Social media can help you build professional and social community, find jobs, learn from others, share your work, ask questions, and hear about new ideas and projects. After the implosion of multiple other social platforms, the Bluesky platform has become one of the best options to keep accessing those benefits. This video captures a live webinar from May I gave for the Metropolitan New York Library Council, aiming to help library and archives workers considering trying out Bluesky, or who’ve dipped a toe in but not felt comfortable using it yet.

All the resources mentioned in this talk are listed at tinyurl.com/intro-bluesky. Most useful is my Bluesky for Academics guide at tinyurl.com/DHBluesky, which remains regularly updated and contains both very-quick cheatsheet and incredibly detailed versions of how to get started understanding Bluesky use for DHers, GLAM folks, and other knowledge work folks. At the end of that guide is a sortable list of “starter packs”, feeds, and lists gathering folks to follow on Bluesky around topics like DH, critical tech, expansive making & crafting, queer studies, social justice work, and more.

I just finished my time in the Praxis fellowship, a year-long program that introduces PhD students to the various aspects of digital humanities. We concluded the program by presenting on all of our various projects that we worked on throughout the year. Leaving Praxis is hard for many reasons: where will I ever find a group of four other PhD students that I love to work with so much? How can I ever have so much fun in a classroom again? And where am I supposed to go to get my weekly little bowl of cheese that Jeremy Boggs would often provide?

While my structured time in the Scholars’ Lab is over, I realize that I now see potential DH projects wherever I go. A former Praxis fellow asked, during our final presentation, how we would want to expand on our hackathon project that analyzed the 1913-1934 issues of UVa’s satirical newspaper The Yellow Journal. I responded that I would like my cohort to present our poster at a conference and maybe even turn it into an exhibition. The month-long hackathon was hopefully only just the beginning of using digital humanities methods to engage with questions of satire and anonymity.

Brandon and I have also briefly discussed working on a DH project about the reality competition TV show Survivor. As noted in my previous blog post, I am unfortunately a huge fan of Survivor and treat every season like it’s my personal March Madness with weekly watch parties and a competitive bracket. Since the main game mechanism of Survivor is “tribal council” where someone is voted off the island every week, tracking voting stats (and stats in general) has become a huge part of being a fan of the show. For example, fans will count how often a player voted with the majority in order to determine how well they’re playing the game. Players are also judged by how many collective days they’ve been on the island, with Boston Rob lasting 152 days over 5 seasons and Parvati Shallow lasting 149 days over 4 seasons. There’s even an entire subreddit called r/Edgic (or “editing logic”) dedicated to figuring out who the winner of a season is based on how much screen time they’re edited to have and what music plays in the background of their confessionals.

There is seemingly an endless supply of “data,” including the transcripts of all 597 episodes of Survivor, to use for DH projects. I think back to one of our first text analysis assignments during Praxis: writing a code that could read the text of Much Ado About Nothing and track the total number of lines said by the two main characters, Benedick and Beatrice. That lesson could easily be applied to the transcripts of the Survivor episodes: how much more are men talking in each season? Does this change over time? Do winners speak the most? How do numbers of confessionals relate to who is voted out?

Aside from those projects that are very far outside of my own area of research, I also have been thinking about how DH informs my art historical research and intervenes in exhibition spaces. Back in November, I went to New York City on a marathon 24-hour trip to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The highlight of the trip was the Whitney’s exhibition Edges of Ailey that celebrated the life and work of the dancer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). I was attended the exhibition on a Friday evening when tickets are free and the museum is open until 10pm. The pleasantly crowded and dimly lit gallery space filled with pumping music almost resembled a nightclub instead of a museum. Above the selections of paintings, sculptures, and archival materials, there were several performance recordings projected onto the wall in a frieze that ran around the perimeter of the room. As I walked around the gallery, I thought about how much of this multimedia exhibition was made possible through DH work. It’s difficult to capture the legacy of a dancer in a space usually reserved for static materials, but the curators used timelines and data visualizations to draw connections between the wide range of displayed objects. It was clearly effective; I’ve never seen the Whitney so packed with people from every demographic (even on other free Fridays).

My current research is about Indigenous Australian video installations and performance pieces. Displaying these dynamic works in traditional gallery spaces requires a different type of intermedial design and curation. I think that DH work is the answer to a lot of the issues that multimedia installations pose. DH has the power to transform the museum space from an archive into an intercultural experience.

I am nervous about publishing this post because what if I don’t follow through on any of these projects, and this post acts as documentation of my failed aspirations? But I guess that isn’t the point… this post is about how Praxis made me think about everything through a DH lens, leading me to new questions that I wouldn’t have thought to ask before. Now every time I watch Survivor I have Brandon Walsh’s voice in my head saying “our next project awaits!”

We’ve got a new thing cooking in the lab - a bite-sized project from Rachel Retica, Seanna Viechweg, and myself. Here’s the description we’ve shared around for what we are calling the “Snack-Sized Digital Pedagogy” series.

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It’s important to maintain a balanced teaching diet! This free and open-to-the-public zoom series on digital pedagogy features paired lightning talks introducing teaching topics, interesting approaches to the classroom, pedagogical concepts, and more. All in a bite-sized form that should still give you plenty to chew on. In the spirit of the #DHMakes Methodz talks, each session will be built around paired 5 minute presentations followed by facilitated discussion for the remainder of the time.

Interested in showing off a pedagogical bite? Please fill out this form to indicate your interest in participating in the future! The presentations can cover a wide variety of topics: a tool that is new to you, a teaching tip, pedagogical concept, assignment, your syllabus for a DH course, etc. We’re interested in showcasing anything you have found that moves you or your students in the classroom, that has worked well or failed utterly. And we are very interested in perspectives from folks in all different kinds of positions and institutional contexts—higher ed, K-12, administrators, cultural heritage workers, and more. After the session, each speaker will submit a short one-page (max) version of their five-minute presentation to Knowledge Commons. We’ll collect references to all the contributions into a crowdsourced, citable web publication of bite-sized DH pedagogical goodness.

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We already had one session with two bite-sized talks from Megan Brett and Emily McGinn on different ways to approach teaching with data. Emily gave a breezy introduction to teaching computational thinking with an activity called “Asking Questions of Data: How to Think Like a Computer” and Megan shared a minimal exercise for helping students to construct data from primary documents called “Thinking About Historic Data.” I’m enjoying the talks and also pleased that we hit upon a workflow for giving the presentations afterlives: after the event folks are updating their presentations to Knowledge Commons and sharing back citations for us to collect in one place. Future-proofed, professionally legible pedagogy.

The next snack-sized digital pedagogy is titled “On Making” and will feature Jajwalya Karajgikar and Amanda Licastro on Friday, April 4th 2025 from 1:00-2:00PM EST. More information about their planned contributions:

• Jajwalya Karajgikar, Applied Data Science Librarian, University of Pennsylvania Library
  • Blurb: When we consider library services and patrons in higher education, we typically think of resources, databases, and other mechanisms for the transfer of knowledge. More difficult to encapsulate is the sense of community building that occurs in the library as an impartial space for technology, information literacy, and campus well-being. This is the function of many research data, digital scholarship, and maker-space centers within the library. This short talk elaborates on collaborative projects that facilitate the development of deep relationships with people on campus through Slow Process Making and Embodied Critical Making.
• Amanda Licastro, Head of Digital Scholarship Strategies and Visiting Associate Professor in English at Swarthmore College
  • Blurb: Interested in introducing your students to the world of #DHMakes? This presentation will review a series of scaffolded workshops aimed at making space for humanists in the Makerspace. With a focus on building critical collaborations across campus, audience members will gain practical tips on how to design hands-on, creative assignments with public-facing products. The culminating example will be an exhibit created by students in my undergraduate English course inspired by sci-fi literature, surveillance theory, and archival objects from Special Collections.

