Designing a workshop is hard. From what I understand, you need at least three components for it to be successful:

1. have an activity;
2. have a method;
3. have a takeaway.

Connecting these three components is not as easy as it seems: you might have a takeaway but no other clue as what you want to do (the potential trap of backwards design), or have a fun activity but no takeaway, other than “hey, this could be fun”. Amna and I both expressed having the same fear. What is the workshop we were supposed to design wasn’t DH enough? But what even is “DH enough”? Requiring attendees to bring their laptops, making sure we’ll be using our terminal, making sure we have a shiny tool to baffle attendees with our DH skills?

Being exposed to “pen & paper” and “beyond buttonology” pedagogies meant that we were confronted to the limitations of DH from the outset. You don’t know if everyone will even come up with a laptop (or have a functioning one, RIP to my previous laptop and its broken keyboard which required me to copy and paste each “x” and “w” for the first months of Praxis), just like you don’t know if people will actually learn something in a critical way, and not just follow orders.

Being exposed to “pen & paper” and “beyond buttonology” pedagogies meant that we rapidly became hyperaware of the limitations surrounding our practice and our format. Because it can lead to feelings such as anxiety, doubt, and the weekly imposter syndrome crisis checkup, I had to sit down with myself and outline what I understand to be enough.

A “DH enough” workshop is…

• a workshop in which people are invited to think critically about a specific subject
• a workshop that allows you to ask questions about the field of DH in general
• a workshop in which you assume that everyone is interested and happy to be there
• a workshop in which learning goes hand in hand with some level of creativity
• a workshop in which you look at limitations as something exciting
• a workshop in which adults are encouraged to use crayons

Jeremy Boggs & Praxis Fellow Oriane Guiziou-Lamour had a talk proposal on DH link rot accepted to the “Irresistable Decay” conference at the University of Warwick, March 2025.

…judging from my notes:

• “A blog post can be anything you want it to be”
• What would you like the Scholar’s Lab staff? SNACKS
• who is the “public”?
• Git is how you engage with the community in code
• Computers are deterministic, and determinism is a cage
• Coding as labour
• International Morse Code: actually, not a binary system but trinary (dots, dashes AND pauses)
• “DH can meld critique, social justice, technology, studies of form and language”
• Consideration for an algorithm: space and time
• US = odd Bonne Maman jars fixation
• sometimes, when we write code, we have to think about strange cases. Think about “edge cases” (technically allowed, but unexpected)
• in Python, WHITE SPACE MATTERS A LOT
• Workflow: pull, edit, save, add, commit, push
• Attention is not a renewable resource
• Speculative minimalist workshop design can offer both training in digital pedagogy and transformative professional development
• Idea of “beyond buttonology”
• Hack-a-thon: short-term collaboration intervention together, lightweight, interesting
• 1. Entice, 2. Inform, 3. Provoke
• SAVE THE FILE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (for changes to appear) (ctrl+s)
• Praxathon = research interest + format + method
• Is it happy or is it sad?
• Just because it’s low tech, doesn’t mean it’s not technical
• Teaching is more than delivering content. Your classroom may be the only safe space some students have.
• “Too many ghosts:(“
• How to credit: potentially create a humans.txt. file
• Inside HTML, tells it to treat it as Javascript
• Favourite Yellow Journal headline: “UVA OUT OF NOTABLE ALUMNI, FORCED TO NAME THE NEW DORM “BANJO KAZOOIE”

This post is inspired by ‘“The Bolted Desk”’, written by Brandon Walsh. A sentence in particular keeps haunting me: “Where the chairs spoke of quiet restraint, their surfaces told a different story, narrating favorite bands, quotations, weekend adventures, and more. Freedom. Flexibility. Movement. Waiting to get out of the chair”. Here, Brandon opposes the chair as limitation and constraint, and the desk as a means to escape, to resist, to free oneself from not only what the chair is, but also what it represents.

As we found ourselves thinking about our Charter and what we were ready to commit to for the duration of the year together, I went back to this article and to the idea of the “bolted desk”. I expressed to the other Fellows a concern I had. As a TA, you learn that as soon as you make something mandatory, students will dread it, as apparently appealing as it seem. Similarly, I felt that convening of a specific time where we would meet each time could be theoretically beneficial, but concretely ineffective – especially as, because one of us lives a few hours from Charlottesville, there were only two days of the week where we could potentially meet up (and that excludes classes and other personal commitments). Shifting the concern from time to space, I suggested we could commit to hanging out in the Fellows’ Lounge as much as we could before or after Praxis, something we had started doing from the start of semester anyway.

After all, we are the first Praxis cohort to get to enjoy the fully renovated Scholars’ Lab and Shannon Library, which means that we are also the first cohort to experiment with a space dedicated to our needs. Amanda, Brandon, Jeremy and the rest of the Scholar’s Lab people are vocal about hearing our suggestions, in order to make the Fellow’s Lounge a space where we feel comfortable and accepted. Here, I have to single someone out and personally thank Amanda for their perpetual efforts in making the Scholars’ Lab space inclusive.

