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

Bookend the week with check-ins

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tasks

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

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

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

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

Shadowing

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

Blogging

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

Curricular design

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

Projects

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

Project 1 - fellowship documentation

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

Project 2 - alumni data

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

Project 3 - update development packet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re in the back half of my data for the rest of us course right now. I’ve already written a bit about the beginning of the course and how it was framed around a kind of data pipeline that aimed to give students a baseline level of data literacy. My goal for the course was always that the second half would work through the pipeline again, building towards small group work as students created datasets around their own particular interests. These final products were largely based on the model of Responsible Datasets in Context and the Post45 Data Collective. I wanted my students to work together to gather data based on their interests and produce an essay that situates that data in the larger context from which it came, demonstrates what kinds of questions you can ask of it, and makes the processed data available for other people to use in a legible manner.

The plan was always there. First half of the course: me teaching. Second half: all hands-on working. The problem I ran into was that I had more students sign up for the course than I expected. I’m used to running group work for graduate students where the entire group is working on the same project, but the number of participants is quite small: typically four to six. I framed the course with that scale in mind, and I was not ready mentally for a course where I would have 15 to 25 students. That’s what happens when you’ve taught only off the books for years! When it came time to plan how the course would actually look on a day-to-day basis once we got to the group work phase, I wasn’t actually certain what to do. What would it even look like for 15 students to work on the same thing? If I broke them into groups, how would the course’s pipeline model impact the students’ experience? With a single group over the course of a semester or a year, students will typically fall into different roles. You might have one person serve as a developer, another as a project manager, still another as a designer. But I worried after a conversation with Mackenzie Brooks that roles delineated in this way would mean one person waiting around for weeks for a partner to finish before they could even start.

What I finally landed upon was a plan to break the class into small groups of four to five students. Rather than explicitly assign clear roles, I wanted each person to contribute to every stage of the project. That way, each person would be able to demonstrate facility with each stage of the data production process as opposed to explicit mastery of any one phase. For each week, students had two assignments: a group deliverable as well as an individual reflection. One week the groups produced their metadata schema. For another, they turned in their raw data. And as they moved through these milestones, students also shared back individual reflections where they described their individual contributions to the work.

Beyond the assignments, I also needed to develop a new way for managing class work time for multiple groups. In my library fellowships, it’s very common for us to pivot at a certain time to pure group work for a number of sessions. The students decide what we need to do on a day-to-day basis, and conversation is limited to setting an agenda and then executing that plan. We’ll typically have several weeks of the calendar that are empty. In trying to adapt this structure to the undergraduate context, I’ve implemented a series of strategies from agile project development I learned from Ronda Grizzle, our expert project management and software training specialist in the Scholars’ Lab. This framework provides both a structure for each class meeting as well as a tangible experience the students can take away. We’re building every class around a series of scrums and debriefs.

If you’re not familiar, the term scrum comes from rugby, and it refers to the moment when all the players lock arms over the ball, try to gain possession of it, and attempt to move it forward across the field. It also is a term from the agile development framework that typically refers to a moderated set of practices used to facilitate project updates and agenda setting. Typically, as I’ve seen them, a scrum is a daily practice with specific time constraints and particular questions meant to be answered. At the beginning of a meeting, each person will get one minute of time to answer three questions about their work. The practice allows you to get stuff on the table for your group without spending a lot of time falling into the weeds such that you preserve actual work time. This practice is especially helpful with humanities scholars, as they can easily talk about questions so long that you run out of time before ever working. The first time you scrum, it’s almost always the case that people will run out of time, but it teaches you to move very quickly through updates. You get a quick sense of what the next state of work will be as well as what needs larger discussion.

I settled upon a modified scrumming practice for my class that incorporated both individual and group scrums. We had the same setup every day:

• Start of class scrums (5-10 minutes):
  • Within small groups, 1 minute for each person to answer three questions:
    • What have I done?
    • What is next for me?
    • What do I need from somebody else?
  • As a class, 1 minute for a representative from each group to give a project update:
    • Where is your group at?
    • What problems are you running into?
• Bulk of class time (approximately 60 minutes)
  • Work time within groups
    • I float to answer questions and help troubleshoot
• End of session debrief (5 minutes)
  • As a class, 1 minute for a representative from each group to share:
    • What did you do?
    • What is next for your group?

I brought scrums into my class as a way to provide structure to the work. They offered a way to bring people into the room and establish a ritual to mark the beginning of class as serious work—not time that could be blown off. The practice also helped students determine how they would use their time with each other. But I also wanted to use a modified scrum process to make sure the groups knew what other groups were doing. What lessons were they learning? What problems were they were running into? In this way, hopefully, the back half of the course would come to be about more than just their own group’s work but also about the larger journey the class as a whole was taking through the material. The kinds of projects that groups are working on vary broadly: video games, food and recipes, museum collections, and macroeconomic data. The groups are all dealing with similar kinds of challenges, though, and scrums have offered a good way to update each other and share advice. The practice has worked well for my purposes, and I will use it to help facilitate group work in the future.

What follows is material drawn from a larger book project I’m working on about an approach to digital humanities pedagogy that intersects with administrative policy to work towards a more equitable landscape for higher education. I’ll be blogging pieces of it as I go, so stay tuned for more related work in the future. Keep in mind, though, that I will likely be blogging about other topics intermittently as well. You can find book-related posts here. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

UVA Reveal works to understand institutional legacies. The app is as an attempt by students to re-narrativize the stories the university tells about itself, its public spaces, and their inhabitants. But, in a way, the augmented reality project remains focused on the present: users must travel to the specific locations on campus in order to trigger the interactive context that troubles the historical narrative. A subsequent student project would go further, attempting to understand UVA’s relationship to physical space as a contested interplay of power and economics. For the 2019-2020 Praxis cohort, the central animating question was ostensibly quite simple: how much land does the university own, anyway? Finding the answer to this seemingly straightforward question required an immense amount of work: the students were forced to dive deep into the archives to negotiate a vast web of interrelated business entities acting on behalf of the university. The driving spirit for the digital project was clear: the students wanted to know their university in ways that were not immediately obvious.

