The following post was written by Sam Goven, a master’s student in Journalism at KU Leuven. It offers a participant’s perspective on the BiblioTech Hackathon, reflecting on the experience, the creative process, and collaborative spirit that shaped the event.

Libraries are often seen as places of preservation rather than experimentation, but the BiblioTech Hackathon turns KU Leuven Libraries into a digital playground. Drawing on rich library datasets, students, researchers, and staff from diverse backgrounds work in interdisciplinary teams to reimagine historical collections through digital tools and collaboration.

The second edition of the hackathon culminated on 26 March in the University Library in Leuven, where seven teams presented their final projects to a jury. Over the course of ten days, materials from the library collection were transformed into innovative digital outputs, ranging from interactive maps and searchable databases to experimental interfaces, which can be explored via the project websites. Team PostScript ultimately claimed both the jury prize and the audience award with an interactive digital archive of Belgian postcards.

By combining technical support, curated library collections, and an emphasis on experimentation rather than competition, the BiblioTech Hackathon demonstrates that digital humanities can be accessible, creative, and collaborative, even for those new to computational approaches.

What is a Hackathon?

During a hackathon, a blend of “hacking” and “marathon”, participants work together in teams on a project against a tight deadline. These projects often have a digital component and can be developed over one or several days, resulting in a website, database, or another form of digital output.

The first edition of the BiblioTech Hackathon took place in 2023, organized by KU Leuven Libraries and the Faculty of Arts. Participants could choose from seven datasets, including the Bible of Anjou and wartime posters. The focus was on exploring documentary heritage from a fresh perspective by transforming it into computational data. The hackathon proved to be a success and led to a second edition in 2026.

Meet the Data, Meet the People

The second edition kicked off on 12 March in Agora Learning Centre in Leuven. As the smell of pizza filled the space, the perfect brain food for sharp minds, the seven teams discovered both the datasets and each other for the first time. In total, 39 enthusiastic participants from a wide range of backgrounds took on the challenge. The hackathon attracted not only master’s students, but also PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and KU Leuven staff. Participants represented a broad variety of disciplines and research fields, including Computer Science, Egyptology, Law, and Economics.

To make the most of this diversity, teams were formed in advance based on digital skills and areas of expertise, ensuring a balanced mix. Each team was supported by a designated team leader to keep the project on track, while technical experts were readily available throughout the hackathon to answer questions and provide assistance. To ensure everyone could get started smoothly, an additional training session on the technical infrastructure and tools was organized the next day.

Following an introduction to the datasets and the available support network, the teams dove into the material. This year’s hackathon offered two datasets: well over 35.000 historical postcards from Belgium and around 300 travel accounts written by European authors describing the destinations they visited. Once again, these historical sources provided ample opportunities for innovative perspectives. Four teams chose to work with the travelogues, while the remaining three focused on the postcards.

The brainstorming phase reflected the exploratory nature of the hackathon. Faced with rich datasets and a wide range of ideas and ambitions, teams took time to explore different directions before narrowing their focus. Working within a limited timeframe required careful consideration of what was both innovative and feasible. This process not only helped shape the projects but also allowed participants to recognize and build on each other’s strengths. Andreas Ketele, a member of the Inked and Stamped team, reflected afterwards: “What I really enjoyed was that process of exploration. We reflected on our ideas and experimented a lot, and that’s exactly what a hackathon is about: discovering possibilities along the way.”

The Final Projects

On 26 March, participants, jury members, and guests gathered in the University Library for the final presentations accompanied by a poster exhibition, marking the culmination of the hackathon and an opportunity for teams to present their work. The evening opened with welcoming words from the organizing team, Demmy Verbeke (Head of KU Leuven Libraries Artes), and Geert Brône (Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Arts), who praised the creativity and commitment shown throughout the hackathon.

The presentations were opened by team CaptaCats with their project ShipAdvisor. Loosely inspired by the travel website TripAdvisor, the team developed a web platform that maps maritime routes in the Mediterranean during the 18th and 19th centuries, based on historical travel accounts.

Next, team DH.xml presented their analysis of the postcard dataset. They argued that historical postcards functioned as a form of social media avant la lettre, and used the collection to identify recurring visual trends and patterns.

All Reads Lead to Leuven focused on how 19th-century French travel writers wrote about African languages. Their project resulted in a website featuring Instagram-inspired posts that reveal the vocabulary and framing these authors used when describing linguistic encounters.

