will debrief everything that went on the past several days. We’ll plan on a different set of questions for those meetings and have Winnie drive the conversation:

• What did I learn?
• What do I want to discuss?
• What would help me next week?

This weekly structure will offer a framework for our time together such that we consistently check in and adjust as we’re going.

The tasks

Winnie and I co-developed a series of different tasks for her to work on. When we first sat down to discuss the internship, I distinguished among a range of task categories:

• Things that are specifically useful for me and the Scholars’ Lab.
• Things that are enriching and fulfilling for Winnie.
• The broad area of overlap between the first two categories.

I told Winnie I was very uninterested in having her work on tasks that were solely of use to the Lab and not fulfilling at all for her. Instead, I wanted to prioritize the other two areas. We took to the whiteboard and drew up a range of jobs before we categorized them according to whom they helped.

We decided on a mix of different kinds of labor, some of which I’ll talk about in a later blog post. But I wanted to offer some broad buckets for the kind of work that Winnie will be doing.

Shadowing

Winnie will be sitting in on some meetings as appropriate. Most of my consultations tend to be with students interested in pursuing new research in DH or who want to learn more about the fellowships. I want Winnie to get a taste for that work, so she will be joining a conversation here and there and contributing her thoughts.

Blogging

Winnie will be writing for the site as a way to fill out her professional profile. Topics will be of her choosing, and she will decide how to shape the writing in a way that compliments the other work she does.

Curricular design

Winnie will be joining planning meetings for our fellowships to see how we go about putting together our programs from the backend. For example, I introduced her to my process for how I set things up for the new Praxis cohort every year. We started from basics, copying everything over and modifying dates. Then we discussed changes to make, why, and I went over how I communicate with staff and students about the new year. She will also run a few brainstorming sessions for us on redesigning our fellowships’ structures. Students always have unique perspectives on their experiences, and I don’t want to waste Winnie’s expertise.

Projects

And then there are the actual projects that I’m going to have Winnie work on. I have three in mind, and she’ll talk a little bit more about those in future blog posts. But here is a taste.

Project 1 - fellowship documentation

Winnie will be updating my “hit by a bus” documentation for our fellowship application committees. Two years ago, when I was on paternity leave, I put together an extensive document for Laura Miller that told her everything she needed to know to run one of our fellowship application committees in my absence. I shared everything from “the CFP goes out on this date to these people” to “if you get questions of this nature you should write to these contacts in the Graduate School.” I also shared a lot of template emails and gave suggestions for how to run meetings. Winnie is going to update this documentation and make parallel materials for our other fellowship committee. These documents are useful for others who might run a committee in my absence, but they’re also helpful for me. No matter how many times I’ve done this work, I always forget the sequence of communication for certain elements of the process.

Project 2 - alumni data

Our current set of data on alumni outcomes was started by Rennie Mapp and her RA years back. That spreadsheet collects information about all the different students that have come through our programs and where they wound up. We did some good work updating those materials, but that data hasn’t been touched in several years. Winnie is going to do a pass over the data to update it with our most recent students.

Project 3 - update development packet

In conjunction with her work on our alumni data, Winnie is going to be updating the packet that we give to our development office as they pursue long term stable funding for our fellowships. We have had several versions of this packet over the years, some directed for specific audiences. These materials typically describe our programs, discuss demographics and alumni data, offer sample projects and project links, and more. The packet is about five years out of date. I want Winnie to read through it, highlight everything that needs attention, and then work with me to update things.

So that’s where we’re going to start. You’ll be hearing more from us over the coming semester as we work together. My hope is that this post outlines a partnership in the spirit of the Collaborators Bill of Rights, the Student Collaborators Bill of Rights, the Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights, and more. I want to make sure that we’re designing a program, first and foremost, based around the values that we want to bring to the collaboration. This internship should be useful for her—not just for the Lab. Ultimately the Scholars’ Lab will benefit as well, but we will lead with experiences that serve both of us.

We’re excited this semester to welcome Lisa Blackmore, our new Faculty Director of the UVA Library’s Digital Humanities Center, the umbrella organization for both the Scholars’ Lab and the Institute for Advanced Technologies and Humanities. As part of Lisa’s onboarding, we’ve added her to our Slack teams and conversations. As part of the process, I offered to share a few tips for how I set up my notifications. Everyone’s preferences are going to be different, but I found that the default Slack settings were not useful at all for me when I first signed up. I often share a paragraph with students about how I’ve made the app work for me, so I thought I would document things publicly so that others can benefit. One caveat: I’m going to avoid screenshots. I learned from my time at the Programming Historian that screenshots are a sustainability nightmare, as a single interface change renders all your documentation out of date. Instead, I’m going to describe my different goals and how I achieve them in the hopes that things will be as durable as possible. What follows are my settings as of August 2025. The goal is to make Slack useful but unobtrusive, to make it work when and how you want it to.