As with UVA Reveal, the origin story for the project put together by the 2019-2020 Praxis cohort is one of the staff offering one direction and students choosing another. The goal of the Praxis assignments at this time was for students to shape a digital project of their own design, but over the years our Lab staff determined that students needed some degree of guidance in coming to these topics. Asking an interdisciplinary cohort with no prior association with one another—or background in digital humanities—to develop a project from scratch frequently brought frustration for the students who earnestly wanted to complete the task but lacked the tools to do so. The UVA Reveal cohort, for example, was given much more latitude to decide their topic but struggled for some time to bring their project into focus. For the 2019-2020 cohort year, the staff decided to offer two constraints:

• The students would be given a specific dataset to work with containing clear research questions, but the particular exploration of these questions would be left to the students.
• The students would be paired with a stakeholder within the library who could help give context for the work.

For this year’s cohort, the Lab provided the students with a set of ARCGIS datasets and map layers for UVA real estate acquisitions in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. As a part of the project, they engaged with Rebecca Cooper Coleman, UVA’s Librarian for Architecture and Co-PI for an initiative funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to develop an equity atlas, a “data and policy tool for leaders and advocates to advance a more equitable community while helping citizens hold decision-makers accountable” (Association of Research Libraries 2023). The Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas and the associated dataset provided some semblance of direction for the student work, broad research questions within which the project would take place. All the same, the staff left these connections largely implied, ready to be pursued or discarded as the students saw fit. It was the students themselves who chose to focus on transparency as a core principle and research topic in ways the staff could not have predicted while designing the assignment constraints.

The result of this work was Land and Legacy, a project that critiques the University of Virginia’s real estate acquisitions since the 1980s by contrasting the university’s public narratives about being a good neighbor with the negative impact of this expansion on the surrounding local communities. As with any good humanities project, Land and Legacy quickly pushed beyond the limitations staff tried to impose on it. The one dataset provided to the students quickly took them to others. Even as they tried to scope their work down, the students could not help but be led on an odyssey through the archives. The project’s data usage page describes a range of different sources including newspapers, meeting minutes, local open datasets, institutional websites, tax documents, architects’ plans, and more (“Our Data” 2020). Even as the project sought to explore how UVA’s relentless real estate acquisitions affected the local community, they first found themselves pressed to understand what those acquisitions were and how the university organized itself on a fundamental level.

Land and Legacy’s central intervention was to illustrate visually and narratively the complicated history of the university’s reach. Doing so required the students to piece together a contested history of land acquisition that spanned centuries, involved countless university and local actors, and revealed a range of dispositions towards the land, the locality, and the legacy of the university. The University of Virginia’s cornerstone was not laid until 1817, and its founding is typically dated to 1819. But Land and Legacy actually dates the beginning of the university’s sprawling growth much earlier with the theft of land from the Monacan Indian Nation (Figure 1):

The University’s physical presence in the landscape began in the early 19th century with the acquisition of two parcels of land: 43 ¾ acres that would become the Academical Village and 153 acres that included Lewis and Observatory Mountains. Although these parcels were purchased from Virginia farmers, this land originally belonged to the Monacan Indian Nation. European settlers had displaced the Monacans from Charlottesville and Albemarle County by the 1750s, but they still traveled to important ancestral sites in the area. For instance, in his Notes on the State of Virginia Thomas Jefferson recalled seeing a group of Native Americans, presumed to be Monacan, near his home at Monticello to grieve at a burial mound that he later excavated. (“Foundations” 2020).

It is one thing to offer a land acknowledgement at the beginning of University meetings. It is quite another to spatially visualize the University’s long history of colonialism alongside its contemporary rhetoric about community. This long history can be difficult to conceptualize, so Land and Legacy opens with a gif illustrating the various land acquisitions.

Figure 1: Screenshot of animated spatial visualization from Land and Legacy project depicting real estate acquisition by the University of Virginia over time. This screenshot illustrates the status of UVA-related lands as of 1754.

Figure 2: Screenshot of animated spatial visualization from Land and Legacy project depicting real estate acquisition by the University of Virginia over time. This screenshot illustrates the status of UVA-related lands as of 1980.

Figure 3: Screenshot of animated spatial visualization from Land and Legacy project depicting real estate acquisition by the University of Virginia over time. This screenshot illustrates the status of UVA-related lands as of 2020.

Land and Legacy focuses, in particular, on the period since the 1980s, which saw the university’s major efforts to be viewed as the premier American public university. As illustrated by the project’s animated spatial visualization, the university’s ambition was matched with an explosion of construction and land acquisition (Figures 2 and 3). The project goes to great lengths to show how this rapid development was contested, a source of tension between the university and its surrounding community. Local groups pushed back on these land grabs even as, importantly, they struggled to understand their exact nature.