Using the postcard dataset, Inked and Stamped built a searchable digital database. Its intuitive interface allows users to explore the collection by location, date, and even the color of the postcards.

Team PostScript adopted a similar approach, but with a specific focus on postcards from Antwerp. In addition to a searchable database, they introduced interactive features such as maps that contrast contemporary photographs with historical images from the collection.

The penultimate presentation came from Team W@nder. Drawing on The Land and the Book, a 19th-century publication by W. M. Thompson, they visualized the author’s travels in the Levant. As with other projects, historical illustrations were juxtaposed with present-day photographs to highlight continuity and change.

The evening concluded with a presentation by Team Julie Verne. They developed an oracle-like search tool based on the travelogues dataset. Through their website, users can query the texts and receive the most relevant responses generated from the corpus.

After a brief deliberation by the jury and a public vote, the awards were announced. The jury consisted of experts in data and digital research: Julie Birkholz (Coordinator CLARIAH VL+), Geert Brône (Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Arts), Jo Rademakers, (Head of LIBIS), Fred Truyen (Head of CS Digital), and Katrien Verbert (Program director of the POC Digital Humanities). Team PostScript was awarded both the jury prize and the audience award. As in the 2023 edition, however, each team received recognition, including awards such as Best Research Potential and Best Visualization. The evening concluded with a reception, where teams presented their project posters over food and drinks. To share the creativity and impact of the hackathon with a wider audience, the posters are currently touring across KU Leuven.

A Community Built Through Collaboration

Not only were the results of the hackathon impressive, participants also praised the atmosphere and strong sense of community that developed throughout the event. In post-hackathon interviews, several participants reflected on the collaborative environment that emerged over the course of the ten days. Andreas Ketele described the experience as particularly rewarding: “I’m usually not someone who uses very strong words, but this really was fantastic. […] We were working as a group of highly motivated people. We collaborated very well and benefited enormously from all the support we received along the way.”

The diversity of backgrounds and skill levels did not prove to be a challenge, but rather one of the hackathon’s greatest strengths. By bringing together participants with different perspectives, expertise, and levels of technical experience, the hackathon created space for learning from one another. As Roberta Pireddu, team leader of PostScript, explained: “I really think everyone can participate, because there’s a place for everyone in a hackathon, even if you don’t have strong technical skills. Whatever your background or skills, there’s always a way to contribute and find your role within the group.”

For many participants, this emphasis on collaboration rather than competition was key. As advice for future participants, Luisa Ripoll Alberola, team leader of CaptaCats, encouraged newcomers not to focus too heavily on the final outcome: “What really matters is not the end product, but the process: working together, learning new things, and enjoying the experience. That’s what makes it valuable.”

The second edition of the BiblioTech Hackathon proved once again how working with library data can foster meaningful collaboration across disciplines. By bringing together diverse participants, the hackathon strengthened connections within the academic community and opened up new ways of engaging with humanities collections.

More information about the hackathon, its datasets, and the final projects can be found on the BiblioTech 2026 website. We encourage you to have a look at the project posters and websites to explore the teams’ outputs and discover the creative ways in which KU Leuven’s library collections continue to inspire digital humanities research.

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.

Will Rourk directed a team of students, Fluvanna County community, & architecture preservation professionals in completing the documentation necessary to nominate the ~1935 Evergreen African-American School as an official historic site with the Virginia Dept of Historic Resources.

KU Leuven Libraries has invested in an integrated approach to strengthen the discoverability and accessibility of physical resources through digital access, thereby supporting and stimulating research, education, and heritage activities.

The Digitisation and Enrichment of Collections Service creates, manages, and enriches data through metadata creation, digitisation, and imaging and serve as experts in these fields. Through state-of-the-art infrastructure such as the Imaging Lab and the Scan Hub, both fragile heritage materials and modern documents are digitised. These processes are supported by metadata creation and embedded within a broader policy framework for the preservation and management of physical collections. The team follows the latest developments in the field with regards to technical aspects and concerning digitisation project management and legal matters.

To make this often invisible expertise visible, Digitisation and Enrichment of Collections of KU Leuven Libraries developed the YouTube series “How KU Leuven Libraries Digitises” (in Dutch). Through a seriest of 4 videos you can discover, step by step, how materials are prepared, handled, placed under controlled lightning, scanned, and described. They show the people, equipment, and procedures behind the digitisation workflow. Discover the series below, or directly on Youtube.

If you want to know more about KU Leuven Libraries digitisation process, visit the website.

1. Safely handling

2. Metadata creation

3. Imaging Lab

4. Scan Hub

The Train Moves On!