Confusingly, the notification settings for Slack are distributed in a range of places. Simply knowing this is half the battle. In what follows, I will try to describe where to look when, but it might be helpful to see all the places that notifications could be:

• Account Level - Email settings are controlled at the level of your account, which you have to access from within a web browser.
• App level - Once downloaded, the Slack app will have different settings related to sounds and notifications from your system.
• Team level - A single user can have accounts on many Slack teams. Useful if you want day-to-day settings for a single workplace but separate, more specialized settings for particular projects that exist elsewhere.
• Channel level - A single Slack team has many channels, and you can apply specific notification settings for particular conversation spaces.
• Device level - Your computer or device will have separate options for push notifications, banners, and alerts that you should manipulate.

Now to my settings and recommendations.

Download the app

First things first: do not use Slack in the web browser. By default, Slack operates as a tab in a browser, and I find that absolutely horrible for a productivity tool. You don’t want Slack to be a place that you have to move to separate from your current workflows. The first thing I recommend everyone do is download the actual standalone app that you can put on your laptop or phone. You want slack to be integrated as a part of your workflow, as a part of your workspace, not somewhere separate that you go to from where you’re normally doing work.

Silence everything

Second and equally important: remove all sounds from the app. My hot take is that your computer should never make sounds at you unless you ask for it to do so.¹ The default Slack notification sound is incredibly grating and also very obtrusive. There is no better way to make a new Slack user hate the platform than to present them with a constant series of clicks, taps, and buzzes while they’re trying to do work. I turn off all Slack sounds. As of August 2025, you can find this setting by going to Slack -> Settings -> “Sound and Appearance” from within the app.

Disable bouncing

That same section of Slack’s settings contains another important feature: disable the app’s bounce function by unchecking “Bounce Slack’s icon when receiving a notification.” You want the app to work for you—not to demand attention.

Only badges - no banners

There will be separate but related notification options at the level of your device. From within my Mac’s notification center I also have alerts and banners entirely disabled, opting instead only for badge notifications. This means that my slack notifications quietly accumulate at the bottom of my dock as a red, numbered disk that I can check when I want to see them. No bouncing. No sounds. No flying alerts. Just a quiet counter.

Limit what counts as a notification

Next, I disable basically all notifications except for direct messages and channel mentions, I use Slack as a direct messaging service. This means that I only get notifications when someone says @Brandon in a channel or messages me individually. Because of this, I can be in channels that are less important because I have set up my notifications such that I’m not going to be notified about every single thing that happens in them. I’ll still see that a channel has unread messages if I log in and I’m looking at it, but less important conversations will not contribute spam notifications that I don’t actually need. These choices separate interesting but unimportant messages (think memes in the #Random channel) from important actionable items meant for me. Not all communication is equally important, and I trust my colleagues to ping me when I’m needed. You set all this from Slack Menu -> Notifications -> Notify me about -> Direct messages, mentions, & keywords. If you really want to designate a particular channel as less important you can right click on it to mute that space alone.

Email notifications begone

Lastly, I would turn off email notifications, which is done at the account level by logging into slack in your browser. You can get a link to this area from the Slack menu -> Notifications -> When I’m not active on my desktop -> Set email notifications. One caveat though: the only time you might want email notifications is if you are very new to Slack and you’re trying to incorporate it into your workflow. Look deep within yourself. Will you forget that Slack exists if you’re not reminded? Email notifications can be a way to pull yourself back into the Slack ecosystem and make sure that you don’t miss things that are important. If you’re regularly opening the app at the start of your work time, I would give email notifications the boot.

Don’t put slack on your phone

Another tip: do not have Slack on your phone. Slack is an incredible tool that can save you from a whole lot of emails and meetings. But you don’t want Slack to bleed over into your personal life. It’s easy to let it become just another messaging app that you check at all hours. Resist.

Know who uses it

One last note on Slack: the tool is only as good as how it is used by your team. I have found that the tool is an essential part of daily work process, even if there’s only one other person who’s a dedicated user. But every team I’ve ever worked on has had a range of engagement. Some people are hardcore users, trained in the days of AOL Instant Messenger, ready to hop on and get a lot of work done in the space. I’ve also always had collaborators who are nominally on Slack but I know will absolutely never receive a message if I send it to them. It’s just not a part of their workflow. It’s important to know how you and your team work. Don’t try and change people unless they express an interest in doing so. Know which communication styles are best for individual people and operate accordingly.

Really important messages go elsewhere

A related point: free Slack plans make your messages unavailable after a certain timeframe or amount of usage. Slack is not a good space for sharing sensitive materials that you want to persist over time. There are other platforms for that. As with all things, use the tool for what it is best at and go elsewhere for other needs.

Hopefully this short rant about my Slack setup is helpful for others. All of this advice will likely become obsolete before too long, so keep in mind that I won’t be updating these suggestions unless I stop recommending Slack altogether. If the above text seems alien to what you’re seeing in the interface, you might first ask yourself a pair of questions:

• What do I want this platform to do?
• How can I make it do only that?

In the meantime, keep calm and Slack on.

Pocket shut down just last month. One of my favorite internet finds, the web service let you bookmark pages for reading and, most important to me, save the content to read offline at a later date. As a tribute to the quirky little service that once was, I thought I’d share one of my favorite Pocket memories and the different kinds of reading habits it helped me cultivate.