The university’s real estate holdings are opaque by design. The students found it difficult to determine exactly what purchases the institution had made, in large part due to the complicated ways in which universities manage their dealings. As described on the Land and Legacy “Foundations” essay: “Since 1986, UVA’s real estate activities have been manage by a subsidiary, nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation: the UVA Real Estate Foundation (UVREF), later incorporated as the UVA Foundation (UVAF)” (2020). The University used these legally distinct entities to manage their financial and physical growth, but, as the students found in the archives, “local residents have not always perceived them as distinct entities” (“Foundations” 2020). Clarifying this relationship and understanding the nature of the UVA Foundation became one of the main challenges of the project. The project started out with the goal of analyzing and critiquing real estate practices, but it wound up simplifying its aims considerably: just helping anyone understand this messy history was an end in itself. Transparency, alone, proved to be both worthwhile and immensely difficult. Land and Legacy started with a dataset about the university, but it developed into an attempt to demystify the nature of that institution, which had intentionally set up a structure that alienated its communities from understanding its actions. In this way, the pedagogy and practice at the core of the project aimed to reintroduce transparency to an overly opaque system, a value that ran in direct opposition to institutional goals. While UVA claimed to be great and good, a knowable member of the community, it was, in fact, acting in direct opposition to those values and doing so with an obfuscating cloud of bureaucracy.

Both Land and Legacy and UVA Reveal point to a pervasive interest among students in understanding and critiquing their spaces of teaching and learning. Rather than accepting manufactured institutional narratives, students hunger to develop their own, authentic ways of knowing their own communities. As Boggs notes, all digital humanities work is an effort to build containers for stories. These students saw the institutional containers presented to them as black boxes, impossibly complex and obscure entities refused to be known. They told one story but held another inside. These students, instead, helped to develop their own, transparent containers, ones that explained rather than obscured. The Scholars’ Lab staff partnered with its students in the service of re-knowing their educational organizations, critiquing them, and reshaping them. In the process they helped to develop a pedagogy of transparency. Such a pedagogy is one that refuses institutions attempts to obscure their institutional histories. Instead, a pedagogy of transparency co-creates new ways for students, teachers, and communities to re-examine the spaces they inhabit. It makes space for new ways of knowing, teaching, and learning.

As I have illustrated, the projects developed by the Praxis Program have always come into being through a complicated give and take with students, responsive to their needs and interests. This approach to curricular design is, itself, an attempt to be transparent about our own processes. In the staff charter, the statement of values that outlines the goals of the program, we write: “we will constantly re-evaluate the curriculum with an eye to building the best experience for the students” (2021). The program is not one in which we share a fixed syllabus at the beginning of the course and then unflinchingly march through it week by week. The curricula shared at the beginning of each semester often undergo tweaks based on student needs and feedback that result in new workshops, new modules, and new assignments. On a larger level, the program today would look unrecognizable to someone who was a member of the first two cohorts.¹ When the program began, each cohort worked on a single collaborative project for the entire year. Now, instead, we incorporate a small, low-stakes project that takes place over the course of a month in the service of offering more concentrated training in project design and management, pedagogy, and community building. All of these changes have been documented on the Scholars’ Lab blog, where I, as Head of Student Programs, make a case for the changes to the program. These readings are later re-incorporated into the curriculum to expose students to the decisions made on their behalf.² Put another way, we attempt to design and redesign the program’s pedagogy in public, in all of its administrative messiness. The hope is that this results in an experience that illuminates for students the possibilities—as well as the limitations—for the teaching administrator in the neoliberal university. It also helps to frame our work as always in process, always responsive to their needs. A transparent carrier bag—not a black box.

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As this chapter has argued, institutions have pedagogies embedded within them, complicated networks of policies, expectations, and norms that give a gravitational pull towards specific kinds of educational experiences. The first step to challenging these pedagogies is to see them for what they are, to note their affects on our teaching and learning environments and how we might push back. Whether with budgets or with student projects, the teaching administrator is well positioned to help render legible those processes that might otherwise appear opaque to its community. In doing so, we can shape a new relationship with our students, one in which we begin to learn more about our institutions and the challenges they face for the work we want to do. We can meet the limited knowability and opacity of the neoliberal university with a pedagogy that champions transparency, that draws students further into the gears of their education without sweeping them up within them.

Teaching in the face of an inimical institution is immensely challenging work. The embedded pedagogies have a current to them, and teaching in your own way can feel like swimming upstream. The hope is that this book will offer a roadmap and guidebook for doing so. When met with bolted-down desks, we can instead sit in them facing the opposite directions and shape new communities despite the institutional pressure. This work can be transformative and invigorating, but it can also be fraught and painful. Those desks are rigid—they attempt to enforce a particular worldview on those who sit within them. Perhaps most challenging, they appear to be passive companions in teaching and learning rather than the active agents that they are. The classroom designed in this way purports to be a flat space, a container that we can fill with whatever educational experiences we desire. But as we have seen, the desks have an agenda. And the university is anything but indifferent to the kinds of education, politics, and community members it allows into its walls. Our first entry point for pushing back on institutional pedagogies was to counter their limited knowability with transparency. In meeting the active pedagogical will of the university, we introduce the second component of the stories neoliberal universities tell about themselves that directly challenges our ability to teach justly.

Universities claim to be neutral. They are anything but, and this facade of neutrality directly undermines our ability to educate.

Boggs, Jeremy. 2018. “A Carrier Bag Theory for Digital Humanities.” Accessed July 31, 2024. https://jeremyboggs.net/carrier-bag-theory-for-dh/.

Scholars’ Lab and Praxis Program. 2021. “Praxis Program Charter.” Accessed July 30, 2024. https://praxis.scholarslab.org/praxis-program-charter/.

Scholars’ Lab and Praxis Program. 2018. “UVa Reveal.” UVa Reveal. Accessed May 24, 2024. http://reveal.scholarslab.org/about/.

Land and Legacy, Praxis Program, University of Virginia Library, Scholars’ Lab, last modified July 31, 2020, https://landandlegacy.scholarslab.org/.

“Foundations.” Land and Legacy, Praxis Program, University of Virginia Library, Scholars’ Lab, last modified July 31, 2020, https://landandlegacy.scholarslab.org/story-1-foundations.html.