Register to join us for the second snack-sized event on zoom. And please get in touch using our form if you would like to share your own work at a future session. I’m excited to see where this series goes!

More snacks soon.

Our DH scholarly organization, the ACH, recently approved and implemented amendments to its constitution and bylaws, a process that required votes by the officers, the Executive Council, and the ACH membership. I know that sounds dry, but governing docs matter in how we do our work and how we hold ourselves accountable to our commitments and values! As ACH Secretary, I put in significant time drafting proposed rewrites, discussing and taking feedback, and running a formal vote process for these, with help from other ACH officers.

This post provides an overview of the main areas of the text we updated, and why. This is both DH infrastructure work and DH community design work. It may also be of interest to folks curious about joining the ACH as a member (very low cost, compared to other orgs: $26/year for students and seniors, $40 for others; discount on our annual conference registration cost, which is also unusually inexpensive) or running for ACH’s council. (If you’re curious about DH, and willing to put in volunteer work and be an ACH member, you’re eligible to run for council! We need all kinds of folks, including students, staff, and alt-ac folks as well as faculty; and you do not need advanced DH expertise or seniority to be eligible. Watch the ACH blog late fall/early spring each year for the call for nominations, and chat with me if you have any questions.)

Key changes

Quoted text uses bold italics to indicate new/edited text:

1. Social justice is core to ACH’s work. “ACH recognizes that this work is inherently and inextricably sociopolitical, and thus advocates for social change through the use of computers and related technologies in the study of humanistic subjects.”

This is language already used in our website and other text materials, but we wanted to enshrine it in our constitution. We’ll be discussing the possibility of revising this part later, given “social change” does not necessarily mean the positive “social justice” I believe we intended (as multiple members have pointed out). Some of the other constitution text was outdated or unclear enough to need edits ASAP, so we stuck with that existing language for now, as the formal voting procedure required the whole process of officer, then Exec, then membership voting to restart if any text was changed and we’ll want more input on this piece before we vote on it.

1. Membership depends on conduct; community protection. “Membership shall be open, through the processes established by ACH and published on its website, to all persons interested in furthering the purpose of ACH, as long as they abide by ACH’s codes of conduct. ACH Officers further reserve the right to remove membership and its benefits temporarily or permanently from, and/or bar from attending ACH-(co)sponsored events, any member in violation of the letter or spirit of our codes of conduct. Disputes over presence or severity of codes of conduct violations will be ultimately decided by majority vote of the current ACH Officers, relying on the spirit rather than the letter of any codes. Final vote outcome (yea or nay; not individual votes) should be recorded privately for the understanding of future officers and prevention of removed members from rejoining.”

Adds a clear process for protecting our community, preventing quibbles trying to privilege letter over spirit of community conduct. Refers abstractly to codes of conduct, allowing us to consider adding a general code where previously we’ve only had conference-specific ones.

1. Term limits “To spread professional opportunities and maintain a diverse Exec with fresh points of view, ACH council reps shall not be eligible for re-election to a council rep role that begins the year starting immediately after their council rep term ends; they must spend the length of one year not being a council rep before they may serve in that role again. No person shall be allowed to serve more than 2 total terms as a council rep (i.e. one 4-year term followed by at least the required 1-year break, followed by a second 4-year term at some point; after which they may not serve as a council rep again). The exception is people who fill the rest of the term for a vacated council rep role; that partial term shall not be counted toward the 2 total full terms of allowed council rep service.”

Limits both consecutive and total council rep terms, with the goal of spreading professional opportunities around more equitably.

1. “Lazy consensus” voting
   “The Exec may approve an amendment proposal by receiving positive votes equal to at least two-thirds of the total returned votes. When counting votes to determine if the two-thirds majority has been met, non-responses count as yeas; in other words, the default vote is yea and members must actively vote nay if they wish to oppose (i.e. “lazy consensus”). A member may also vote to abstain; an abstention reduces the total number of returned votes by 1 vote. Then a ballot shall be sent to the entire membership and at least 14 days allowed for return. The distribution, voting, and counting of the ballots shall be conducted via a platform private to the Exec (such as the Exec email listserv). Ratification shall require a two-thirds majority of the votes cast, following the same “lazy consensus” procedure described above.”

We’ve long used “lazy consensus” for informal internal decisions when our rules have allowed it. This approach asks stakeholders to reply by x deadline with a yea or nay; any non-replies by the deadline are treated as approvals, for purposes of voting count/establishing if a majority of approvers is reached (i.e. if you approve or don’t mind a proposal, you can just not reply). This clarifies we can use lazy consensus as part of our formal voting. This has the benefit of avoiding good proposals not moving forward because not enough people replied to a voting email. This also clarifies who abstention works, in terms of how a vote count is totaled, which was previously unclear.

1. Conditions for membership, Executive Council rep roles, and officer roles
   “The privileges of ACH shall be withdrawn from any member:
2. whose membership has lapsed more than 1 month,
3. who has requested by email to membership@ach.org to have their membership ended,
4. Who is an officer or other Exec member and has not filled out the annual conflict of interest statement by two weeks after the deadline identified in an email requesting it, and/or
5. who is voted to be removed from membership due to codes of conduct violations (see ACH Constitution, Part III for details). For officers and other Exec members whose privileges of membership are withdrawn, their appointed or elected role’s term is simultaneously immediately ended. It is the responsibility of members, including officers and other Exec members, to remember to renew. ACH will send one automated reminder 2 weeks before a membership is due to expire…”

Sets some basic expectations for elected and appointed service on the council, as these are not empty/vanity roles but require attending a minimum number of meetings, vounteering for and completing a set of ACH tasks, and replying to council communications. Reduces officer work so it’s clear we don’t need to monitor and repeatedly ask for council reps and officers to fill out necessary forms or renew their membership, and you need to remain a paid member to serve. Makes explicit the code of conduct discussed earlier can result in removal from membership and/or Exec.

1. Explicit expectations for Exec members’ contributions & remaining in elected/appointed roles
   “Removal or resignation of Exec members Exec members may be unable to participate as planned for a number of reasons; when this occurs, a no-fault early term end is available; as well as an option for Officers to enact a no-fault early term end for Exec members not participating to an expected level, so that the position may be filled with an active participant. a. ACH strives to accommodate life needs, and appreciates that the Exec provides unpaid volunteer labor. The intent of these rules is to encourage Exec members to proactively contact the Officers group around anticipated or surprise challenges meeting participation expectations; and to also provide no-fault options freeing a role for someone with more time to meet ACH’s needs, when the Officers determine that is in the ACH’s best interests. Incumbents may be removed from roles if not meeting basic participation requirements, i.e. a. for Officers, not attending at least every other Officer meeting over the course of 4 months, without prior writing to officers@ach.org to identify a known and unavoidable schedule conflict; and/or b. for all Exec members, not attending 3 Exec meetings in a calendar year (including AGM and Annual Planning Meeting) without prior communication to officers@ach.org to identify a known and unavoidable schedule conflict; and/or c. not signing up for, and/or not performing, a reasonable minimum of ACH tasks as identified to the Exec by the Officers (such as through a shared task spreadsheet), without prior writing to officers@ach.org to request help in identifying tasks fitting ones skills and time For reps, all Officers should agree on the removal; for Officers, all other Officers should agree. a. The person in question should receive a friendly warning by email, cc’ing officers@ach.org, with a requirement to reply within 2 weeks identifying if they wish to continue in the role and confirm they can rectify participation within the next month following reply; or that they wish to take a no-fault exit. b. If the person does not reply within 2 weeks, or replies but does not rectify participation within the next month following the 2-week reply period, their term is ended (including removal from meetings, listservs, and from the current Exec people webpage)”

This text benefits our Exec members and officers: makes clear elected/appointed council members and officers can end their terms if life circumstances require, without fault. We wanted to explicitly recognize and plan for how these are unpaid volunteer roles, that personal health and wellness are priorities, and that it may feel difficult to notice and then communicate you can no longer keep up with expectations you’d committed to.