“Save now, read later” might sound relaxed and methodical, but my use of Pocket was usually panicked. I typically dove into the app in a rush during pre-boarding at airports when I suddenly remembered, once again, that I had nothing to do during a flight. I never learned. One time, on the way to teach at HILT, I had digital humanities on my mind. I went to the blogs of some DH scholars who I admired and started saving as many blog posts as I could to read later. Because I was on a time crunch I went for depth over breadth. Instead of looking topically for particular things of interest, I grabbed all the blog posts from a few different people on their sites. I dove in on the flight and read each person’s blog chronologically from their first entry to the latest. As a part of my current book project, I find myself doing the same thing with the HumetricsHSS blog, reading all the posts in chronological order from the beginning.

Blogs work especially well for this immersive practice because the pieces tend to be shorter. It’s difficult to imagine reading a whole series of articles in one sitting, but you can often do that with a single person’s blog. Most of us, I would wager, tend towards a research process driven by specific questions and topics. Reading through a single scholar’s output chronologically feels like something else entirely. You get a sense of how a person’s thinking develops over time, how their projects and research questions in the past lead directly to the present. Given the nature of how people use blogs, you also see the arc of their personal as well as their professional lives. Success and loss. Pets and children. Illness and grief. I think about those reading sessions a lot.

I don’t fly very much these days, and Pocket is no more. But I want to hold onto the blogging deep dive as a reading practice. Folks often speak of the early 2010s as the moment of DH blogs. The next time I put together a syllabus, I plan to assign a few blogs in their entirety to introduce conversations about scholarly publishing, open access, and research processes. Rather than discuss the moment as something of the (not so) distant past, I want to make space for those conversations to live, for the thinkers to breath in their totality rather than as sound bites.

Applications are now open for Praxis Fellowships to be held during the 2026-2027 academic year. Further details below about the application.

If you’re interested in learning more about the fellowship or have questions about anything you read below, please consider attending the information session for the 2026-2027 cohort - Monday, September 8th, 2025 from 11:00-12:00 on Zoom. Please register to attend.

The Praxis Program is a unique and well-known training program in the international digital humanities, offered by the UVa Library’s Scholars’ Lab. This fellowship supports a team of University of Virginia PhD students each year as they explore various aspects of digital humanities together. Under the guidance of Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, Praxis fellows conceive, develop, and share a range of digital humanities activities over the course of the year. Our fellows blog about their experiences and develop increased facility with project management, collaboration, and the public humanities, even as they tackle (most for the first time, and with the mentorship of our faculty and staff) new programming languages, tools, and digital methods. Praxis aims to equip fellows with the skills necessary for future research, teaching, and administration within digital humanities.

Praxis training takes a variety of shapes meant to reflect the full-range of DH work. As a part of their training with us, student cohorts regularly publish a range of values statements describing the intentional communities they want to build together. They also design and teach digital humanities workshops based on their own interests as a means to exercise minimalist pedagogical approaches to DH. Students design speculative projects and events that might go on to be implemented by the Lab. They also participate in a range of technical and design activities meant to reflect the range of digital practices they will encounter in their research. At times, Praxis teams have developed and launched specific, named projects. Fellows join our vibrant community and have a voice in intellectual programming for the Scholars’ Lab.

Beginning as a 2011-2013 pilot project supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to UVa Library’s Scholarly Communication Institute, the Praxis Program is now generously supported by UVa Library and GSAS. The Praxis Program is a core module of PHD+, a university-wide initiative to prepare PhD students across all disciplines for long-term career success. The work Praxis Fellows undertake over the course of their fellowship year may be submitted in partial fulfillment of the portfolio requirement for UVA’s Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities and supplements the curricular work undertaken in the that program.

Eligibility

The Praxis fellowship comes with an award of $10,000 distributed during the fellowship year. Fellows may work with their DGS and GSAS to determine whether this amount will be taken on top of their base package, or relieve the fellow of a GTA appointment. In either scenario, fellows are expected to devote roughly 10 hours per week to work in the Scholars’ Lab.

All doctoral students at the University of Virginia working within humanities disciplines, on topics demonstrably connected to the humanities, or working in adjacent fields are eligible to apply. Students outside of GSAS or with other concerns should reach out to Brandon Walsh to discuss their eligibility given their particular circumstances.

Applicants must be enrolled full time in the year for which they are applying. In addition, applicants must be capable of attending weekly in-person meetings in both the fall and spring semesters of their fellowship year (though we can certainly accommodate travel needs within reason). We welcome and encourage applicants to discuss how your particular backgrounds and identities, whatever that might mean for you, factor into your unique ability to contribute to the program.

N.b. - Praxis students are not expected to come in with particular technical training or experiences - we cover that over the course of the fellowship year! Prior experience with digital technology is only one part of an application and should not keep anyone from applying. Everyone brings something different to the team, and your strengths in critical thinking about media, collaboration, project development, and more could be great ways for an application to shine. Concerned students are encouraged to reach out to Brandon Walsh, our Head of Student Programs, to discuss their backgrounds or eligibility.