Virginia Equity Center. n.d. Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas. Accessed May 24, 2024. https://www.virginiaequitycenter.org/charlottesville-regional-equity-atlas.

Association of Research Libraries. 2023. “University of Virginia Library—Community-Led Open Data to Address Inequality.” Association of Research Libraries (blog). Accessed May 24, 2024. https://www.arl.org/university-of-virginia-library-community-led-open-data-to-address-inequality/.

Walsh, Brandon. 2023. “The Shape of DH Work” July 3. Scholars’ Lab (blog). Accessed July 30, 2024. https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/the-shape-of-dh-work/

I recently gave a workshop for the US Latino Digital Humanities Center (USLDH) at the University of Houston on introductory text analysis concepts and Voyant. I don’t have a full talk to share since it was a workshop, but I still thought I would share some of the things that worked especially well about the session. USLDH recorded the talk and made it available here, and you can find the link to my materials here.

I had a teaching observation when I was graduate student, and one comment always stuck with me. My director told me, “this was all great but don’t be afraid to tell them what you think.” I’ve written elsewhere about how I tend to approach classroom facilitation as a process of generating questions that the group explores together. This orientation is sometimes in conflict with DH instruction, where you have information that simply needs to be conveyed. I had this tension in mind while planning the USLDH event. It was billed as a workshop, and I think there’s nothing worse than attending a workshop only to find that it’s really a lecture. How to balance the generic expectations with the knowledge that I had stuff I needed to put on the table? As an attempt to thread this needle, I structured the three-part session around a range of different kinds of teaching moves: some lecture, yes, but also a mix of open discussion, case study, quiz questions, and free play with a tool.

The broad idea behind the workshop entitled “Book Number Graph” is that people come to text analysis consultations with all varieties of materials and a range of research questions. Most often, my first step in consulting with them is to ask them to slow down and think more deeply about their base assumptions. Do they actually have their materials in a usable form? Is it possible to ask the questions they are interested in using the evidence they have? I built the workshop discussions as though I was prepping participants to field these kinds of research consultations, as though they were digital humanities librarians.

First, the “book” portion of the workshop featured a short introduction to different kinds of materials, exploring how format matters in the context of digital text analysis. We discussed how a book is distinct from an eBook is distinct from a web material, and how all of these are really distinct from the kind of plain text document that we likely want to get to. I used here a hypothetical person who shows up in my office and says, “Oh yeah, I have my texts. I’m ready to work on them with you. Can you help me?” And they will hand me either a stack of books or a series of PDF files that haven’t been OCR’d. I introduced workshop participants to the kinds of technical and legal challenges that arise in such situations so that they’ll be able to better assess the feasibility of their own plans. This all built to a pair of case studies where I asked the participants how they would respond if a researcher came to them with questions for their own project.

With these case studies, I hoped to give participants a glimpse into the real-world kinds of conversations that I have as a DH library worker. For the most part, consultations begin with my asking a range of questions of the researcher so as to help them get new clarity on the actual feasibility of what they want to do. I hoped for the participants to question the formats of the materials for these hypothetical researchers and point out a range of ethical and legal concerns. Hopefully they would be able to ask these questions of their own work as well.

For the second section of the workshop entitled “number,” I gave participants an introduction to thinking about evidence and analysis, distinguishing between what computers can do and the kinds of things that readers are good at. Broadly speaking, computers are concrete. They know what’s on the page and not what’s outside of it. Researchers in text analysis need to point software to the specific things that they are interested in on the page and supplement this information with any other information outside of the text. Complicated text analysis research questions have at their core really simplistic, concrete, measurable things on the page. You are pointing to a thing and counting. For examples of the things that computers can readily be told to examine, we discussed structural information, proximity, the order of words, frequency of words, case, and more.

To practice this, I adapted an exercise that I was first introduced to by Mackenzie Brooks but that was developed by librarians at the University of Michigan. To introduce TEI, the activity asks students to draw boxes around a printed poem as a way to identify the different structural elements that you would want to encode. For my purposes, I put a Langston Hughes poem on the Zoom screen and asked participants to annotate it with all sorts of information that they thought a computer would be capable of identifying.

The result was a beautiful tapestry of underlines and squiggles. Some of the choices would be very easy for a computer: word frequency, line breaks, structural elements. But we also talked about more challenging cases. We know the poem’s title because we expect to see it in a certain place on the page. The computer might be pointed to this this by flagging the line that comes three after three blank line breaks. But what if this isn’t always the case? It was good practice in how to distinguish between the information we bring to the text and what is actually available on the page. We talked about the challenges in trying to bridge the gap between what computers can do and what humans can do, to try and think through how a complicated intellectual question might take shape in a computationally legible form.

Wrapping all this together, I introduced what I called the M.E. test for text analysis research. To have a successful text analysis project you have to have…

• Materials that are…
  • appropriate to your questions and
  • accessible for your purposes.

You must also have

• Evidence that is…
  • identifiable to you as an expression of your research question and
  • legible to the tool you are using.

Materials and Evidence. M and E.

M.E.

The next time you sit down to do text analysis, ask yourself, “What makes a good question? M.E. Me!”

Painfully earnest? Sure! But this was a nice little way for me to tie in what I often joke is my most frequently requested consultation topic: imposter syndrome. The M.E. question is both a test for deciding whether or not a text analysis research question is appropriate, but it is also a call for you to recognize that you can handle this work. A nice little way for you to give yourself a pump up, because I believe that these methods belong to anyone. Anyone can handle these kinds of consultations. They’re more art than science at the level we are discussing. You just have to know the correct way to approach them. Deep expertise can come later. If you are too intimidated to get started you will never get there.