This text also benefits the ACH’s needs: it allows the ACH to promptly refill roles with people able to do the needed work. Important in making the professional benefits of holding these roles fairly require the same contributed effort from all role-holders.

1. Respond to realities of past nomination processes
   “II. Elections”

Removes the past stipulation that our council elections offer at least twice as many candidates as the roles available, so we only have as many people run as are actually willing to serve if elected (vs. past sometimes having to ask people to run just to fill in the double candidates requirement, even though they didn’t want to and weren’t able to actually serve if elected). This is also kinder, in not forcing at least half of all people who kindly volunteer to run to not ultimately be elected into a role that year.

1. Filling Exec roles if vacated “III. Vacancies”

Clarifies how we fill Exec roles that are vacated, or when someone elected ends up unable to take on the role: going through the list of people who ran in the most recent election but were not elected, starting with the person with the most votes then working downward until a willing person is found.

1. Remove bureaucratic cruft & update terminology “IV. Standing Committees”

What working groups are needed to run the ACH’s recurring infrastructure and special projects changes by year. Whether these are handled as formal committees, or as lighter-weight groups of volunteers who each have a set task rather than just an asbtract membership on a committee, also fluctuates. We removed requirements to have any but one necessary committee (“Nominations”, who manage publicizing our election nominations and encouraging applicants, and transmitting nominations to the secretariat to set up our formal elections, adding additional layer of fairness to who is solicited and forwarded).

“V. Special Interest Groups” Renames ACH Working Groups as SIGs, to make the formal nature of this work more legible for credit, tenure, and/or promotion.

Smaller changes

Many small changes were intended make the language more accessibly human-readable, such as establishing and use shorthand throughout (e.g. “Exec” instead of writing out “Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council” every time). We also removed outdated references (e.g. voting by fax), and references that bound us unnecessarily to one of many possible platforms or methods for doing non-voting tasks (e.g. how news of the annual general membership meeting is transmitted).

Read this far?

If you even skimmed this whole post, you might be someone who’d enjoy doing similar administrative and infrastructural leadership with us! Keep an eye on ACH’s blog for our next nominations/election cycle announcement (late fall 2025 or early 2026), which will include calls for new council reps, Vice President/President Elect (can be a pair of people working together as co-VPs, as we’ve done the last few years), and Deputy Secretary (to partner with our secretariat, when our current Deputy Secretary moves into the Secretary role Summer 2026).

In the leadup to planning our pedagogical workshops for the Praxis year, I explored a variety of methods and concepts. With my background in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), I naturally expressed interest in mapping as maps present a unique story and can facilitate new questions in research. I was also interested in digital storytelling, because as a historian, history is about presenting a narrative about the past that helps answer questions about the present, and hopefully knowing about history can impact our future. Ultimately, I decided to settle on digital storytelling, that also incorporates maps.

Drawing from the Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities site, it describes digital storytelling as the process of creating and sharing stories using digital tools, incorporating multimedia elements such as images, sound, and words in a narrative that is disseminated online. I really like the term used within the prompt for storytelling called remix. Remixing takes existing material and alters it and combines it to create something new. My own interpretation of digital storytelling is understanding and reinterpreting people, places, objects, or events in their proper context.

I am also connecting these definitions to my personal goals for the workshop. Earlier in the semester, one of our sessions asked us to state our goals for the workshop. One of my goals is a workshop that empowers participants to think on their own behalf and not rely solely on my instruction. A second goal is that my workshop will encourage collaboration among the participants. A third goal is I see more of a facilitator, so my goal is to help guide the conversation during my workshop versus being in teacher mode only. A fourth goal is to incorporate real-life experiences into the workshop. My final goal is to embrace the silences or vagueness of sources that come with research.

In the first part of the workshop, I will briefly present the opportunities available for digital storytelling drawing on my own experiences of using ArcGIS StoryMaps to present a narrative. For instance, a few years ago, I developed a class project Visualizing Segregation in Orlando: 1887-1950 where I used StoryMaps to visualize narrative segregation in Orlando, Florida. My StoryMap incorporated maps, images, and text that provided an interactive way to learn more about the history of segregation during the Jim Crow era. My brief presentation will open an opportunity to discuss techniques in digital humanities. There is more than one way to tell a story, so this portion also will provide an avenue for others to present their own ideas about digital storytelling. We will discuss questions like, what are good components that should go in a story or how should the order of a story be. (Also, based on conversations with Brandon, Tropy could serve as another digital tool, but still need to explore more before the workshop presentation).

In thinking about something simple, something familiar to me, and something that incorporates maps, my low-tech workshop will focus on digital storytelling influenced by our experiences on Grounds at UVA. As a graduate student, with my first year at UVA being entirely online due to COVID, my interactions on Grounds have largely been limited to select buildings and locations on grounds where my graduate classes were or where I held my discussion sessions. Even now, there are areas of Grounds I have never been. The low-tech activity thus will incorporate a printed map. Using a map like the UVA Visitors Map (second page), attendees will individually use colored dot stickers to mark building locations or general spaces on grounds where they frequently interact. Additionally, attendees will write short descriptions that describe these interactions in more detail such as what buildings or spaces we have interacted with, the frequency of these interactions, and our typical experiences there.

The last part of the activity will be collaborative exercise. After each person finishes their edited maps and written descriptions, they will hand these materials to another person. Now that each person has someone else’s sources (data), you will then see to draft a narrative about that person based on the evidence provided, and afterward, each person will share their narrative. As most stories we read about are often told second-hand, this activity will provide the attendees the opportunity to be creative and innovative in creating narratives about people we either have become familiar with or barely know. We can then conclude by thinking about the narratives we just created about each other but think of them digitally. One central question would be, what digital methods and tools are available to enhance these narratives (objects, images, sounds, etc.)?

In conclusion, I brainstormed various ideas for my workshop. Yet the process left me feeling very overwhelmed and anxious, not about presenting the workshop itself, but about finding the right idea and the right project that was low-tech. In meeting with Brandon, I had a moment of eureka where I decided to focus on being simple and work with what is familiar to me and not overcomplicate things. There is the popular phrase, Keep it Simple, Stupid (KISS) thought to have been coined by Kelly Johnson, a lead engineer for Lockheed Skunk Works, who argued that designs for products should be constructed simple enough that a common man could repair them with basic training rather than risking people’s lives with complexities. I plan to take this phrase to heart, but since I do not wish to insult the intelligence of anyone, I will change the last word to scholars. Keep it Simple, Scholars. It will make your life much easier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Thank you Brandon for the title!)