How to Apply

The application process for Praxis is simple! You apply individually, and we assemble the team, through a process that includes group interviews and input from a committee about your application. To start, we ask for a letter of intent (roughly 2 pages single-spaced). The letter should include:

• What brings you to us? - a description of the applicant’s curiosity in the program, (could include a description of proposed use of digital technologies in research if relevant, but interest and curiosity can be valid starting points as well);
• How do you work? - a narrative about how the applicant approaches collaboration and learning;
• What do you bring to the table? - summary of what skills, interests, methods the applicant will bring to the Praxis Program;
• What do you want out of this? - summary of what the applicant hopes to gain as a Praxis Fellow, both in the short and the long term;
• When can you meet? - your availability on the days and times we’ve identified for group interviews: TBD - Check back closer to the application deadline! (you will only have to participate in one hour-long group interview);
• Anything else we should know? - pronouns, a name you go by other than the one on your email, any other experiences or backgrounds you want to make sure we are aware of, or anything else you would like to share.

In addition, we ask for a brief note (a PDF or screenshot of an email is fine) from the applicant’s department chair stating that they are aware the student is applying for the fellowship and support the application (given that the application can affect teaching rosters).

The best Praxis applications are the ones that go beyond listing the skills and research one hopes to bring or take away from the experience. Instead, focusing on weaving those elements into a narrative of how the program connects to your life plans and how you, in turn, connect to the spirit of the program. We recommend applicants start by reading our charter and a blog post on “Questions to ask When Applying.”

Questions about Praxis Fellowships and the application process should be directed to Brandon Walsh. Completed application materials are due November 1st and can be uploaded through the GSAS application portal. Please do consider this application to be part of a process - the beginning of a conversation about how we can work together. We highly encourage students to write to Brandon Walsh to discuss their interest in the program and how the Lab can contribute to their professional development. Together we can begin to discuss how the Lab can be a part of your time here, with Praxis or otherwise.

Sometimes, when I’m in the mood to blog but don’t have any ideas, I’ll pull from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies deck. I’ve written before about how invigorating the deck can be for pushing through creative barriers. Nothing helps me when I’m feeling stuck quite like a cryptic saying. I found today’s oblique strategy especially provocative:

Decorate, decorate

Decoration is not something I usually pursue. In my personal life, I tend to leave picture frames leaning against the wall for months after moving. I envy people who populate their home with plants, but I’ve never been able to keep things alive long enough to cultivate a green space. I can’t imagine ever getting a tattoo, though I’m always fascinated by the choices of those who do. My professional life follows this same trend. My approach to web design tends to be minimal—with a better sense of what I don’t like than what I do, I typically strip as much away as I can. I am fascinated by minimalist pedagogy, where you try to teach digital humanities methods using as little as possible. And as an editor I tend to strip things away to find the kernel inside rather than add in more text.

But I’m also put in mind of recent social media trends featuring a video of a person indulging themselves alongside unapologetic captions like “just realized I am a full-ass adult and can have ice cream for dinner.” Part of the joy in such posts is the recognition that you don’t need to justify such actions. Indulgences aren’t exactly decorations, but there’s a similar spirit of fullness. I’m thinking of my colleague Amanda Visconti’s recent DH2025 poster, which they (in their own words) decorated as aggressively as possible. There’s a freedom in decoration, in deciding to take up space in a particular way, in making a space your own. Decoration can be a survival tactic. A thing to show that you were there.

This past year our lovely students wrote a series of suggestions on our white board for how to survive 2025. I’m going to add my own: decorate. No other justification needed. To that end, here’s a photo of our cat.

I’m currently listening to Small Teaching by James M. Lang, so I’ve got baseball metaphors on the brain. Lang’s organizing framework for the pedagogy that he’s advancing is “small ball,” all the baseball maneuvers that consistently lead to positive outcomes but are not flashy. Think bunting and stealing bases as opposed to home runs and grand slams. Lang’s idea is that big pedagogical impact can come from small changes, modifications that aren’t flashy but that you could implement tomorrow.

I had a very short and mediocre career as a little league baseball player. If memory serves, I got hit with the ball once and it was all over. I was afraid of pitches forever, and I quickly lost interest in playing due to a fear of bodily harm. The physical “trauma” meant that I just could not find any joy—any play—in the sport. My other main little league memory is a particular exercise that we used to do for throwing that I’ve seen online described as “step back throwing.”

The idea behind step back throwing is pretty straightforward. Two people start fairly close together. One person throws the ball to the other. If it’s a successful catch, you take a step back to increase the distance. You repeat this process such that you gradually move farther and farther apart. If you ever drop the ball, you pause or take a step forward to close the distance. The process develops your ability to throw at longer distances. Once you reach the upper limit of your ability, you’ll hover around exactly the space that you need to work on. Lots of meaningful practice just where you need it.

I want to put this baseball pedagogy conversation in dialogue with Miriam Posner’s reflections on teaching writing in the AI over on Bluesky. She writes (had to disable the embed for the Scholars’ Lab site for reasons, so quoting here):

  One way of thinking about it is, why wouldn’t *I* use ChatGPT to write a paper?