From there, I closed the “number” portion of the workshop with a couple more case study prompts. I asked participants to respond to two more scenarios as though someone had just walked into their office with an idea they wanted to try out.

The hypothetical consultation prompts involved, first, an interest in finding the most important characters in a particular Shakespeare play and, second, an interest in space and place in southeastern American literature. In each case, we discussed questions of format and copyright, but we also got to some fairly high-level questions about what kinds of evidence you could use to discuss the research questions. For importance, participants proposed measuring either number of lines for each character or who happens to be onstage for the greatest amount of time. For space and place, we discussed counting place names using Python (a nice way to introduce concepts related to Named Entity Recognition). In each case, my goal was to give the workshop participants a sense of how to test and develop their own research questions by walking them through the process I use when talking with researchers asking for a fresh consultation.

USLDH has shared the recording link, so feel free to check out the recording if you want to see the activities in action. The slides can be found here. And never forget the most important thing to ask yourself the next time you’re working on a text analysis problem:

“What makes a good research question? Me.”

I recently published the third in a series of excerpts on my ongoing book project. This third piece closes out the first section of the first chapter, which introduces the principle argument of the book: institutions have pedagogies embedded within them that we can work to change in our teaching and administration. This first section also introduces the structure of the book, which draws upon what I see as the five components of the institutional narratives neoliberal universities tell about themselves. Universities aspire to be:

• Knowable
• Neutral
• Intellectual
• Prestigious
• Forward-looking

Each chapter takes one of these values, critiques its relationship to teaching and learning, and offers pedagogical and administrative ways to push back from the stance of the digital humanities practitioner. The material so far comes from the first chapter on knowability. Normally, I would push ahead and post the next excerpt from the project, but that material has actually already been published as “The Pedagogy of Digital Humanities Budgets” by The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. So please check out that article if you want to see what comes next in the project. You can find a full listing of current material from the book here. Since what would otherwise be the next pieces are already out there, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the process so far, what it’s been like to blog the book in public and what comes next.

Structure - Thinking about the book as a thing that would live online first has helped the drafting process feel a lot more doable. The structure of the completed project unfolded fairly naturally out of its component parts. The book has five chapters. Each of these chapters has three sections. And each section has three subsections. These subsections are roughly the length and shape of blog posts. I can write a blog post. And, if I can write a lot of them, I can write a book. While things will undoubtedly change, this framing makes things feel possible for now.

Continuity - One challenge in presenting this work online in this particular way, piecemeal over many months, is that the sections appear to the public in disconnected ways. At the end of the day, the book is not the only thing I am working on. I started teaching a new course this semester, and people immediately wrote to me asking for reflections on it as I went. I have other general reflections on DH that I want to share. I could really only focus on the one project if I wanted to keep the conversation here consistent, and I opted not to do so. This meant that some weeks on my blog I talked about my course while others I wrote about my book project. Connecting these various threads and managing these conversations is a challenge, but I am happy with the choice I made because it encouraged me to keep writing. After all, the main person reading all this is…me. It’s got to serve this audience first before it reaches anyone else. And this plan is consistent with my general approach to blogging, which recognizes my writing here as primarily about building out the things I needed to read during the previous months and years. Letters to the past, as it were.

Tempo - Instead of a consistent topic, I aimed to prioritize the mere fact of writing. At all. In some form. About whatever felt the most doable that day. I sacrificed a steady subject in favor of weekly posts, and I think this has been a worthwhile exchange. Writing is a muscle. Blogging, similarly, becomes easier the more you do it. It’s like cross-training. Words will come a bit easier to the book project when I turn back to it if I am regularly practicing writing on a range of topics, genres, and contexts. A steady stream of writing is the thing for me, even if not always going in the same direction.

Blogging as editing - I’ve found blogging to be helpful as a final stage in the preliminary drafting process. I wrote the whole first chapter at once before the fall semester, and various circumstances pulled me away from it in the following months. Returning to blogging has meant revisiting material with fresh eyes what I haven’t looked at in a while. It’s been a welcome opportunity to polish pieces up for readers in a way that I would not otherwise do while working on a larger project. Even if no one reads them the blog posts are still worth sharing. They’re a sign to myself that the project is moving forward. Personal accountability.

What Will Change - Now that I’m several posts in I’ve started thinking about how the material will need to be changed and reframed as part of a larger project instead of as a series of posts. Most immediately, I’m struck by how different the section published in JITP on budget pedagogy feels. It was polished into—and feels like—a standalone piece of work. At the very least, I will need to do some thinking about how to make the structure of that section feel in keeping with the rest of the material in other chapters. That’s good work to do, but it is still labor. Something that I can only do later when the whole thing is in view.

That’s it for now. Thanks to folks who have offered feedback thus far—always happy to hear what people have to say. I’m looking forward to sharing more of the book as it comes together in the coming weeks and to having more time for writing this summer.

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

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

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

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

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

A “DH enough” workshop is…

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

I just gave a workshop online for Dr. Jennifer Isasi’s course at Pennsylvania State University. Normally I would share the text I used for events like these, but since it was a workshop I don’t quite have something formal to share in that mode. The abstract and title I provided for the event can give some flavor of things:

Organized Chaos: Humanities Data and Cleaning with a Purpose

This workshop covers the theory and practice of preparing humanities data for analysis. Even while being notoriously difficult to work with, we will explore how the mess of humanities data is actually what conveys a wealth of information. We will discuss the affordances and tradeoffs inherent in data cleaning with the humanities, when it is worth doing, and when it is worth maintaining a sense of organized chaos that our materials demand. Practical discussions will include working with dates, irregular spellings, and data organization. We will use OpenRefine to practice working with data and use examples drawn from the real world. Participants should come to the workshop with OpenRefine installed on their computer.