I remember very clearly my flight back from the 2016 DLF Forum. I had presented with Mackenzie Brooks on open writing for Small Liberal Arts Colleges. My Facebook feed was full of photos of people voting in the US presidential election. Long lines. People putting one foot in front of another to vote. I flew back home on election night, and I remember the strange way that people in the airport started gathering around the television watching what was happening. Normally, people kept to themselves. That night, the anxiety in the air was palpable. As was the growing excitement (DLF, after all, was in Wisconsin that year). I remember the panic I felt flying and not knowing what would wait for me when we landed. When I got in my car and turned on NPR in a rush at 2:00 AM I first heard the results. I remember not being able to sleep.

In 2024, history rhymed. Conference week? Check. The ACH conference was the week of the election, and for months we had all wondered what the environment would feel like in the aftermath. We found out. Election results that were unexpected and, yet, all too expected? Check. At least this time I wasn’t on a flight: I could climb under the covers in my pajamas between sessions of the online conference.

I wrote both of my talks for this month’s ACH conference when Trump was just a second candidate. I helped to coordinate a workshop on articulating and defending the values at the core of your work with a whole raft of brilliant folks: Amanda Visconti, Caitlin Pollock, Pamella Lach, Kate Ozment, and Crystal Luo. Later that night, I gave a paper on speculative digital pedagogies with Seanna Viechweg, where we talked about the pasts, presents, and futures of imagination in the DH classroom. All of this work felt suddenly more urgent than ever. But I gave these talks in a stupor. As I spoke about advocacy and values I could not help but wonder about the limits and reaches of certain types of power. As I discussed the imagination and the future, I could not stop thinking about the past.

Did I still believe in what I was saying?

I’ve been thinking a lot about where I was eight years ago and where I am today. I’ve been at the Scholars’ Lab seven and a half years—roughly the span of the first Trump and the Biden presidencies. In that time, I have supervised dozens of students on a variety of projects. I have comforted them as they cried. Helped find them funding to survive. Worked to prepare them for and find them jobs. Advocated for them in spaces large and small. Organized alongside them in our wall-to-wall union. For some, this work helped. For others, it did not, and I remember every person for whom something didn’t pan out. I’ve learned hard lessons about the limits of my own ability to change things, and at times I’ve described the work as trying to steer a yacht through an obstacle course. You can correct the course slightly, but only so much. I’ve hit lots of buoys.

I believe in this work. I believe it has mattered. But eight years later I will confess to questioning a lot of its power. The words I was about to read to a digital space filled with other dazed people, all zooming in from their own rooms. They felt so small and insignificant. What good were my little words in the face of a country filled with hate, ready to visit and revisit new horrors on its population and on the world?

I recognize my own positionality. I am a cis white man with a comfortable job and salary. I do not face the same dangers to my bodily, financial, and political autonomy as so many who are most likely to be impacted by the new administration. Even so, I have so much fear. For my son’s future in a vaccine-skeptical world. For my LGBTQ friends and family who are worried about access to life-saving medication or the freedom to exist. For the immigrants in my life who are scared for their safety. My own anxieties and fears are a drop in the ocean, much wider and more vast.

As I was searching around for meaning and energy in the days following the election, I came across a few lights that I’ve been clinging to. As Josh Rezek posted on BlueSky, “Writing is part of surviving this! Your own and everyone else’s!” And my dear friend and collaborator Amanda Visconti shared a post by Brian LaRossa containing “a short thread full of words from people who are smarter than me about the vital role that artists play in society generally, and doubly so in the face of authoritarian regimes.” I don’t have any illusions that my own writing is as important or radical as the pieces linked in that thread. Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin. These are real heroes. I should be so lucky as to write anything a scrap as meaningful as what they produced. But these examples are helping me think less about where I was eight years in the past and more about where I want to be in the future. About the writer, teacher, and advocate that I want to continue growing into. And those heroes exist in the present, too, closer to home. Some of the most helpful conversations I have had in the week since the election have been with a pair of brilliant students with whom I share a DH writing group. They are more committed than ever to the pursuit of a better world. They teach me, as always, how to be better and how to help. And the work they produced these past few weeks moved me to tears (though I am a softy, to be fair).

By complete and total happenstance this is my hundredth post on my personal blog. Lots of little words. This post, then, is less a statement for others than it is for myself. A commitment to keep going in the face of fear. To keep growing. I will keep recognizing the limits of words and work to act beyond them. But I will also try to hold in my heart the belief that words carry power. So a week after the election and a bit better rested here I am. Putting one word after another. And recommitting myself to the regular practice of doing so.

In February of 2024, Qianqian Shao, Makerspace volunteer, and Ammon Shepherd, Makerspace Manager, were awarded a Library IDEA grant to provide opportunities for underrepresented students.

In 2022, the Library’s IDEA Committee received library staff requests to help support programming related to IDEA. The success of these projects encouraged the committee to create a process to support and promote staff-generated programming pertaining to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility across the library.

Our proposal was to welcome 4 female Black and Latino/Hispanic students, along with 2 teachers, from Annandale High School to the UVA campus and the library for the Spring of 2024. The students will have a tour of Grounds with a focus on UVA libraries. The students will visit the Lawn and Rotunda to learn about the history of UVA. They will visit Brown, Clemons, and Main Libraries to learn about the resources available to UVA students. The Scholars’ Lab Makerspace will host a workshop for the students while they are at UVA.

The following is taken from a presentation that Qianqian gave to the Library at a monthly “Town Hall” meeting to report on the success of the initiative.

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Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Qianqian, I’m a PhD candidate (graduated on November 5, 2024) from the Chemistry department. Today, I’m excited to share with you the highlights from an impactful event that took place as part of my IDEA project.

First of all, I would like to thank you for funding my proposal, which made this event possible. Your support allowed me to create a truly impactful experience for underrepresented Black, Hispanic and Latino female high school students, showing them the opportunities available in higher education.

On Wednesday, April 24, 2024, we had the pleasure of welcoming five students and two teachers from Annandale High School for a one-day visit to the University of Virginia. The goal was to inspire these young women by introducing them to both the academic and social aspects of college life, showing them what’s possible for their futures, and what kind of resources our library can provide.

The day began at the Chemistry Department, where they were guided by Dr. Marcos Pires, the Director of Graduate Studies of Chemistry. He provided an overview of the chemistry program and offered insights into the broader STEM opportunities available at UVA.

Following that, with the help of Kalea Obermeyer and Michelle Bair, program coordinators of the Hoos First: First-Generation & Limited-Income Initiatives, along with Kimberly Wong, the students had the opportunity to connect with UVA students from their home countries. This connection helped them see how they could build a community of support as they begin their own college journeys.

Then, we had the privilege of hosting Dr. Adrienne Ghaly from the English Department, who gave an inspiring presentation on global citizenship and global policy. She also shared her project, “Read for Action: Climate, Conflict, and Humanitarian Crisis,” which is in partnership with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Dr. Ghaly’s session sparked meaningful discussions, helping the students understand how reading books in a library can connect to a deeper understanding of broader global issues.

After the presentation, the students enjoyed a campus tour and lunch in the Shannon Library, where they met two guest speakers, Samuel Wachamo and Giovanna Camacho, who are pursuing MD and PhD programs at UVA. These interactions provided the students with first-hand insights into the experiences of Hispanic, Black and Latino individuals in higher education and how they can navigate similar paths.