Creating a space where all students (especially students from minorities) feel included, is not an easy task. When I talked to Brandon about the Fellow’s space, he summed up my feelings perfectly: everything in the room, from posters to furniture, was “intentional”. Spatial inclusivity is the embodiment of an idea, not just the sign of mere decoration but the means to a deep connection and interaction.

Thinking of ideas to make the Fellow’s Lounge even more of our own, here are a few suggestions I collected:

• Praxis memento, so that each fellow leaves a trace of their passage here, for the future cohorts to add on to
• A yoga mat and yoga block
• A few cushions and a throw
• A coat rack
• Even more snacks!
• A poster (as opposed to a screen, for sustainability reasons) of a view, as there are no windows in the Fellow’s space (although some can argue that knowledge is already a window to the world…)

One of the best decisions I ever made, upon starting my PhD, was probably purchasing a console. The last thing you want to do, coming home after a day spent looking at and talking about books, is probably reading one. In this doctoral journey, playing videogames has been key to preserving my mental health. The Fable saga got me through my coursework. The Witcher 3 got me through my dissertation proposal. Similarly to what Gramond is reflecting on in his most recent post “Praxis is Invading My Life…In A Good Way”, I find myself seeing Praxis everywhere and applying the lessons we collectively learn each week to my personal life. Little did I know, these lessons would also apply to the game I am spending hours on this semester: Baldur’s Gate 3. I realize that Baldur’s Gate 3 is making me a better digital humanist. Just like Praxis is making me a better Baldur’s Gate 3 player.

• “A balanced party makes the journey easier”. I used to be afraid of close combat, hence excluding melee class characters from my party, while cherishing complementarity in AFK life (as Legacy Russell would say). This year, learning with diverse people from entirely different backgrounds has made me realize how true and applicable this BDG3 reminder is. Praxis fellows are just a team of adventurers, and the interdisciplinary nature of our present cohort is our best asset. Don’t get me started on what class each person would be (Brandon is the Scholar’s Lab bard, Amna would be a great cleric, etc)…
• Glitches are possible, but unlikely. In all likehood, there is something wrong with the data you entered. Close the game/VS Code, take a break, and go back to it once you’ve cleared up your mind. You’ll probably notice what the solution is then.
• When in doubt, just look it up online. Or rather: having to find the answer to your problem online is not something to be ashamed of. If you stumble upon a difficulty, chances are you are not the only one – someone probably asked the question online, just like someone probably solved the problem. Let IGN’s BDG3 walkthrough be your CodeNewbie community.
• Saving is a prerequisite and should be like breathing (here, I have a flashback of Brandon looking over my shoulder, whispering “You forgot to save it”). I used to hate having to save the game every minute or so. I remember getting visibly mad at my Divinity 2 coop partner because of his perpetual interruptions to save the game. It is only through Praxis and coding that I learnt that one cannot advance any further if the progress is not saved. Goodbye old me, who would insist on having a single save because it looked more aesthetically pleasing, and less messy. At least, now I don’t have to fight an entire market square just because I desperately wanted to loot a potato.
• Regular expressions are Illithid powers. Can you use it? Of course. Should you use it? Well… Jeremy told me regular expressions were a form of powerful voodoo or witchcraft – something you should not really mess with, especially if you are just learning code. Yes, I want to make coding easier, but turning into a mind flyer is not worth the sacrifice.

Now, is this post an elaborate strategy to have a D&D one-shot at the Scholar’s Lab? Perhaps. Note for the Slab’s Dungeon Master: I hope that the notes above convinced you that Praxis makes perfect. I am learning a lot. No more disgraceful potato looting.

Last semester, I presented a paper on what I call the “Great Lesbian Panic of Eighteenth-Century France”. As part of my presentation, I chose to show an engraving from Sade’s Juliette ou les prospérités du vice, in which several lesbian couples are having sex on a stage, performing in front of a man sexually stimulated by the spectacle. Because I did not want to potentially unsettle people with pornography – even if that pornography is from the late eighteenth-century – I chose to use my great editing skills and went on Paint to add lavender-coloured circles on the characters’ genitalia. Let me just say that there were quite a lot of circles on this engraving.

Being a Praxis fellow has shed a new light on this paper I presented, and on the choice I made to show sexually explicit content in a conference. Especially, as someone who’d like to pursue a career in academia, the discussions around DH pedagogy made me question the way I would envision my future teaching. How can we present undergraduates, or even graduate students, with sexually explicit content (in this case, engravings depicting not always consensual sexual intercourse)? Putting aside the pertinent but limiting argument of tradition and memory (“This content is a significant portion of eighteenth-century French literature, which is why you should learn it: it is part of literary history”) and engaging with scholarship on care and trauma-informed practices, why would we choose to do so, and what methods should we use?