So basically, the broad point of the workshop was that data cleaning in a humanities context can best be thought of as a kind of organizing of many possibilities, as living with chaos rather than trying to eliminate it. Your data will never really be “clean,” per se, no matter how much you try to pursue those ends. And in trying to impose an order that does not exist in reality you eliminate a lot of important cultural and linguistic differences that we as humanists care about quite a bit. All of this was a layer over what was essentially a workshop on Open Refine, a fabulous open-source power tool for working with messy data. You can find my slides at this link.

While I don’t have a full text worth sharing, I do think that there is one piece of the workshop that worked especially well that I wanted to document. As is often the case, at the beginning of our time participants introduced themselves to me and to each other. Dr. Isasi helped fill in gaps about who the people in the room were, where they were from, and what they work on. Dr. Isasi then read my bio, which is always an uncomfortable moment for me. I never quite know what to do while someone is talking about me in this way or how to transition gracefully from that discomfort to the topic at hand. This time I decided to sit in that space a bit longer and tie it directly to what we were doing by having the first phase of the workshop address what I called my “personal data story.”

I began by sharing an internet search for my name and asking students what they made of it:

If you were alive at a certain point in the 1990’s, you likely already know the answer to what you are looking at. I share my name with a particular character from the Beverly Hills, 90210, a popular TV show that premiered in 1990. I have been haunted by this data point my whole life. My earliest memory of it was in kindergarten, but as recently as last year someone started laughing the moment I spoke my name while trying to book a doctor’s appointment [Update: between drafting and publishing this post a faculty member from a different department pointed the connection out again!]. The workshop participants very quickly recognized that there was more than one Brandon Walsh out there in this particular dataset. I pointed to this as an example of how messy data can be when we’re dealing with people. How do you represent these differences in a data set? It can get complicated quite quickly. I also took the moment to point out that I’m slowly creeping up in the search engine optimization. If you zoom out several times, I finally show up at the very bottom of the page. I’m coming for you, Brandon Walsh.

As the next stage of my data journey, I asked participants to consider a particular piece of mail that I’ve been getting my whole life.

My whole life I’ve been getting mail to a particular person named Brandonm, all one word, from modeling agencies asking me to come in and do runway shoots. It started when I was in elementary school. Every few years I will I think I’m finally free and forget about it. But then I’ll get a fresh call asking me to come in. I asked the participants to guess what they thought might be going on. They immediately had the same thought I did, as someone asked, “does your middle name start with the letter M?” It does indeed. My middle name is Michael, and I would be willing to bet money that someone accidentally merged two columns in a table at some point. Brandon M Walsh became Brandonm Walsh, and a star was born. In the context of this particular workshop, I found it interesting for the way in which this story shows that data errors can follow you your whole life whether you realize it or not.

For the last stage of my data journey, I gave the participants a more technical exercise. Not about me, per se, but rather about a particular kind of data problem that was quite pivotal to one stage of my life.

I presented five pieces of data to the participants and asked them a series of questions:

• What are we looking at? What are these things in front of you?
• What’s going on with them?
• And then, if you cared about such things, how would you correct them?

The data in front of the group, of course, consisted of dates in a variety of different formats. These are the sort of thing that can be quite confusing, especially if you’re talking to people from different geographic locations, different cultural contexts. The most confusing are the two formats that interchange day and month but keep the year in the same place. The participants described how they would first decide on a standard and then convert each date one at a time to conform by moving digits around and editing the punctuation separating things. I then revealed the trick of this prompt: this was actually a real-life job interview question I got when I was interviewing for a programming position at the University of Virginia Library. And I think it’s a really good example of a technical question that one might get in an interview. You have to think through a problem, talk about how you would solve it, and display a lot of technical understanding. But you don’t have to actually write any code on a whiteboard. If I recall correctly, my own response was “these are dates that are formatted incorrectly, and I would start by using regular expressions to try and work out how to massage the dates into a particular format. Otherwise it can make data processing and computational work quite challenging, if not possible.”

I use this technical question all the time in mock interviews because it’s easy to remember. In the context of this particular workshop, it also served as a good pivot from the individual, personal stakes of data management to the ways the same questions might arise in a real-world professional context. At this point, the participants quite wisely began to make connections to Katie Rawson and Trevor Muñoz’s piece entitled “Against Cleaning.” In that piece, Rawson and Muñoz discuss the need to preserve the cultural context of data. Rather than cleaning away difference, the students suggested that we actually add a second column for the new, cleaned data fields as we work through them. In this way, we would preserve the original information while also gaining a new set of material that we could use for computation. Adding data rather than taking away difference.

There’s more in the slides if you’re interested. The workshop drew heavily on the work that I have been doing in my class this semester on “Data for the Rest of Us.” I’ll keep sharing more about that work in the future.

What follows is material drawn from a larger book project I’m working on about an approach to digital humanities pedagogy that intersects with administrative policy to work towards a more equitable landscape for higher education. I’ll be blogging pieces of it as I go, so stay tuned for more related work in the future. Keep in mind, though, that I will likely be blogging about other topics intermittently as well. You can find book-related posts here. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

Every institution has embedded pedagogies—tacit structures, policies, and norms that govern the possibilities for teaching and learning. The curriculum is only one place in which teaching happens in higher education: every interaction is also a form of teaching, whether it pertains to a syllabus, a budget, or the use of campus space. In other words, the classroom is inseparable from the infrastructure that supports its work. The teacher struggling to find resources for her students, for example, cannot help but have her work affected by the threat of budget cuts. As sociologist Jessica Calarco and others have argued, students are often subject to a hidden curriculum of expectations and practices that reinforce social inequalities. I build on this work by offering a theory of the embedded pedagogies of institutions, those interrelated sets of strictures that pressure instructors to adopt particular pedagogies regardless of their own personal inclination. The book argues that, while these embedded pedagogies could feasibly support effective teaching, they most often inhibit justice-oriented approaches to education. 