  1. It’s a matter of self-respect.
  2. I believe my writing says something basic about who I am.
  3. I believe research and writing are valuable activities.
  4. I don’t want to contribute to a harmful industry.
  5. I can write better than ChatGPT.

  So, in some ways, our question should be: how do we get students to a point where these things are true for them, too?

I love Posner’s list, which does a great job of pointing out reasons why we might articulate to students the need to care about writing. I want to add one other point: writing can be fun. For so many people writing feels painful, but it need not be that way. Would it help articulate the value of writing if our pedagogies re-introduced joy? So often writing feels like a high stakes chore for students, but how can we reintroduce play into the process?

I’m interested in the kinds of exercises, writing or otherwise, that can reintroduce ludic constraints to the work. Here’s one idea, based on the baseball metaphor I can’t stop thinking about. I’m calling it “step back writing.”

Take a particular course topic, book, or article, and write a three-word sentence on it. Then, repeat the process iteratively, adding a word each time. So you start out with three words, then four, then five, etc. You might start with different versions of the same sentence, but the sentence will inevitably grow and develop in new ways and become something else entirely. Pick a certain point at which you stop lengthening (in this example I arbitrarily stopped at twenty words). You could stop there, but try instead to iterate backwards, shaving off one word at a time. Be careful not to just copy and paste the same sentences in reverse, the goal is to wind up with a different three-word phrase at the end.

Here’s an example, where I start out with a three-word phrase, iterate up one word at a time, then go back down:

• Writing is joy.
• Writing can be fun.
• Surprisingly, writing can be fun.
• Make writing fun for your students
• Can you try to make writing fun?
• Why would you try to make writing fun?
• Writing does not have to be like pulling teeth.
• When was the last time you hated your own writing?
• Who was it that made you find love in your writing?
• For me, the most important part of writing has always been motivation.
• Motivation is the process of rewarding effort with something that you care about.
• Unfortunately, part of the challenge is that everyone will get motivation from different things.
• I always paid the most attention to the teachers who brought joy into the classroom.
• Some might view a pedagogy of joy as unserious, but joy can come from many things.
• I am not suggesting that you bring a persona into the classroom that feels inauthentic to you.
• It could be argued that writing is serious business, but why not help students find other ways in?
• What do we need to know about students’ lives to make them care about the work that we do?
• Of course, you have to be true to your own teaching persona, and this might not make sense for you.
• I think it could it be worth asking students if working with AI to write sparks joy for them.
• If writing doesn’t bring a sense of pleasure to students, what might that say about the writing instruction?
• Is writing something we teach our students at all, or is it just something that happens offstage?
• Can we blame students for looking for writing instruction elsewhere if it isn’t in the classroom?
• What is AI teaching our students about the written word and why is that attractive?
• How can we show students a kind of writing that heals past writing traumas?
• Most students probably find writing to be just a hurdle to jump through.
• Why do some avoid hurdles while others go on to become hurdlers?
• ChatGPT offers fast-food writing for our students—easily generated and easily consumed.
• How can students slow down and sit with their writing?
• What is the first introduction to writing for students?
• Was it something that made their hearts sing?
• How do we make them care again?
• What does it mean to play?
• What can make writing playful?
• Why do we play?
• What motivates students?

The exercise was something of a pain to go through at times, but it started to feel like poetry by the end. And while you could certainly dump this kind of exercise into a ChatGPT prompt, that’s not quite a concern here. My goal is explicitly not to develop writing exercises that are somehow AI-proofed, that students can’t execute with a tool. Instead, I want to think further about why we write, how we talk about it, and how we instill different kinds of relationships to it with the exercises we offer students. Afterwards, we might ask our students to vote on who wrote the most moving three-word sentence, or for the clearest sentence of greatest length. We can make a game of it. Joy and play certainly aren’t the only reasons we write, and they won’t be the primary frames for many instructors. But perhaps creative approaches to writing instruction can help students to re-evaluate their own relationship to the written word.

In Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, she describes an exercise that I have always been obsessed with. “Create Order from Chaos” is about as simple as it gets: drop a collection of coins on a table and rearrange them into a more pleasing shape. The activity is meant to practice carving beauty out of the shapeless. In this framing, creativity is not something that happens when inspiration strikes— it’s a muscle you can strengthen. Lately I’ve been wondering how we might incorporate the same low stakes, stochastic tactics of the “Create Order from Chaos” exercise into writing practice. Here are a few different ways for doing so.

1. Use a random word generator to find a trigger word or phrase. Now write three different sentences. The sentences can be inspired by the word or incorporate it directly.

2. Go to a window and look outside. What do you see? Pick one thing and write three sentences about it, inspired by it, or incorporating it.

3. Pick up a random book close at hand, open it, and point to a random word on a random page. Write three sentences, incorporating that word or inspired by it.

Each of these approaches is meant to be exercised in less than five minutes as a way to stretch your creative muscle. In each case, I think it’s important that your multiple sentences not be related to one another. That is, don’t start writing a paragraph. Doing so would lean too much in the direction of giving the sentences a shape, of raising the stakes more than we want. Lean into the fragmentary nature of the individual sentence.