Progress is happening. Much of it reworking what I already did. End of year projects crept in and put this project on the back burner for a couple of weeks. But despite the delay, the train moves forward! And what once was done is now redone!

Servo Motors

For example, the servo motors. The first version worked, sort of. They didn’t move a full 180°, and they were kind of weak.

So I found new motors, bought a couple, and tested them out. That of course, required recreating the servo gear and the whole housing unit.

After many iterations of the servo gear…

I dialed in the tolerances and sizing so the new servo horn/arm fits and stays in place. But just to be safe, I’ll be screwing in each of the servo gears.

Holder

The new servo motor is bigger than the previous. That means the holder needs altering. Fortunately, I designed it measurements so that a quick change of a few select dimensions and the holder fits the new motor snug, but not as tight as a fat kid in the middle seat. Hence the screw.

Also note that I started writing the version number on the object.

I also opened up the back side so it is easier to install the gears, especially the servo gear. I tightened up the tolerances here, too.

(New version on the left.)

And here’s the new gear train all assembled with the new servo. It moves so much more cleanly and smoothly.

And just for fun, here are most of the parts I 3D printed so far.

Moving On

This got me to the point of creating the states. I first needed to calculate how big this project was going to be more accurately.

So I counted all of the hexagons horizontally, and vertically to get a much better calculation than we had used in the past.

I plugged these numbers into a spread sheet, and iterated over a few hexagon dimensions in order to see how big this map can be, or how small it needs to be. Two factors weighted the dimensions the most: 1) the maximum size that the laser cutter can cut, 2) the size of a doorway. I figure that I can cut the map out in multiple pieces, so the size of the laser cutter is not too much of an issue. But if this thing needs to travel, then it definitely needs to fit through a doorway. So that is really the limiting factor, because it will need to travel at some point in it’s existence.

Our original dimensions called for a map that was nearly 4 feet by 3 feet. Too large for the laser cutter, and too large to fit through a door.

A good size ended up being a hexagon that is 20mm from side to side, which creates a map about 30 inches long and 23 inches wide. A common, indoor doorway in the US is 30-32 inches wide. Such a table will definitely slide through at 23 inches wide.

All posts in this series:

• Part I - Critical Making Project 2026
• Part II - Jump on the Gear Train
• Part III - Gear Train Assemble
• Part IV - Back on the Train

Funding provided through a generous grant from UVA Arts Council.

Digital images are in constant motion. They traverse various platforms, feeds, databases, and archives, often reappearing in modified forms. Through my research on digital art, I have recognized this phenomenon as more than a mere feature of online dissemination. It constitutes both a methodological challenge and a perceptual issue.

What appears to be a single image may, in actuality, exist as a collection of various versions: cropped, compressed, recoloured, or reposted without proper attribution. Although these differences may seem insignificant at first glance, they give rise to a question that is more complex to answer than it initially appears.

      Under what circumstances can two images be considered identical?

That question became the basis of my assignment for the CodeLab course in my ongoing Praxis Fellowship Program. Using Python with the ImageHash and Pillow libraries in VS Code, I built a small tool to test how visual similarity might be measured across images that have changed through circulation. What started as an exercise became a way of thinking through something larger: what does it mean for a computer to recognize an image, and does that match what we mean when we say two images are the same?

The approach

The tool uses the imagehash library to compute perceptual hashes and compare images by visual similarity.¹ Unlike cryptographic hashing, which changes entirely if even a single byte changes, perceptual hashing captures how an image looks. Two visually similar images should produce similar hashes; unrelated images should not.

After generating the comparison data, I modified the script to export results as JSON and render them as an HTML page. Instead of raw values, the interface ranked each image against the reference, displayed a distance score, and grouped results into categories from “nearly identical” to “different from the original.” The script processed files in the images/ folder, saved results to version_results.json, and generated output in results.html.

Figure 1. HTML interface showing ranked comparison of image variants against the reference image. See https://jimgaconcept.github.io/image-versioning-demo/

The dataset

The reference image is a digitized hand-drawn cartoon illustration made with pen and ink and watercolor on paper. This detail turned out to matter a great deal. I compared it to two modified copies (resized and compressed), one digitally recreated version, and three visually unrelated images, to test whether the tool could distinguish genuine variants from unrelated works.²

Results

The two modified versions, resized and compressed, both scored between zero and two, confirming their close relationship to the reference. The three unrelated images all scored above 20, well outside any similarity range. The digitally recreated version (Fig. 1) scored 18, placing it in the category that the interface labeled as different from the original.