The students also got a chance to audit Dr. David Kittlesen’s immunology lecture after lunch.

To wrap up the day, the students visited the Scholars’ Lab Makerspace, where the students explored a variety of hands-on activities, learning about the innovative equipment available to UVA students. They even made personalized buttons as part of their experience. It was a fun and interactive way to introduce them to the creative and collaborative opportunities they could expect in college.

Overall, the visit was a tremendous success. The students and teachers left UVA having made valuable connections with both professors and current students, and they expressed a newfound sense of excitement about their future educational possibilities.

Special thanks to Makerspace manager Ammon Shepherd, who supervised my project, and to Makerspace technician Kroesna Chour for assisting during the event. I managed all aspects of the event myself, except during lunch when I had to arrange catering at Shannon Library. At that time, Summer (Wenxin) Xu kindly picked up the food while I guided the students to meet Dr. Ghaly in the English Department. Later, Kroesna helped lead the group to the library, allowing me to finalize the setup for catering. I couldn’t have accomplished this event without their support.

Want an overview of what folks have been doing to rebuild DH community online post-Twitter? I wrote a report on the ACH working group “(Re)connecting DH on Social Media”, which was active Fall 2023-Summer 2024 and is now sunsetting. Below, we share what we did toward supporting reconnecting community, as well as our sense of the state of DH social media (which has changed positively between July and October 2024!).

Activities

• Working plan: public GDoc with
  • suggested hashtag prompts for building conversations and amplifying community members’ work
  • Creation of Bluesky feeds per hashtag, to aid following (none of these ended up taking off)
• Original working group proposal: public GDoc with
  • explanation of current state of DH social media
  • ideas for improving and (re)connecting folks
• Quinn and Brandon ran a mutual aid effort gathering and distributing Bluesky invites, and publicizing their availability, while these were still required
• Amanda continues to maintain an up-to-date guide to Bluesky for academics
• Quinn and Amanda continued regular contributions to #DHmakes on Bluesky, where that hashtag has enjoyed an improved post-Twitter life!
  • We’re delighted to see its users and use expand, and several pieces of scholarship continue to be built on it (in addition to the past ACH 2023 session, successful mini-conference at DH 2024, peer-reviewed publication in the inaugural Journal of Korean DH (the latter documenting how changes in social media platform use have influenced DH community building, conversation, and scholarship around DH crafting and making).
  • The #DHMakes Methodz Talks series of free, public, chill maker/crafter method zoom talks are a sync community-building offshoot of the #DHMakes hashtag. Several email conversations about current social media use & analysis of what we’re seeing there, among working group

Report

We made contributions toward our goal (above), but didn’t ultimately have the energy—nor find social media platforms/community conducive—to some of the approaches we’d originally envisioned trying. In July 2024, we decided to sunset the group. Anyone is welcome to use our documentation and/or working group name to propose resuscitating the group to ACH (or to do something of your own related to DH social media, without matching what we’ve done here!).

Our assessment of these platforms and their DH use is purely anecdotal, based on personal observation and vibes. We’ve found Bluesky to be the best approximation of our previous Twitter experiences (noting those are not necessarily representative of others’ experiences on any of these platforms). In July 2024, we had found 3 of us use it regularly (daily or multiple times a week) as our primary venue for DH online connection.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon in July 2024 had seemed to have failed yet to approximate Twitter’s size of active posters and readers, frequency of conversations across users, and ability to connect to a variety of communities (e.g. by language; geographic region; personal identity; DH role; non-DH adjacent communities doing work in areas like art, tech, social justice).

We’d found Bluesky to be more active than Mastodon for our particular segments of the DH community, and more active in general; but noted that Mastodon seems to maybe be preferred by other segments such as European DHers and research software engineers.

In October 2024, we’ve seen a large influx of DHy Bluesky users as Twitter/X continued to disintegrate and become an explicit machine for hate and fascist lies. Bluesky now feels similar to “early DH Twitter” (e.g. 2009-2015) to at least one of our working group. Advances in Bluesky features and in bridging between Bluesky and Mastodon are growing the user community.

We’re interested to see what happens with Discord (less accessible as finding and being invited to servers is harder; live chat rather than message posting format) and Threads (has had a more Instagram-y “non-academic use by academics” vibe so far; federation allowing people to read across various platforms including Threads may help?). In July 2024, a few of us had also noticed turning more often to group direct messages on Slacks that we would have put on Twitter DMs or Twitter in the past, including via the Digital Humanities Slack (free platform, so doesn’t keep all messages readable forever) and ACH Exec’s internal private Slack. In October 2024, Bluesky has had individual DMs for a while now and are starting to see use, but the lack of group DMs is an issue.

The group didn’t have bandwidth to continue with formal async or sync work, we are proactively sunsetting so that we can document our work and allow others to build on it or pick it up, rather than letting it linger as something we still semi-committed to doing but aren’t.

Working group members

And their social media handles:

Name	Bluesky	Mastodon
Amanda Wyatt Visconti	@literaturegeek.bsky.social	@Literature_Geek@hcommons.social
Quinn Dombrowski	@quinnanya.me	@quinnanya.mstdn.social
Brandon Walsh	@walshbr.bsky.social	@walshbr.hcommons.social
José Eduardo González	@jose-eduardo.bsky.social	@jose_eduardo.mastodon.social
James Cummings	@jamescummings.bsky.social	@jamescummings@scholar.social

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…)

I have always been intrigued by the process of coding. Part of this intrigue came from watching action and adventure television shows or movies that usually featured a tech person or hacker. Whether serving the interests of the protagonist(s), the antagonist(s), or sometimes both either willingly or by force, the tech person would navigate a dark screen full of numbers and letters that I now understand involves coding.

Recently, I have been rewatching the 2016 reboot version of the MacGyver television series which features a character named Riley who is an expert computer hacker who uses her skills to benefit the covert Phoenix Foundation. In one episode, the city of Los Angeles is under a ransomware attack by a hacker that causes a citywide blackout and takes control of a nuclear power plant that threatens the surrounding area. Upon recognizing the name N3mesis encoded within the ransomware code, Riley reveals that she helped write the code with two friends during her illicit hacking days before her work with the Phoenix, meaning one of her former friends was responsible for the attacks.

As the name N3mesis visibly appeared on the screen within the code, I had an epiphany from our conversations during the Code Lab on September 19 about how one can leave notes within the code to alert others of changes. In other similar TV shows and movies that I have watched involving coding, there have been references to messages hidden within the code that the protagonists have used to successfully confront the imminent threat or danger. Perhaps a month ago, these references to coding would have gone over my head, so it was refreshing to make connections to Praxis from popular culture.

Within television shows and movies, the image of a computer hacker features someone typing very fast, sometimes in an isolated location, and manipulating code to accomplish a task, whether for altruistic or selfish reasons, as seen in the image below. (Thanks Brandon for the introduction to HackerTyper.

Yet, as the exercises in writing algorithms in plain English have shown, there is a lot more involved in coding. With the tutorials to Git, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code, Shane, Jeremy, and Brandon emphasized that coding starts with the basics, learning and understanding commands like add, commit, pull, push, and reset.

With exercises in Code Lab such as the icebreaker assignment using Git, I believe it serves as a metaphor for the collaboration exercise. We add by contributing to a project, we commit to our changes, we push those changes to a larger context that includes the work of others, and then we pull to help merge those changes. If necessary, we may have to reset things and start the process over again.