Educators are under threat, struggling with institutional instability, scarcity, and political attacks on their work. This book offers guidance for instructors struggling with how to teach effectively in such uncertain and hostile environments, whether that teaching takes place in the classroom or elsewhere. With digital humanities pedagogy at US-based institutions of higher education as a frame and focus, I argue for an approach to teaching and learning that seeks to build more just and equitable institutions while also offering strategies to endure the negative ways these structures influence our work. This book offers a theory and practice of DH pedagogy by speaking from the position of a practitioner tasked with both teaching and administrating in the context of a public university in crisis. Teaching administrators, as I call people in roles like mine, are uniquely positioned to lay bare the pedagogical implications of infrastructural decisions at the same time that they implement a classroom practice that intervenes in their local institution. However, since many of these positions are institutionally unique, term-limited, or one-off, this unique vantage point has not often been formally explored. By focusing specifically on this intersection of teaching and administration, this book offers as much in the way of day-to-day approaches to the DH classroom as it does a far-reaching vision for how our pedagogies can help to bring about a university that is more stable, more sustainable, and more just.

The institutional structures that impact teaching are especially salient for those instructors who work outside departmental silos. For staff who work across departments, the warp and weft of the institutional pedagogy is particularly noticeable because we so regularly come into contact with patrons from across the university. DH pedagogy serves as a useful object of study in this regard, as so much DH teaching takes place in the cracks of the university. As a librarian, I have taught credit-bearing courses as well as one-off workshops, consulted on a graduate certificate in digital humanities as well as mentored students individually. Teaching in these spaces, I argue, reveals the pedagogies operationalized by our institutions for and against our work as teachers. Furthermore, because of its intensely collaborative and cross-disciplinary work, digital humanities teaching frequently forces encounters—and friction—with the university in ways that more narrowly discipline-specific instruction might not. Any instructor is subject to policy. But the librarian providing instruction in digital technology is especially aware of its impact and the ways in which it can be hostile to learning. 

In meeting the limited knowability of the university, we meet the first of the five characteristics that will give this book its structure:

• Knowable
• Neutral
• Intellectual
• Prestigious
• Forward-looking

These characteristics form the basis of the stories that institutions of higher education typically tell about themselves and who they want to be. They form the basis of the neoliberal university and its mode of describing itself. In each case, these values exert power over the kinds of teaching and learning possible in their spaces, often in ways that instructors would not willingly ascribe to. The body of the book centers on the narratives that universities use to frame themselves as bastions of neutrality, intellectualism, and prestige. In each chapter, I critique the ways in which these values impose themselves as pedagogical forces on DH teachers and offer a pair of action-oriented responses, first as an administrator thinking pedagogically and then as a teacher thinking administratively. The result is one part theory, one part lesson plan. One part discussion, one part assignment template. As educators faced with frustrating circumstances, it can be easy to feel disempowered, as though the institution is too large to change, and to turn inwards, narrowly focusing on the day’s lesson plan in order to carry on. I argue, instead, for a renewed view of higher education institutions in familiar terms for teachers. By demystifying and breaking them down as pedagogical systems, teachers can find opportunities for change and create the conditions for our learning communities to thrive.

The book concludes by meditating on the contested futures at the center of university life. Universities often claim to look towards the future while enshrining hyper-conservative institutional values that favor the past and refuse change. As such, I conclude by questioning the futures towards which universities are working. Who do these futures belong to? Our communities? Or a substratum of donors, politicians, and pundits? We cannot afford to treat the classroom as closed off, separate from the broader administrative context that shapes its spaces. By seeing teaching as an extension of policy—and policy, in turn, as a set of pedagogical interventions—educators can co-create a more hopeful future with their communities. Taken together, the book offers a roadmap for DH educators aiming to push their teaching and their institutions towards more just futures for teachers and learners. By rendering visible the pedagogical structures at the core of the university, I hope to empower educators to develop the tools to change them, in and out of the classroom.

For a first foray into the ways in which the teaching administrator may intervene in their own institution, we can meet the university’s limited knowability with a pedagogy of transparency. The first experiences many members of the university community have of their institutions are heavily manufactured. Whether through mailers to prospective students, new faculty orientations, or ongoing marketing and communication campaigns, universities have a vested interest in the careful articulation of themselves as particular kinds of institutions with specific values, processes, and audiences. Despite these broad campaigns to appear known in the public eye, I argue that this knowability is limited by design: universities deliberately obscure their workings from their community members, a fact that can hide the ways in which institutional policies and choices structure the possibilities for learning available to teachers and students. From an administrative standpoint, I first examine budgets as pedagogical technologies¹ that can offer students a vehicle by which they can better understand the infrastructure of their university. Second, from a classroom perspective, I examine digital humanities student projects that challenge the narratives universities share with the public and that attempt to make known their difficult histories. By questioning the received knowability of our institutions in our teaching we can illuminate their effects on our work. By recognizing administrative decisions as pedagogical ones we can recast them on grounds in which teachers might intervene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More snacks soon.