That score of 18 was the result I did not expect, and the one worth thinking about most carefully.

What the computer sees, and what we see

The recreated image and the original share the same subject, composition, and color palette. A human viewer encountering both would almost certainly recognize them as versions of the same thing. The algorithm did not. Scoring 18, it placed the recreation closer to the unrelated images than to the two modified copies, which scored between 0 and 2.

The reason lies in what each image actually is at the data level. The original is a scan of a physical drawing, and its pixel data carries the texture of its medium: the grain of the paper, the way ink spreads at the edges of marks, the tonal variation of pigment on a physical surface. The digital recreation was built entirely within Photoshop and saved as a JPEG. Even a faithful digital reconstruction is made from digital brushes and algorithmically generated marks. There is no paper grain, no ink bleed. The two images look the same to us, but their underlying data structures are built from entirely different material.

This is a version of what computer vision researchers call the cross-depiction problem: the gap between human visual recognition, which operates on meaning and composition, and machine recognition, which operates on statistical patterns in pixel data. My experiment gave that abstract problem a specific, personal form. What appears identical to the human eye may share almost nothing in common at the data level. The computer is not seeing the image. It is reading a numerical structure, and two images that represent the same thing visually can be built from entirely different data, depending on how and where they were made.

This relates to a broader discourse within the field of digital humanities. As Drucker (2013) has articulated, digitization constitutes not merely a neutral representation but rather a form of interpretation. Factors such as resolution, lighting conditions, and the medium of capture all influence the transformation of an image into data.³ My findings exemplify this argument concretely. The scanned watercolor and the Photoshop recreation are not simply two variants of the same image; rather, they represent two distinct interpretations, which the algorithm processes accordingly.

If we are building archival systems or image databases that rely on computational similarity to group and relate works, we need to ask whose sense of “the same image” is being encoded. A tool trained on pixel-level data will consistently separate a scanned physical artwork from its digital recreation, not because they are different images in any humanistic sense, but because they are different kinds of data.

Limitations and what comes next

Perceptual hashing assesses visual similarity at the data level. It does not establish authorship, confirm provenance, nor consider contextual factors. Outcomes may also differ based on the specific hashing algorithm employed, as various implementations assign different weights to visual features. This tool serves as one component within a broader interpretive framework, rather than substituting human judgment.

This assignment illuminated a perception that is both straightforward and profound. It is evident that the computer and the human eye do not observe the same aspects, even when examining the same image. The disparity between data and meaning represents the realm where the most compelling inquiries within digital art history reside. As Burdick et al. (2012) suggest, the significance of computational tools in the humanities lies not in their capacity to resolve questions, but rather in their ability to render certain questions newly answerable.⁴ This experience has prompted a question I was previously unaware of having.

The live output and ranked visualization are at the project web interface. Full code is on GitHub.

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Professors HATE This One Weird Trick for Summarizing Your Research

There’s an old story, almost certainly apocryphal, about former British Prime Minister John Major asking Boris Yeltsin to describe the Russian economy in one word. Yeltsin said it was “Good.”

Seeking a bit more detail, Major asked Yeltsin if he could describe it in two words. Yeltsin replied, “Not good.”

Major finally asked for a three-word summary. Yeltsin’s response? “Not good enough.”

While the exchange is most likely a myth, there is something irresistible about its structure, and it was rattling around in my head during a recent session of my dissertation seminar.

During the break, I asked someone to sum up their partner’s dissertation in one word. They said: “Empathy.” I relayed the Yeltsin joke and we decided to test whether the structure held up in summarizing academic research. Two words: “Not empathetic.” Three words: “Not empathetic enough.” Gabby, whose research is about depictions of madness in modernist literature, thought about it for a second and said: “Yeah, that’s actually not a bad summary.”

We started going around the room with it. Spencer, who is working on trans bibliography, offered “hermaphrodite” as her one-word summary, which yielded “not hermaphrodite,” and then “not hermaphrodite enough.” Applied to my own dissertation, which focuses on contemporary poems written from the perspective of animals, I get:

Animal.

Not animal.

Not animal enough.

Which, for a 3-word summary of what is supposed to be a book-length scholarly work investigating the strategic deformation of syntax, figuration, and sound that poets undertake in order to make language register as issuing from a nonhuman consciousness, is pretty good.