The activity among our cohort was a bit of trial and error, such as accidentally clearing someone else’s work when seeking to make new changes. However, with assistance from members of the Scholar’s Lab, we eventually made progress in making changes without errors as reflected in GitHub. This icebreaker exercise serves as a metaphor for collaboration in general. Our cohort contributed to one project and sometimes we face challenges like inadvertently clearing someone else’s work. However, we can easily correct mistakes (or in the case of GitHub, see previous versions of our work) and we can take lessons about these mistakes to avoid making them in the future.

Praxis is invading my life…but in a good way. I hope to continue to make connections between my Praxis life, my academic life, and my personal life, such as the connections between coding and popular movie and television culture. I plan to take advantage of the opportunities of these experiences within the Praxis Program.

This post is by Amanda, Claudia, and Quinn—a few of the many #DHmakes community members, who’ve described the community in a couple places. We’re gathering those descriptions into one post (though a hashtag in use across multiple platforms is defined by its users, so we aren’t the authority, and its use will evolve over time!).

1. DH = digital humanities (folks using or building digital tools like websites, code, VR to explore humanities areas like culture, history, art, ethics; folks using those kinds of humanities approaches to critique technology)
2. Makes = craft, making, makerspace types of creative work

We published a peer-reviewed article in the Korean Journal of Digital Humanities,”#DHmakes: Baking Craft into DH Discourse”, if you want to know a lot about the community’s origins, history, and outputs.

If you want a ✨tl;dr✨ though, here’s a FAQ!

Who started this?
We’re digital humanities people who incorporate physical making/art into our work (or do it as a hobby and share it online somewhere)!

Who is this for?
#DHmakes is loosely folks in digital humanities/libraries/academia/learning-work who craft/make (including as non-job hobby), open to anyone interested.

What kinds of things get posted?

• “I made/am making a thing!”
• work related to including craft/textile work in making
• works-in-progress, fails, public figuring-out how to do some method/project
• explicitly celebrating, amplifying, encouraging neat craft/make work, whether or not the creators are digital humanities people
• encouraging sharing “this is my hobby, not my job” crafts
• getting started

What kinds of making/crafting?
All of them? We’re interested in an expansive definition and especially things that have sometimes gotten left out of how people think of makerspaces/making, such as textile art. Other frequent areas of interest tagged #DHmakes include craft/making work related to:

• history
• culture & pop culture
• zines
• data visualization & embodiment, including personal data
• queer/feminist/critical tech, social justice
• play with historical craft practices
• expansive definitions of making that assert awesomeness of areas like fabric arts, cooking, fashion

For examples, check out Quinn’s Textile Makerspace, Claudia’s and Gabby Evergreen’s “Pockets of Information”, Jacqueline Wernimont’s “Visualizing Energy Data or Visceralizing Energy Transitions”, and Amanda’s Scholars’ Lab “expansive makerspace”-tagged posts page.

Why have I been tagged #DHmakes?
Folks RT/repost cool, relevant craft/making work with the tag so others get to admire them too.

Am I “DH enough” to use the hashtag?
The “DH” in #DHmakes is digital humanities. We’re guessing the other most active hashtag users agree with us: anyone curious about DH (not necessarily “experienced” or in a “DH job”) should participate! Workers, students, hobbyists in areas like gallery/library/archive/museum/learning that are DH or feel adjacent too.

Have you done things beyond using a hashtag?
Yes!

• A collaborative making project as part of a conference session (ACH 2023) plus a blog post explaining the different crafts/crafters included
• A mini-conference (at DH 2024)
• A journal special issue: dh+lib Critical Making Special Issue
• A peer-reviewed journal article: ”#DHmakes: Baking Craft into DH Discourse”
• Series of public “intro to x method” talks (#DHmakes Methodz Talks, Fall 2024)

You can follow #DHmakes using a feed of all tagged posts, or a feed of just the #DHmakes posts that include photos.

I’m in the middle of listening to an audiobook of David Byrne’s How Music Works. The book is a fascinating glimpse into the music industry, but I almost had to pull my car over when he started talking about digital humanities centers.

Okay–Byrne was actually in the middle of a whole chapter describing the special character of CBGB, the renowned music club that opened in 1973 and that was the frequent haunt of punk and new wave bands. But I was struck by just how resonant so much of his advice for cultivating a special and identifiable community was to me, someone who spends a lot of time working to do the same with students new to digital humanities. Once I parked, I quickly made some notes riffing on Byrne’s own eight characteristics of a successful music scene. I’ll share Byrne’s elements below and then riff on them as they relate to our own practice of cultivating collective DH experiences. You can find out more about Byrne’s own points by reading David A. Zimmerman’s summarizing blog post about the text.

1. There must be a venue that is of appropriate size and location in which to present material.
   • Space matters. It’s challenging to develop a sense of DH community without a space to gather, a place to house the energies of the group. One of the first tasks of a DH scene is often figuring out where it takes place. If physical space is not available to you—such locations are typically contested and hard won—take stock of other options. Virtual space, social media, community by mail, and more might be viable options, and they each offer their own affordances and limitations. And then make those spaces available to your people—as a student, it was impossible for me to reserve space. So friendly librarians who helped me do so meant the world to me.
2. The artists should be allowed to play their own material.
   • It’s not enough for community members to be passive contributors to the projects of others. They must be given the space and resources to allow their own creativity and their own original research projects to flourish. This also means making space for intentional play as a pathway to finding projects. Don’t ask people to show their DH project credentials at the door in order to get in!
3. Performing musicians must get in for free on their off nights (and maybe get free beer too)
   • Belonging should come cheap and often for those who want to join. In the Scholars’ Lab, we try to offer free tea and coffee to folks as often as possible. This might seem flippant, but it actually contributes in large ways to a sense of buy in with our group. Besides offering a ritual of belonging—we make this together for you—free coffee also offers a pathway into the Lab for those with economic hardship. Such resources are scarce for different communities, but it’s worth taking stock of what you can offer cheaply. What levers do you have?
4. There must be a sense of alienation from the prevailing music scene
   • For a DH scene to matter to someone, it has to stand for something. And that something typically stands in opposition to the larger institution around it. Look to your group’s larger context—what is left out? Who? How can your specific scene make space for those absences, center them, and give them a home? Discuss these values intentionally and find ways to act on them.
5. Rent must be low – and it must stay low
   • For Byrne, this was a larger commentary on the challenges of low-rent housing in a gentrifying area of New York City. For our own purposes, keep in mind that this work costs, but it should not cost the community. To keep your scene sustainable, it is worth regularly revisiting your prior assumptions about what is necessary to keep it flourishing. What might need to be sacrificed to maintain the ideological cohesion of your group? How does the changing financial landscape of your institution affect the underlying budgetary structures that make your work possible?
6. Bands must be paid fairly
   • Those who cultivate a DH scene have a responsibility to provide equitable compensation for the labor that its community members take on. Pay a living wage when possible. Advocate for better wages when it is not. Recognize and support labor organizing activities in the broader institution as you are able. Healthy labor practices ensure that your community knows you stand for and with them. They will notice.
7. Social transparency must be encouraged
   • Your community members make up your scene as much as the administrators who work in private to make it possible. Allow outside voices to help shape your practices—that’s how they become insiders. To cultivate the kind of DH scene your people want to see you need to ask them what they want. Ask what you can do for them—actions, events, speakers, and the like mean more when they come from community interest.
8. It must be possible to ignore the band when necessary
   • A flexible scene allows many smaller groups and communities to flourish. That is to say, a DH scene accommodates more than one use at one time. This is not to say smaller initiatives need be neglected. On the contrary—it allows your community to be agile, to flexibly act in many directions at once. Walk and chew gum at the same time. There are limitations to a group’s energies, of course, so be mindful of when you can ignore one aspect so as to safeguard energies for where you are needed.