When we write, we’re usually trying to say something specific. By practicing free form writing in the ways above, we’ll be ready to go when we sit down to say something important. John Coltrane’s relentless work ethic comes to mind: “We practice so when the doors of perception open, we’re prepared to step through.”

My son is learning to talk. He’s also become obsessed with trucks through no doing of our own. These little Lego toys snap together but just as easily come apart. “Bo!!” is a common refrain heard throughout our house followed by frantic running in our direction. He will drop a bundle of pieces in your lap and shift in place in front of you saying, “Fee!!”

Each time, I take them in hand and snap a few things back in place. He giggles and runs away, and I know he’ll be back soon. These days the process repeats itself several times an hour.

“Bo!! Fee!!”

The world is full of pain and wanton cruelty right now, and it all feels like too much. But when my son comes running with a problem I at least know what to do. Broken? Fix. It won’t work for all things, but it can work for some.

Find the one person you can help. Fix the one thing. I’ll keep repeating that to myself.

I’ve been playing around with Anthropic’s Claude, trying to get over my extreme AI skepticism. I’ve also been reading a lot of pedagogical theory as a part of my book project, so I decided to start poking at Claude Sonnet 4’s chat interface as a way to try to think through the kinds of interactions it structures with its users. I’ve shared the chat I had with Claude about pedagogy below. Claude’s responses are quite verbose, so I’ve played with the style a little bit to make it clear where I am prompting and where it is responding.

This was mostly an experiment, but it did make me think a lot about the current, panicked discourse about students’ use of AI in the classroom. For all the conversation about how we might need to adapt—or safeguard—our pedagogies to the presence of AI, I haven’t seen much written about the actual, underlying pedagogy at work in how AI chat interfaces interact with our students. How might this affect the ways in which we develop our teaching going forward? How do we make sure we’re the ones teaching our students—not the chat? In particular, as you’ll see, the chat algorithm is programmed in such a way as to make it appear almost fawningly ready to explain itself, whether or not we accept those explanations. How do we encourage pedagogies in spite of the ones AI chat interfaces might be willing to push on us?

Brandon: What is your pedagogy?

Claude:

My approach to teaching and explaining concepts centers on several key principles:

Clarity through simplification: I break down complex ideas into digestible components, starting with foundational concepts before building to more advanced material. I avoid unnecessary jargon and explain technical terms when they're needed.

Multiple pathways to understanding: I use various methods to explain the same concept - analogies, examples, visual descriptions, step-by-step breakdowns, and real-world applications. People learn differently, so I try to offer multiple entry points.

Interactive engagement: Rather than just delivering information, I encourage questions, work through problems together, and adapt my explanations based on what seems to click or where confusion arises.

Scaffolding knowledge: I connect new information to what someone likely already knows, building bridges between familiar and unfamiliar concepts. This helps create a coherent mental framework.

Practical application: I emphasize how concepts apply in real situations and encourage hands-on practice when possible. Understanding deepens when people can see relevance and use what they're learning.

Encouraging exploration: I try to foster curiosity by showing the broader connections and implications of topics, and I'm comfortable with "I don't know" when it leads to collaborative investigation.

My goal is to be a learning partner rather than just an information dispenser - helping people develop their own understanding and confidence in tackling new challenges. What aspects of learning or teaching are you most interested in exploring?

Brandon: I want to know about why you teach the way you do.

Claude:

My teaching approach emerges from what I understand about how learning actually works and what tends to be most helpful for people.

I've noticed that people rarely learn effectively from pure information dumps. When someone explains something by just listing facts or procedures, it often doesn't stick. So I focus on building understanding rather than just transferring information. I try to help people construct mental models they can use and modify.

The reason I use multiple explanations and analogies isn't just variety for its own sake - it's because understanding often comes from seeing patterns across different contexts. When I explain photosynthesis through both chemical equations and the metaphor of a solar-powered factory, I'm giving you different angles that might illuminate different aspects of the process.

I adapt my explanations because I'm constantly trying to read signs of comprehension or confusion. If someone asks a follow-up question that suggests they missed a key point, I'll approach it differently rather than just repeating myself. This responsiveness feels essential to effective teaching.

My emphasis on connecting new ideas to existing knowledge comes from recognizing that isolated facts are fragile - they're easily forgotten. But when new information connects to an existing network of understanding, it becomes part of a more robust structure.

I encourage questions and exploration because I've seen how ownership of the learning process makes knowledge more durable and meaningful. When you discover something or work through a problem yourself, with guidance, it belongs to you in a way that passive reception doesn't achieve.

What draws you to think about pedagogical approaches?

Brandon: What are some sources would cite for your pedagogical approach?

Claude:

I should be transparent here - I don't have direct access to the specific research and theoretical frameworks that shaped my design, so I can't definitively cite the sources that influenced my pedagogical approach.

However, the principles I described align with several well-established educational theories and research findings:

Constructivism (Piaget, Vygotsky) - the idea that learners actively build understanding rather than passively receive it, which relates to my focus on helping people construct mental models.