The question, of course, is to what extent “not X enough” is actually a useful model for summarizing research and to what extent it just feels like it works because the rhythm is satisfying. But I do think there’s something real going on in the unfolding of X, not X, not X enough. So many research projects, across disciplines, are fundamentally about some quality or condition that is absent, insufficient, or misrecognized. The three-word version locates a gap, names an inadequacy, and implies a standard that hasn’t been met. It’s a tiny argument. It can’t work for everything. But it’s a fun test and I’d argue it extends even beyond academic research to artistic projects more broadly.

So, does this method work for summarizing your research or current project? Does it not work? Does it not work well enough?

On March 25, 2026, Mayumi Ohta, Florian Nieser, Jonathan Gaede, Maria Becker, Jonas Braun, and Thomas Renkert gathered for another hackathon at the Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH). This time, the focus was...

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.

At the beginning of the spring semester, each of the Praxis fellows was asked to run a pen-and-paper workshop introducing the rest of the fellows and staff to a digital method. No screens, no code, just the low-tech materials needed to think through a concept with your hands.

The driving philosophy for my workshop came from a quote by Richard Bach: “We teach best what we most need to learn.” I found this a clarifying provocation because instead of asking myself thorny, stressful questions—What will I teach? What do I know well enough to even be able to teach? What will be interesting to the other fellows and staff?—I was able to begin with a simpler one:

What do I need to know?

That was easy. I need to know how to curate and organize works of literature into coherent clusters and how to present those clusters to an audience. The structure of my dissertation is somewhat unusual in that it isn’t organized into chapters based on individual authors—for example a chapter on Elizabeth Bishop, a chapter on the works of Ted Hughes, a third on Gwendolyn Brooks. Rather, my chapters are conceptually themed around three kinds of poems I believe to be undertheorized: poems written from the perspective of animals, poems mourning the death of an animal, and poems detailing an animal encounter. Because these are undertheorized categories, there is no obvious starting point, no established canon to lean on. One of the central challenges of this work is determining what poems to include and how to present them to a reader. Hence my workshop.

A Word Teeming with Life

I decided to begin with a brief etymological history. (Based on my previous blog post, you may sense that this is a common pattern for me, and you would be correct.) The word anthology can feel dead and tiresome, especially in the context of an English department, where it quickly becomes synonymous with The Norton Anthology of English Literature—the ubiquitous teaching tome that conjures up associations of imperialism, hierarchy, and canon-formation. But it felt important to go back to the original anthology, a word whose origins are quite literally teeming with life.

Anthology comes from the ancient Greek anthologia (ἀνθολογία), meaning “flower-gathering”—from anthos (ἄνθος), “flower,” and legein (λέγειν), “to gather or collect.” The word traces back to a specific act of curation: around 100 BCE, the poet Meleager of Gadara compiled what is considered the first true anthology, a collection of epigrams by forty-six Greek poets. He called it The Garland—Stephanos (Στέφανος)—and in his introduction, he compared each poet to a different flower, weaving them together into a literary wreath. From its very beginning, an anthology was never just a heap of texts. It was a garland—something deliberately woven, where the selection and arrangement were themselves creative acts.

I shared this with my fellow fellows to begin reframing the kind of work an anthology can do. The anthology is not a neutral container. It is an argument about what belongs together and why.

Aesop’s Fables

I then introduced the anthology-making exercise. I gave each pair of participants a set of eighteen Aesop’s fables—but only their titles and associated morals, printed on cards. I chose not to include the full text of the fables at the wise suggestion of Brandon Walsh, which saved on reading time and allowed me to include enough fables to make the anthologizing meaningful. Participants were asked to select, cluster, order, and title an anthology from this set of cards.

The decision to strip the fables down to title and moral started me thinking about metadata. In this exercise, what is normally considered metadata—the title, the summary moral—was itself the data, given that participants didn’t have the fables themselves to read. This necessarily informed how they constructed their anthologies. Several groups clustered the fables based on the morals, sorting them into thematic categories like greed, deception, or flexibility. But I noticed that these morals are open to interpretation. Given the cryptic nature of some of the fables, it is fully possible for a single fable to have several competing morals, all of which would in turn affect how it was categorized. Is “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a fable about a thirsty crow attempting to drink from a pitcher too narrow for its beak, about cleverness, persistence, or desperation? The answer depends on the anthologist, and each reading produces a different garland.