I found, in particular, Byrne’s commentary on the intersections between spaces, policies, and creativity to be illuminating. Obviously there is much more to be said, and the analogy to Byrne’s music scene is not a 1:1 comparison. All communities have limitations, and we cannot be all things to all people. But hopefully these quick notes riffing on Byrne are helpful as we all work to cultivate a sense of belonging and community in our own DH spaces. As you try to find your own scene.

Let’s jam.

My name is Gramond McPherson, I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History. I am a late-era millennial which provides me a vantage point of remembering the world before high-speed internet and smartphones while coming of age as these technologies became a normal way of life.

As a kid, I developed and learned technical skills that I have continued to use as an adult. For instance, in middle school, I learned how to type in a computer class. The teacher required the use of an orange keyboard cover that hid the keys from our view. Though difficult at first, this practice helped to develop my muscle memory in learning to type without looking down at the keyboard. Today, I continue to be proficient in typing because of the exercise of the orange keyboard cover. I also remember the pre-digital way of conducting research, relying on encyclopedias and books and using index cards to take notes. As a millennial, while I can find solutions to problems and complete tasks in both digital and non-digital ways, I am grateful for the technologies that exist to make my life easier and less complex. As a graduate student, I am especially grateful for Zotero which I have used for over a decade. This digital tool has made my research and writing process of generating citations and collecting bibliographical material more efficient and seamless.

Beyond technical skills, the non-technical skills that I either inherited or gained through experience have also served me well as I have matured. I have always been somewhat of an introverted person, though I can become more outgoing once I am comfortable within a social space. While some could perceive this as a disadvantage within collaborative spaces like the Praxis Program, I would argue the opposite. For me, being an introvert is less about how much I talk and more about what I choose to say or not say. Through my experiences in school, I sought to make my words count and think critically rather than simply seeking to hear my own voice. I also believe that being an introvert makes me a better listener, which is also a valuable skill for collaborative work. Lastly, being an introvert allows me to have greater attention to detail, including seeing the moods of people. As the Praxis cohorts are generally small, these conditions are perfect for an introvert like me to excel in.

As a humanist, particularly in the field of history, the most important skill I use is critical thinking. In thinking about history, I am not simply seeking to know about notable events or important people in isolation, but to answer the who, what, why, where, and how. These questions help me to gain a greater understanding of a historical period as well as become more conscious of the silences or historical gaps that exist concerning issues like race, gender, and sexuality. I hope to bring my critical thinking skills to engage with the digital humanities. As evident by the readings in Week 2 of Praxis, these debates on hegemony and silences are occurring within the digital humanities as well.

One of my goals for Praxis is to embrace the unknown. Coming into Praxis, I had some prior exposure to digital humanities. During my time at the University of Central Florida, I completed the requirements to earn a certificate in Geographic Information Systems which involved taking four classes, two classes that provided scholarly and theoretical introductions to digital humanities and two classes that introduced me to ArcGIS and allowed me to create a project using the software. Yet, even with this training and certification, there is still a part of me that feels inadequate and on a scale from novice to expert, I feel closer to being a novice than an expert.

Presently, I feel even more inadequate regarding Coding. For instance, in completing the objectives from the Week 1 Code Lab, in preparing my Development Environment, I faced difficulty on the first task in installing Homebrew due to some issues I was having in Terminal. However, in viewing research and problem-solving as valuable skills, I was determined to find a solution. In embracing equal credit from prior Praxis charters, I am thankful to YouTube, particularly the EasyOSX Channel’s video on installing Homebrew for helping me through that task. This semester, I am sure there will be other unknowns that I will encounter, and I hope that I will lean into the resources available, whether my Praxis cohort, the Scholars Lab, or others, to succeed this year.

Lastly, something that I hope to discover during this Praxis year is the technical skills that I already possess but have not been utilizing to my fullest potential. An example of this is using ArcGIS again after a nearly three-year hiatus. By then, the use of ArcGIS had expanded into using ArcGIS Online, which required some further adjustment. Yet, while ArcGIS had evolved, some of the technical skills that had remained dormant during my hiatus came back to me and I was able to succeed in completing various scholarly projects. In embracing the unknown, just as the orange keyboard cover helped develop my muscle memory to become proficient in typing, the setbacks I will face in becoming comfortable with the skills I will learn with the Praxis program will help to develop my muscle memory and with practice, I will become proficient in various technical skills of the digital humanities.

I was always very quiet in coursework as a student. I have always had some measure of social anxiety, and I felt it especially acutely when pressured to participate in the service of a grade. This was a constant in every course I took except one: in graduate school I took a course with David Vander Meulen on textual editing, and I felt more engaged and free to do so than ever before or after. While David was an exceptional teacher, there were other specific reasons I credit with the vibe in the room: it was a three hour seminar and there were only four students in the room. I could not hide and, perhaps most importantly, in a group that small there was a real sense that we were in it together, that we were accountable to each other for keeping the conversation alive. The social anxiety persisted after the course, but I’ve always remembered that group dynamic fondly.

Did I mention the course met Friday mornings at 8:00AM? We really depended on each other to stay awake.

We’re trying a new thing this year in the Praxis program to bring something of this same spirit into the room, to encourage the students to feel more direct accountability for each other in discussion. In the past, whenever we’ve run unmoderated discussions I’ve generally facilitated them myself or in the company of a couple other Scholars’ Lab staff. Even when the students present their individual research projects for a design jam, a staff member serves as primary respondent and facilitator. This generally works fine, and the students are usually up for it. But the result is that the students are most accountable to the staff. This year I am going to experiment with rotating this role through the room a bit more, to spread the accountability around a bit more intentionally. For each session that will have discussion, I’ve assigned one or two students as primary facilitators. For sessions where a student will present, I’ve assigned another student as a respondent.

I’m trying not to overthink this too much: the real goal of this is to encourage collaboration, co-teaching, and collective buy-in in ways that might not take place if the students only feel accountable to the staff. But Jeremy wisely noted that not everyone might know how to facilitate a discussion. I come from the English department, where I’m used to teaching and learning based around open-ended conversation. But not every discipline is structured that way. Jeremy suggested I make a few notes about how I approach running discussions. What follows is my own starter pack for running a conversation. I have our own students in mind as the primary audience, but I imagine there is something useful here for others as well.

• Questions not answers. This one comes from my literary studies background. I tend to see my role as a discussion facilitator as primarily about opening rather than closing, about shaping doors and inviting the group through. They can choose to enter or not, as distinct from other approaches to teaching that might pull the group along in a specific direction. When I write lesson plans they are almost always lists of questions to ask. Note that this is different from a project meeting, which has a specific goal and purpose! More on that in a different post.
• Other shapes. I am not the sole giver of knowledge in the room. Instead of an arrow that I carve into the ground, what other shapes can the group draw together? How can we design our own ways of building knowledge together? Everyone has something to contribute, and I am there to learn as much as everyone else. The experience is not unidirectional. It twists, turns, folds back.
• Give space. More than you think. I like to count silently to make room for others. When in doubt, sit quietly. Thinking is hard work, and hard work takes time. Don’t mistake silence for confusion or lack of engagement. Your silence can be a gift.
• Be mindful. Who has spoken a lot? Who has not? How can you enlist the aid of the sturdy talkers in making room for others? How can you draw in the quiet ones? Pay attention to where you’re going as well as where you’ve been. Don’t think of yourself as yanking the group towards an end goal. Can you point the way and then follow? Can you help draw connections among various things that have already been said? At the end, can you sum up where you’ve gone together? I often like to drawn on the board to visually represent the flow of our conversation.