In his article “Presenting Potentially Harmful Images in College Classrooms”, Connor Kenaston reflects on his pedagogical practice to discuss what it means for a professor to choose to show potentially harmful images in class. Although the gravity of the discussed content cannot, in any way, be compared to what I am reflecting on here – as the author talks about photographs of lynching, that is, the representation of the lived and real suffering of black men – I would like to draw on his analysis of the potential physical and emotional response of students to being shown harmful images, asking myself the same questions: “Should teachers use potentially harmful images in their classroom? Is choosing to do so a form of “pedagogical violence”? And for teachers who do decide the benefits of presenting an image outweigh the potential risks, what are ways to ameliorate the harmful effects?” Connor Kenaston proposes different solutions to this last question:

1. allowing students to opt out of the class when harmful images are being displayed,
2. prepare students and provide them with ample context, and
3. maintain a posture of care.

One could add to this list that showing potentially harmful images to students is always a conscious choice on the teacher’s end. Consequently, it should never be gratuitous: there should always be an intention, evident to the students, behind this decision. Why did I choose to show this eighteenth-century engraving to an audience of graduate students and professors? I wanted to reveal, in obvious and undeniable terms, that lesbianism was solely presented by the author (and by the engraver) as a stimulant for straight men, making my later argument about late eighteenth-century women authors refusing to show lesbian sexuality, hence creating a space of lesbian resistance and counter-discourse through silence, all the more convincing.

I take no pleasure in looking at this particular engraving – it even hurts me, to a certain extent. My lesbian identity is negatively challenged by this representation, as old as time, of lesbianism as a stimulant for straight men. But there is something healing about deconstructing the work that this engraving is doing; about showing it in order to disrupt the intended effect (sexual stimulation for the reader). This all goes back to the idea of care. In her work Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks explores the figure of the professor as a healer, the one who can heal students. But the healing goes both ways, as she argues that “when our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to the process of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice” . Keeping this in mind, one can argue that, with the appropriate parameters (allowing students to consult the material before class; allowing them to opt out; preparing them and giving them content; maintaining a posture of care; setting a clear intention), presenting students with hundred years-old pornography is not antithetical to envisioning the class as a space for healing. Just like within oppression, one can shape archipelagos of resistance, within what harms us, there is room for recovery.

When I was 16, I burned my math exams in a bonfire. I remember holding my last ever math exam in front of my friends, on which a 0.25/20 was marked in bright-red ink, and throwing it in the fire. Feeling a rush of excitement, realizing that I will never have to endure math classes ever again. I would never have to be singled-out by my math teacher for being the worst student of the class, probably of the year, potentially of his career, ever again. Now, I look back at my math years with a more acute sense of how coming from an underprivileged background where no one monitors your homework (and checks if you successfully learnt your times table) and how internalizing a gendered form of knowledge from a very early age (you are a girl you will be drawn to humanities) is a recipe – dare I say the components of an algorithm – for mathematical disaster.

When I applied to Praxis, I was fully aware that being awarded the fellowship would be the first step of a healing journey (as dramatic as it might sound), a healing journey in which band-aids have numbers on them, and not just the fathomable computer binary 0 and 1, but also the mean-looking ones, with squared numbers and exponential functions. Praxis would mean confronting myself to coding, which would require confronting myself, to a certain extent, to mathematics. It feels as though Scholar’s Lab people have now become experts in “teaching the math basics you will need to understand for you to engage in coding” to Humanities people with a varying degree of proficiency in arithmetic. From Shane’s goofy-looking dog Rocky on the first slide of the history and genealogy of computing to constant reassurance, we were presented with a progressive complexity which made our first assignment, “write out in plain English an algorithm to sort a deck of cards” a funny and appealing game.

Now, I have to be honest and confess that I cried on my way out of the Scholar’s Lab, after this first “Introduction to Data” session. Not because someone said something wrong or made me feel bad – of course not. But because in front of this whiteboard on which were written so many numbers, I felt myself going back in time ten years earlier, blankly staring at the whiteboard in my math class, not understanding a single thing. Not because I did not want to (or perhaps unconsciously), but because I was utterly unable to comprehend what was going on. As if I was stuck in a fever dream where whatever was written down felt like a language from outer space and where someone would just keep repeating “how can you not understand this?”.

Then, I remembered the “So you want to be a wizard?” zine that Shane handed out and had us read, and its writer Julia Evans’s positive reframing of difficulty. In this programming zine, she presents bugs as learning opportunities. Bob Ross would have added – “happy accidents”. Somehow, crying after this “Introduction to Data” was a personal necessity. I needed to get my math trauma out of the way, and the deep feelings of shame, guilt, and incompetence that have been hindering me for years. I have no illusion as I know I won’t become Ada Lovelace, Elizabeth Smith Friedman or Mavis Batey – I will still be bad at math, because my brain must have rewired itself differently. But now that we are being invited to learn, fail and learn from apparent failure, I know that I will hold my head high up and try, fail, learn and try again, differently. Praxis has allowed me to move on and make peace with the teenager in me who still feels the burning shame of being the last at something. Now, I can tell her that a bad math average makes for the best potential for growth. 0.25/20 is not so bad.