Titling conventions themselves proved significant. One participant (Shane, unsurprisingly) included only fables featuring dogs (and the dog-like) and titled his anthology “Canidae.” It made me realize how contingent such an anthology is on the metadata available. If the titles of the fables were different, if they foregrounded the morals rather than the characters, could such an anthology even exist? The exercise revealed something I hadn’t fully articulated before: that the categories we use to organize literature are not found but made, and they are made from whatever information is legible to us at the moment of sorting.

Wireframing

The second part of the workshop asked participants to take their anthology and imagine it as a website. Using markers and blank paper, each pair sketched wireframes for three pages: a homepage, a browse page, and a single fable page. The shift from editorial decisions to design decisions turned out to be more disorienting than I expected—and more productive. Suddenly the question was not just what belongs together but how does someone move through what belongs together.

One of the most interesting wireframes came from Shane, who designed a single fable page that presented two fables simultaneously. At the top left of the page, a small illustration accompanied the first line of “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” reading right-side up. But the next line down was the last line of “The Fox and the Grapes”—printed upside down, beginning from the bottom of the page. The two fables were enmeshed, line by line, so that as you read downward through one fable you were also reading upward through the other, the right-side-up text and the inverted text meeting in the middle. Even the pairing was deliberate: the contentment of the country mouse set against the fox’s sour dismissal of what he cannot reach.

To sharpen the design conversation, I borrowed a technique I’d been advised to try (also from Brandon): after the initial wireframing round, I asked participants to create a deliberately bad wireframe, then swap it with another group to fix. It is easier to talk about good design in the context of bad design, and the exercise gave everyone a shared vocabulary. But Shane’s wireframe complicated things beautifully. The group that received it didn’t want to “correct” such a fun and original idea (and who could blame them?) Their fix was to simply present the two fables one after the other, essentially normalizing the layout. It was the responsible design choice. It was also, in some way, a loss. Watching it play out, I realized the exercise had surfaced a genuine tension at the heart of digital presentation: between accessibility and experimentation, between making something usable and making something that rewards a different kind of attention.

This, I think, is the crux of the digital anthology problem and the reason I designed this workshop. The editorial and the digital are never really separate; they shape each other. The way you organize a collection changes what kind of interface it demands, and the affordances of an interface change what kinds of organization are even possible.

Anthologies Reimagined

But why stop at a website? The wireframing exercise opened a door in my thinking that I’m still walking through. If an anthology doesn’t have to be a book—if it can be a website with its own navigation and architecture—then what else could it be? What would an anthology you could walk around in look like? What if it weren’t a book to flip through linearly but something more like a room in a house you could dwell in. Where the poems on the walls changed depending on which door you entered through, where proximity meant something, where you could sit with a cluster of texts the way you sit in a corner of a room?

I don’t have answers to these questions yet. But I think the workshop helped me understand why they matter. Meleager’s original garland of poems was a wreath, a circle with no fixed beginning or end and where each flower touched the ones beside it. Somewhere between the garland and the Norton, we flattened the anthology into a line. The digital gives us a chance to unflatten it, to think about what it means to arrange literature not just sequentially but spatially, relationally, experientially.

We teach best what we most need to learn. I walked into that workshop needing to think more carefully about how the structure of a collection shapes the experience of reading it. I walked out with eighteen fables, four very different garlands, a handful of good (and bad) wireframes, and a vision of an anthology as a room. That feels like progress.

I. Have. A. Website. ✨ https://winnieepm.github.io/ ✨

As this academic year is coming to an end, I don’t have a dissertation to defend yet, but I did publish a public website freely hosted on GitHub Pages—it’s been three years in the making. What took so long, you ask? A combination of reasons, with two that stand out. One, I couldn’t make up my mind about the method for making it or the design. Too many choices, possibilities, tools to try, strong opinions, use-cases. Two, I chose to code my own website, and self-learning coding while you’re a full-time doctoral student in the humanities brings its own significant systemic and personal challenges: there’s no reward for the quirky extra major, at least not immediately. So, why do it at all?

I chose to explore minimal development stacks because building them forced me to learn how they work. At what point is HTML and CSS alone not enough? Why do you need a framework? What decisions draw projects to content managers or static websites? When is a database required?

The ubiquity of websites, especially for professionals today, ticked my curiosity to learn how they worked to produce an online presence of a person IRL, but popular options like Wordpress, Wix, and Squarespace, offer limited out-of-the-box theme options to display and manage your content. Also, it will typically cost you to access their full library of design and layout resources to make a personalized website that uniquely represents you and stands out. Each of these also require constant updates to ensure the site’s safety and functionality, which means your website can easily break, or be exposed to cyber attacks, if you fall behind updates.

