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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandon Walsh has been elected co-VP/Presidents Elect of the U.S.-based, international-membership digital humanities scholarly org, the Association for Computers & the Humanities!

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

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

Gathering

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

Reading

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

Lifting and Transcribing

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

Integrating

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

Proofing

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

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

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

Brandon Walsh’s 1st book, “Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change” is forthcoming from Open Book Publishers!

Brandon Walsh presented on adaptive makerspace tech & some of our digital collecting projects, for our local historical society’s event at a retirement home.

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

Nine things I’ve learned

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

Nine memories to hold onto

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

Nine things I’m grateful for

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

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

We are thrilled to announce the 2026-2027 Scholar’s Lab fellows for the Praxis Program and the Graduate Fellowship in the Digital Humanities. We are welcoming 7 fellows from 4 disciplines from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Our graduate fellows are joining a robust and vibrant community of past students!

Praxis Program

We are delighted to welcome 5 team members to the 16th (!) year of the Praxis Program, our flagship introduction to digital humanities by way of collaborative, project-based pedagogy:

• Slenka Botello (Art and Architectural History)
• Catherine Fan (Art and Architectural History)
• Sena Kaplan (Sociology)
• Ruth Kramer (History)
• Kaarin Percy (Art and Architectural History)

Look forward to more details about the Praxis Program’s work in the fall!

Critical Making Fellow

The Scholars’ Lab Makerspace Critical Making Fellow is a year-long, paid graduate fellowship that supports a student in creating a physically grounded scholarly project connected to their academic research using Makerspace and UVA fabrication resources. We are excited to welcome Jessica Gómez (English) as our 2026-2027 Critical Making Fellow. The Fellow works about 10 hours per week, collaborates with the Makerspace community, documents their process, teaches two workshops, and presents the completed project publicly at the end of the spring semester.

Graduate Fellows in the Digital Humanities

Finally, we are looking forward to working with Ganiyu Jimoh (Jimga), our 2026-2027 Graduate Fellow in the Digital Humanities. Jimga’s (Art and Architectural History) dissertation is titled “Digital Art in Nigeria 1990 – 1999.”

Jimga will work with our team throughout the year and over the summer on substantial research projects related to his dissertation. He joins a vibrant community of students working in the lab in the coming year.

Special thanks to everyone who served on the application committees that selected these fantastic students. We are looking forward to working with all of them in the coming year!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give notice early

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

Identify areas of responsibility

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

Wrap up what I can

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

Establish points of contact for what I can’t

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

Document everything

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

Put guardrails on future commitments

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

Caveats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Check this out!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History

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

Eligibility, Conditions, and Requirements

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

How to Apply

A complete application package will include the following materials:

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

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

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

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

How do I write my dissertation?

How did you write yours?

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

My dissertation process

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

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

My process now

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

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

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

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

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

• object of study + method = project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Process Blog

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

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

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

Dissertation Sidecar

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

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

Project-Chapter

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

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

Maximalist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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