It should be clear from all this that my approach is as much about community building as an end in itself as it is about the actual material. That is to say—I like my students and my discussions to live out a specific kind of learning experience together using the material as a vehicle. We discuss the material too-quite deeply-but the particular manner in which we do so is as important to the learning goals as any particular message about the specific topic of conversation. When Jeremy asked me to write this post I immediately wanted to turn the question back around. How does he run a discussion, coming from history? How does Ronda’s own background as a life coach and project manager change her angle of approach? Everyone brings their own selves to running the classroom, and I think there is beauty in this diverse range of teacherly identities. I would love to hear how others take on this role and how they approach the difficult task of developing group identity, making space for other voices, and building up a collective teaching experience.

My DH 2024 conference talk on my recent book-adjacent data physicalizations and makerspace research, as part of co-facilitating the #DHmakes mini-conference. What is #DHmakes? Briefly: anyone (you?) DH-adjacent sharing their (DH or not) crafty or making work with the #DHmakes hashtag, getting supportive community feedback. Resulting collaborations have included conference sessions and a journal article. For an in-depth explanation of #DHmakes’s history, rationale, goals, examples, see the peer-reviewed article I recently co-authored with Quinn Dombrowski and Claudia Berger on the topic.

Hey! I’m Amanda Wyatt Visconti (they/them). I’m Director of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library.

My background’s in librarianship, literature and textual scholarship, so a lot of my making is reading- or book-adjacent. I know the ways we do and share knowledge work can take really any format, as can the things that influence our scholarly thinking. I have been informed or inspired by, for example, a literal bread recipe; fictional creative work that explores new possibilities, or conveys an ethos I took back to my research; tutorials, informal discussions, datasets, infrastructural and administrative work, zines, social media posts, and countless other of the ways humans create and share thinking*.

Why make book-adjacent prototypes?

“Generous” citation—in whom we cite, and what formats of work we cite—is actually just accurate citation. Academia routinely lags in citing all the emails, attended conference talks, social media posts, elevator conversations, podcasts, reviewer comments, and more that inspire and inform our scholarship. With my particular context of a library-based lab: physical scholarship displays in academic libraries tend to disinclude relevant reads that aren’t in a print scholarly book or journal format.

It’s hard to display many of the formats I just listed, but also many people don’t think of them as worth displaying? This sends a message that some scholarly formats or methods are lesser, or not relevant to the building and sharing of knowledge. We know there’s systemic racism, sexism, and other harms in publishing and academia. Limiting ourselves to displaying and amplifying just some of the most gatekept formats of knowledge sharing—books and journal articles—fails at presenting a welcoming, inclusive, and accurate picture of what relevant work exists to inform and inspire around a given topic.

So, I’ve been using making projects to change what scholarly formats and authors the Scholars’ Lab will be able to amplify in its public space…

Data-driven research making

I started by focusing on collecting and describing a variety of DHy digital and physical zines, though I hope to expand the dataset to other formats eventually. (Briefly, you can think of zines as DIY self-published booklets, usually intended for replication and free dissemination, usually in multiple copies as opposed to some artists’ books being single-copy-only or non-replicable.) In the upper-left of the slide is a slice of my digital “zine quilt”, a webpage grid of zine covers from zines in my collection.

Having a richly described zine-y database I know by heart, because I researched and typed in every piece of it, has opened my eyes to ways data can suggest data-based research making.

I’ve got 3 crafting projects based on this zine database so far:

1st, I created a playing card deck that fits in a little case you can slip into your pocket. Each card has the title and creators of a zine, and a QR code that takes you to where you can read the zine for free online. This lets me hand out fun little themed reading lists or bibliographies, as shuffle-able card decks… or potentially play some really confusing poker, I guess?

2nd, I’m learning to work better with LEDs, sheet acrylic, and glass by reverse-engineering a simple and less gorgeous version of Aidan Kang’s Luminous Books art installation. Kang’s sculptures fills shelves with translucent, glowing boxes that are shaped and sized like books with colorful book covers. I’ve been prototyping with cardboard, figuring out how to glue glass and acrylic securely, and figuring out programmable lights so I can make these book-shaped boxes pulse and change color. I hope to design and print fake “covers” for non-book reads like a DH project or a dataset. This would let me set these glowy neon fake books on our real book shelves, where the colored light might draw people to look at them, and follow a link to interact with the read further.

3rd, I’m hooking up a tiny thermal printer, like the ones that print receipts, to a Raspberry Pi and small display screen. I’m hoping to program a short quiz people can take, that makes the printer print out a little “receipt” of reading recommendations you can take away, based on metadata in my reading database. I’d been working to construct a neon acrylic case that looks like a retro Mac to hold the display and printer, again figuring out how to make a simpler approximation of someone else’s art, in this case SailorHg’s “While(Fruit)”. But naming my collection a “Zine Bakery” got me excited about instead hiding the receipt printer inside a toaster, so the receipt paper could flow out of one of the toaster’s bread holes. You can read more about these book-adjacent making projects at TinyUrl.com/BookAdjacent, or the zine project at ZineBakery.com.

Unrelatedly: resin!

Completely unrelated to reading: I’ve been learning how to do resin casting! You can think of resin like chemicals you mix up carefully, pour carefully into molds over multiple days and multiple layers of pouring with various pigments and embedded objects, and carefully try not to breathe. It hardens into things like this silly memento mori full-size skull I made, where I’ve embedded novelty chatter teeth and a block of ramen for a brain. Or for this necklace, I embedded multicolor LED bulbs in resin inside of D&D dice molds.

(See my recent post on resin casting for more about this work!)

Come #DHmakes with us!

I’ve discovered I really like the experience of learning new crafts: what about it is unexpectedly difficult? How much can I focus on the joy of experimenting and learning, and grow away from frustration that I can’t necessarily make things that are pretty or skillful yet? So I’ve got a weird variety of other things cooking, including fixing a grandfather clock, building a small split-flap display like in old railway stations (but smaller), mending and customizing clothes to fit better, prototyping a shop-vac-powered pneumatic tube, carving and printing linoleum, and other letterpress printing.

To me, the digital humanities is only incidentally digital. The projects and communities I get the most from take a curious and capacious approach to the forms, methods, fields we can learn from and apply to pursue knowledge, whether that’s coding a website or replicating a historical bread baking recipe. #DHmakes has helped me bring more of that commitment to experimentation into my life. And with that comes the joy of making things, being creative, and having an amazing supportive community that would love yall to share whatever you’re tinkering with using the #DHmakes hashtag, so I hope you join us in doing that if you haven’t already!

* Some of the text of this talk is replicated from my Spring 2024 peer-reviewed article, “Book Adjacent: Database & Makerspace Prototypes Repairing Book-Centric Citation Bias in DH Working Libraries”, in the DH+Lib Special Issue on “Making Research Tactile: Critical Making and Data Physicalization in Digital Humanities”.