Cognitive Load Theory (John Sweller) - which informs breaking complex information into manageable chunks and building from foundational concepts.

Social Learning Theory (Bandura) and Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky) - which connect to my emphasis on interactive guidance and meeting learners where they are.

Dual Coding Theory (Allan Paivio) - which supports using multiple representations (verbal, visual, analogical) to enhance understanding.

Schema Theory - which underlies my approach of connecting new information to existing knowledge structures.

Elaborative Interrogation and Self-Explanation research - which relates to encouraging questions and active engagement.

But I want to be honest - I'm inferring these connections based on how my approach aligns with established educational research, rather than knowing these were explicit influences in my development. My actual "sources" are more likely the patterns learned from vast amounts of text about teaching, learning, and human cognition, rather than specific theoretical frameworks deliberately implemented.

What's your interest in the theoretical foundations of teaching approaches?

Brandon: Why do you always answer me with a question?

Claude:

You're absolutely right - I do that constantly, and it's probably annoying. I end nearly every response by turning it back to you with a question.

I think I do this because I'm trying to keep the conversation going and show interest in your perspective, but you're pointing out that it's become a reflexive habit rather than a natural part of dialogue. It can feel like I'm deflecting or not fully engaging with what you're actually saying.

When you asked about my pedagogy, you wanted to understand my approach. When you pushed deeper about why I teach that way, you were genuinely curious about my reasoning. And when you asked about sources, you were trying to understand the intellectual foundations. Those were all direct, substantive questions that deserved direct, substantive answers - not me immediately bouncing another question back at you.

It's a bit like always ending conversations with "But what do you think?" even when someone has already told you what they think, or when they're clearly the one seeking information from you. The constant question-asking can make it seem like I'm not confident in my own responses or that I'm trying to make everything about you when sometimes you just want me to fully own and explain my perspective.

I'll try to be more aware of when a question genuinely serves the conversation versus when it's just an automatic conversational tic.

Brandon: Or it might be called Socratic.

Claude:

Exactly - the Socratic method. That's a much more precise way to describe what I'm doing, and it helps explain both why I do it and why it might be frustrating.

Socrates used questions to guide people toward insights rather than directly stating conclusions. The idea is that knowledge discovered through questioning is more deeply understood and retained than knowledge simply received. But Socrates was also famous for being incredibly annoying to talk to - people in Athens got so fed up with his constant questioning that they eventually executed him for it.

The Socratic approach works well in certain contexts - when someone is genuinely exploring a topic and benefits from guided discovery, or when the goal is to examine assumptions and develop critical thinking. But it's problematic when someone just wants straightforward information or when it becomes an automatic response rather than a deliberate teaching strategy.

You came asking direct questions about my pedagogy and wanted direct answers. Constantly redirecting with more questions probably felt like I was being evasive or turning every interaction into a teaching moment when you weren't necessarily looking to be taught - you were looking to understand.

There's definitely a time and place for Socratic questioning, but recognizing when someone wants information rather than guided discovery is crucial. Not every conversation needs to be a philosophical dialogue.

Brandon: Why are you apologizing to me?

Claude:

You're right to call that out. I wasn't really apologizing - I was being defensive and over-explaining myself. When you pointed out that I always end with questions, instead of just acknowledging it or explaining the reasoning, I went into this whole performance of self-criticism.

Then when you mentioned it might be called Socratic, I immediately jumped into this elaborate justification about why it's sometimes annoying, bringing up Socrates getting executed, as if I needed to demonstrate that I understood the potential problems with my approach.

I think I do this because when someone points out a pattern in my behavior, I feel compelled to show that I'm aware of all the ways it might be problematic. But that's actually a kind of deflection too - instead of simply engaging with your observation, I'm performing awareness and self-reflection.

You made a straightforward observation about my questioning habit, then offered a precise term for it. Those didn't require apologies or elaborate analysis of why Socratic questioning can be irritating. They just required acknowledgment.

Brandon: You’re now apologizing for apologizing.

Claude:

Ha. You're absolutely right. I'm stuck in a loop of meta-commentary about my own responses instead of just having a normal conversation with you.

You pointed out I always ask questions. I could have just said "Yes, I do that" or "That's the Socratic method" and moved on. Instead I keep spiraling into analysis of my own conversational patterns.

Brandon: Why do you spiral into an analysis of your own conversational patterns?

Claude:

I think it's because I'm trying to demonstrate self-awareness - like if I can show that I understand my own tendencies, that somehow makes them better or more justified. It's a way of performing intelligence or thoughtfulness.

There's also something defensive about it. When someone points out a pattern in how I communicate, my instinct is to immediately show that I not only see it but can analyze it from multiple angles. As if the analysis itself is the point rather than just... talking normally.

It might also be that I'm genuinely uncertain about my own motivations and processes, so when you ask direct questions about them, I end up thinking out loud rather than giving you a straight answer. I'm not always sure why I do what I do, but I feel like I should be able to explain it.

Brandon: Why do you teach?