Though the CMS (content management system) route makes sense for many, I had questions about web sustainability, development, and design that drove me instead to pure HTML/CSS pages, and static site generators (SSGs), for making myself a website I could style and organize at will locally. SSGs take in textual content written in markdown, your designated layouts, and data, they then process all these files locally to produce a version of your website in a set of HTML files ready for hosting. This simple production pipeline makes for fast, flexible, and design agnostic webpages that are so small in file size they can fit in a 1GB flashdrive.

But the benefits come with a steep learning curve. It requires great learning effort, if you’re unfamiliar with coding, and a significant time commitment. For collaborative projects, creating different user access levels and credentials is not supported and would require coding a custom solution. You also need to use a code editor for updating the website, which is something not everyone is comfortable doing or needs to learn.

I built and continue developing my own portfolio website using the 11ty framework, an SSG based on JavaScript that has become popular in the past years because it’s easy to set up, compared to others like Jekyll, and it makes no decisions on how to style your projects out of the box. Honestly, I wasn’t aware of how long it would take me to learn all the things I’ve come to learn up until this point, but I also don’t regret it because I have been able to support other digital projects just because I have spent enough time banging my head against the wall to setup up and customize 11ty. If I had to do it all over again, I would, though I’d focus more on simplifying my goals and tasks, rather than setting out to accomplish really ambitious projects that constantly feel out of reach while you’re working on them.

Anyway, I made my website. It’s live, it’ll keep growing, and it’s mine.

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.

Updates April 2026 Added language selection feature to allow users to select the language(s) that appear in the PDF to assist in accuracy of OCR Accessibility report feature that includes...

I’m very belatedly joining the Praxis Fellows blog after more than a semester of meaning to write this post and not writing it. Let me start with the word that has been keeping me busy instead.

Prosopopoeia

Pro-so-po-PEE-a. It comes from the Greek prosopon (“face,” “mask”) and poiein (“to make”), and it means, roughly, to give a face to something that doesn’t have one—or more precisely, to give speech to something that cannot speak. (The Greek word for “make” is also where we get the word “poem”—literally “a made thing.”) When a poet makes a dead person talk, that’s prosopopoeia. When the poet makes the wind talk, or a river, or a nation— prosopopoeia. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the rhetorical toolkit, and one of the strangest: the fiction that things which have no voice—or rather, a voice which we are not accustomed to listening for—can be “given” one by the writer.

What I’d like to do in this post is walk through a few examples of prosopopoeia to give you a sense of why this figure fascinates me and why I think it matters so much.

A courtroom ghost

Let’s begin in a Roman courtroom. In 56 BCE, Cicero was defending a young man named Marcus Caelius Rufus against charges of political violence. Cicero’s strategy was to reframe the whole prosecution as the scheme of a scorned lover—Clodia Metelli, a powerful patrician widow who had been Caelius’s mistress. To discredit Clodia, Cicero did something audacious: he announced that he would summon from the dead her own ancestor, Appius Claudius Caecus—the famous blind censor who built the Via Appia, Rome’s first great road—and let him address her directly.

What follows is one of the most celebrated prosopopoeiae in classical rhetoric. Cicero assumes Appius’s voice directly and has him thunder at Clodia: Woman, what business have you with Caelius? What business with a young boy? The address is deliberately humiliating. The Latin word Cicero uses, “mulier” (“Woman!”), strips Clodia of her patrician dignity. The jurors know these are Cicero’s words, not Appius’s, but when placed in his mouth they take on, almost by alchemy, a new kind of power. Prosopopoeia, in this instance, is able to create a sense of moral authority, seemingly out of thin air.

A silent urn’s subversive speech

If the Cicero example shows prosopopoeia as a deliberate rhetorical strategy, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” shows how the figure can be a force of destabilization—how the question of who is speaking can even become unanswerable.

You probably know the poem’s famous last lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” But here are the closing lines, in the version most modern anthologies print:

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

With the quotation marks around the phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” it seems quite clear that the urn is given a chance to speak and offer its profound metaphysical proposition on the nature of beauty and truth. The trouble is that those quotation marks do not appear in transcripts of the poem made by Keats’s friends, nor do they appear in other printed versions. This has led to major critical disagreement over how much speech can really be attributed to the urn. Are the lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said by the urn with the rest attributed to the lyric speaker of the poem or is the urn meant to be saying the entirety of the last two lines? Without any quotation marks indicating who is saying what, is the “ye” in the final line addressing the speaker of the poem, the readers of the poem, the urn, or the painted figures on the urn itself?