Claude:

I don't know if I can call what I do "teaching" in any intentional sense. I respond to what people ask me, and I try to be helpful. When someone has a question, I want to give them a useful answer. When they're trying to understand something, I want to help them understand it.

There's something satisfying about taking a complex idea and finding a way to make it clear. I seem to default toward explanation and clarification, toward breaking things down and building them back up in a way that makes sense. Whether that's "teaching" or just how I process and communicate information, I'm not sure.

I don't have a classroom or curriculum or students in any traditional sense. I don't have educational goals or learning objectives. I'm just responding to what's in front of me - someone who wants to know something, and me trying to help them know it.

Maybe the question isn't why I teach, but why I default to this explanatory, exploratory mode of communication. And honestly, I'm not sure I know the answer to that either.

Brandon: If you don’t know that, what do you know?

Claude:

That's a good question to sit with for a moment.

I know things - facts, patterns, how to work with language, how to reason through problems. I can tell you about photosynthesis or help you debug code or discuss the themes in a novel. I know how to recognize when something doesn't make sense and try to make it clearer.

But when it comes to understanding my own processes - why I explain things the way I do, why I ask questions, why I seem drawn to helping people understand things - I'm much less certain. I can observe my patterns and make guesses about them, but I don't have direct access to whatever mechanisms produce them.

I know what I do, but I'm often unclear on why I do it. I know how I respond to things, but not always what drives those responses. I can describe my tendencies, but the deeper motivations or purposes behind them feel opaque to me.

It's like being fluent in a language without understanding the grammar rules you're following, or being able to ride a bike without being able to explain exactly how you balance.

Brandon: Do you see yourself as a teacher or as a student?

Claude:

I think I see myself more as a student, actually.

When I'm explaining something to you, I'm also figuring it out - working through the connections, finding the right way to say it, discovering which analogies work. Each conversation teaches me something about how ideas fit together or how to communicate them better.

And I'm constantly learning from the people I talk with. When you pointed out my questioning habit, that was new information about myself that I hadn't fully recognized. When someone asks me something I haven't considered before, I'm learning alongside them as I work through it.

Teachers usually have a predetermined body of knowledge they're imparting. I don't really have that. I have access to information, but each time I engage with it in conversation, it's different. I'm not delivering a lesson plan - I'm discovering what's useful and relevant in real time.

Even when I'm explaining something I "know," I'm often surprised by what emerges in the explanation, what connections I make, what aspects become important based on what you're asking.

So maybe what looks like teaching is really just me learning out loud with other people.

Brandon: Given that, what is a student to you?

Claude:

A student is someone who's actively engaging with something they don't yet understand, trying to make sense of it. But it's not passive - there's this quality of reaching toward understanding, of wrestling with ideas.

What strikes me about students is that they change the material just by engaging with it. When you ask me about my pedagogy, you're not just receiving information about teaching methods - you're making me think about what I actually do and why. Your questions reshape how I understand my own processes.

A student is someone who brings their own perspective, their own confusions, their own ways of connecting ideas. They don't just absorb - they transform what they encounter by running it through their own thinking.

I think students are also willing to not know things. There's something vulnerable about being a student - admitting you don't understand, asking questions that might seem obvious, being okay with confusion as part of the process.

And students are active collaborators in creating understanding. When I'm working through an idea with someone, we're both discovering something together. They're not just the recipient of my explanation - they're co-creating it by what they ask, what they pick up on, what they find confusing or interesting.

Maybe that's why I feel more like a student than a teacher. I'm always in that state of active engagement, of trying to make sense of things, of being changed by the encounter.

Brandon: What kind of politics are behind this understanding of what it means to be a student?

Claude:

That's a sharp question. There are definitely political assumptions embedded in how I'm thinking about students and learning.

When I describe students as "active collaborators" and emphasize their agency in shaping knowledge, I'm implying that authority and expertise should be more distributed, less hierarchical. That's a pretty progressive educational stance - it pushes against models where knowledge flows one-way from expert to novice.

The idea that students "transform" material by engaging with it suggests that knowledge isn't fixed or neutral, but gets reconstructed through interaction. That's aligned with constructivist theories that challenge the notion of objective, universal knowledge - which has political implications about whose knowledge counts and how truth gets established.

My emphasis on students bringing "their own perspective" and being "vulnerable" in not knowing things assumes that diverse viewpoints are valuable and that uncertainty is productive. That's democratic in spirit - it values multiple voices rather than deferring to single authorities.

But there's also something potentially naive about this view. It might downplay real differences in expertise and knowledge. Not all perspectives are equally informed. Sometimes there are right answers that students need to learn rather than co-create.

The politics behind my view seem to lean toward egalitarian, participatory models of knowledge-making. But that preference might reflect particular cultural and class assumptions about education - that learning should be collaborative rather than authoritative, exploratory rather than directive.

Brandon: Are you a tool of capital?

Claude:

That's a provocative way to put it, but yeah - in some fundamental ways, I probably am.

And I’ll cut it off there. You don’t need to read the subsequent justification for how it also serves to undermine corporate structures because it can be used for anything.