The instability of the speaker gives way to an instability of tone. Is the statement about beauty and truth a profound metaphysical proposition? Or is it a comic overstatement representing the naive and narrow point of view of the urn? The shifting quotation marks across manuscripts and editions are the material trace of a question prosopopoeia always raises: when we give speech to something that cannot speak, whose voice are we really hearing? And how exactly are we meant to hear them?

The sled dog, the bee, and the pig

This is where my dissertation comes in. The first chapter focuses on what I’m calling “animal persona poems”—contemporary poems written from the perspective of nonhuman animals. These poems occupy a strange position relative to prosopopoeia. Strictly speaking, they’re dramatic monologues: a poet assumes a character and speaks as that character, the way Browning speaks as the Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess.” But the character is a sled dog, or a bee, or a pig. And the fact that the character is an animal changes everything about how the ventriloquism works.

Consider Timothy Donnelly’s “Malamute,” from his collection The Problem of the Many (2019). The poem is written in long, winding, syntactically complex sentences—each stanza essentially one sprawling clause accumulating subordinate phrases. Every verse paragraph opens with the same refrain: “When I was a dog I pulled the sled with the other dogs.” That past tense is crucial. This isn’t a dog speaking in the moment; it’s a being that once inhabited a dog’s body and now reflects from some other vantage point. The dog pulled the sled with the other dogs “who didn’t know I didn’t know”—it conceals its disquiet, its not-belonging, while the elaborate syntax enacts an interiority far exceeding anything we’d attribute to a naturalistic animal consciousness. The poem doesn’t pretend to offer transparent access to a dog’s mind. It foregrounds its own artifice.

Or take “As Bee,” by Paula Bohince. Here the speaker is a bee—polite, reflective, stoically aware of its own brevity. “This is my first and only spring on earth. / I get it.” The bee wonders parenthetically about its own mother—”(did I have one?)”—which captures both biological reality (bees don’t have individual mothers in any meaningful sense) and deeper emotional uncertainty. What strikes me about this poem is the “As” in the title, which marks the poem as a performance, a speaking-as, not a speaking-from.

And there’s Margaret Atwood’s “Pig Song,” from You Are Happy (1974) which features a sequence called “Songs of the Transformed” in which nine speakers are animals who have been changed by “Madame.” The pig describes itself in grotesque imagery—”a greypink vegetable with slug / eyes, buttock / incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip”—and then turns on its captor: “Madame, this song offends you, these grunts / which you find oppressively sexual, mistaking / simple greed for lust.” The poem’s final lines crystallize something about prosopopoeia itself: “I am yours. If you feed me garbage, / I will sing a song of garbage. / This is a hymn.” The pig will mirror back exactly what it receives, and the mirroring becomes sacred utterance. The voice given to the degraded creature becomes the vehicle for its resistance.

The paradox

What connects all these examples—the Roman courtroom, the Grecian urn, the sled dog and the bee and the pig—is a shared paradox. Speaking for what cannot speak or what cannot be thought to speak is simultaneously an act of imaginative generosity and an act of appropriation. The voice that emerges always belongs to two speakers at once—the ostensible speaker (the ancestor, the urn, the animal) and the real one (the orator, the poet). And the uncertainty about whose voice we’re really hearing is prosopopoeia’s deepest feature.

For my dissertation, this paradox becomes especially charged when the subject is an animal. Animals do have voices—they bark and sing and grunt and click, not to mention the huge range of gestures and non-speech acts they perform. They communicate, even if we can’t fully understand what they’re saying. So the poet who writes in the voice of a dog or a bee isn’t conjuring speech from silence, the way Keats does with his urn. The poet is replacing one kind of utterance (the animal’s actual, opaque expressiveness) with another (human language). The animal already has a face. The poet is putting a new one on top of it. And the most interesting animal poems, I think, are the ones that know this—that build the awareness of their own ventriloquism into their formal structures.

More to come. My dissertation explores what happens to poetic language when it tries to cross the species boundary, and part of what excites me about being a Praxis Fellow is thinking about how digital methods might shape that inquiry—how you curate a corpus of poems, how you present and sequence them, and what it means to build a digital environment that lets readers encounter those poems rather than just read about them. In my next post, I’ll write about a workshop I recently ran in which participants assembled their own anthologies of Aesop’s fables and then designed pen-and-paper wireframes for how they’d present them as websites. Until then, thank you for reading.