What follows is material drawn from a larger book project I’m working on about an approach to digital humanities pedagogy that intersects with administrative policy to work towards a more equitable landscape for higher education. I’ll be blogging pieces of it as I go, so stay tuned for more related work in the future. Keep in mind, though, that I will likely be blogging about other topics intermittently as well. You can find book-related posts here. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

This is a book about teachers, the labor they take on, and the structures that prevent them doing that work well. Our institutions often define teaching as something that happens in specific spaces, at specific times, and by specific people. In higher education, positions are often described with a common shorthand: “I teach a 2-2” or “I carry a 4-4.” The formulation describes both a calendar distribution as well as the supposed burden of teaching. Once your courses are done—your course load carried—you can get back to work. And the implicit encouragement is to spend less time on teaching and more time on your tenure file. The classroom is a space to be escaped. And when we describe some positions and institutions as teaching-intensive, however true the designation might be, we create boundaries. We suggest that some spaces are for teaching and some not.

Staff positions often distribute identification with the craft of teaching in a similar way. A Teaching and Learning Librarian might explicitly focus on classroom instruction. An Undergraduate Success Librarian might specialize in undergraduate outreach. Some roles might work with patrons directly to answer questions and roles, while others might think of themselves more as back of house and removed from the community. As with faculty positions and their associated teaching responsibilities, the ways we distribute staff labor can suggest separation between those who teach and those who do not. Some are in the classroom, while others might never set foot in it.

But we all teach.

It is understandable that someone without explicit classroom responsibilities might see themselves as disconnected from the act of teaching. But we do ourselves and our students a disservice when we fail to recognize the teaching that takes place across the institution by instructors in a range of different job titles. This book specifically speaks from the point of view of the teaching librarian, in part, because library positions entail a range of types of interaction. In some cases, librarians might design for-credit courses as part of the curriculum. But so much of the work of librarianship takes place in other spaces: reference consultations, collaborations with faculty members, one-on-one mentoring, workshops, one-off instructional sessions, and more. To be a librarian is to dance along the cracks of the institution, engaged in a thousand small teaching acts. Because of this, library perspectives are helpful for illuminating the cross-cutting impact of pedagogical decisions.

In the same way that teaching occurs throughout the university, staff positions like those in the library are useful case studies for discussing the pedagogies of institutions because they are regularly called upon to engage in the infrastructure of the university. Even if their job titles do not contain the word “administrator,” staff positions often make policy decisions that affect others. Digital humanities library positions, in particular, expose the ways in which teaching is an intersection of pedagogy and policy. Throughout this book I use the term teaching administrator to refer to individuals inhabiting such complicated roles in places of higher education. The term refers to those faculty and staff who inhabit administrative roles within their respective institution but also provide instruction in some capacity. I use the term administrator quite liberally here: it refers not only to directors or managers but more broadly to anyone engaged in the inner workings of university infrastructure and making policy decisions for it. Teaching, too, is construed broadly. Teaching takes place throughout the university, in its cracks and its hallways, in all manner of forms. The teaching administrator might direct a center but teach a course periodically. They might be a GIS Specialist who also runs regular workshops. Or they might be a developer engaged in paired programming with a student as part of a project development. Teaching administrators, no matter their specific job title, regularly find themselves implicated in and exerting force upon the various policies and norms that work on the institution and, in so doing, upon their embedded pedagogies.

More specifically, this is a book about all those principles, practices, and structures that intersect in a kind of pedagogy in the institution around them. When a local government reduces its budget, forcing secondary educators to dip into the own bank accounts to pay for classroom supplies—that is an observable act that impacts pedagogy. The material conditions of the classroom are changed based on administrative choices that are removed from the classroom. When the chairs in a public classroom are welded to the floor so as to prevent them from being moved from neatly arranged rows—that is a kind of pedagogy. The decision to bolt chairs to the ground may never have been made with actual instruction in mind, but it nonetheless affects the possibilities for learning in that space. The university encourages the idea that teaching takes place in the classroom, and this mode of thinking is a function of policy, power, and politics. When conversations are not explicitly about teachers and students—a kind of pedagogy is still being enacted. After all, an absence can still be noted and remarked upon. Why aren’t we talking about teaching? What does it say about what we value instead? A pedagogy.

This is a book about administrative choices like these, about the ways in which they help or harm the teachers in their midst. About all the myriad ways in which the work of education is routinely damaged by forces outside the classroom. This book argues that these institutional norms, policies, and structures act as embedded pedagogies that are operationalized for or against teachers and learners. Most often, as in the case of budgets cuts or prescriptive classroom spaces, these institutional pedagogies put teachers on the back foot, forced to teach in ways they might not otherwise do so in part out of a survival instinct. The first step to finding our way to the teaching we want to see in our work is to recognize the obstacles facing that labor, the pedagogies running counter to our own. And it can be especially difficult to notice the things affecting our teaching when they happen far outside the classroom, carried out by those who don’t consider themselves educators. By recasting institutional activities and actors in pedagogical terms, I hope to empower teachers to find their own path to enduring administrative difficulties even as they work to change them. These embedded pedagogies can be especially challenging to work against because the pressures they exert are often invisible to the teachers and learners in their midst. The first tactical decision we can make to counter them is to render them known.

Universities invest vast resources in making themselves known to their students, their communities, and their publics, from marketing to branding, communications to legislative testimony. In the process, though, this knowability is limited by design, as elite universities necessarily want themselves to be only so known, in specific ways, and by particular people. Institutions frequently obscure their actual administration in ways that distance teachers from their core functions. This web of policies, practices, and pressures shape our ability to teach and learn in seen and unseen ways, forming the network of embedded institutional pedagogies. By rendering these opaque practices transparent, we can empower educators to intervene in the forces affecting their ability to do the work of teaching.

In a certain way this book was also my own attempt to chart a pathway to survival in the face of the embedded pedagogies of my own institution. During a period of administrative upheaval at my place of work, blogging became a way for me to vent and reflect about the challenges I found for supporting student work. The audience I found for this writing seemed to be largely people in positions like mine: mid-career digital humanities administrators who had a hand in research, teaching, and administration. Positions like these are sometimes called “alt-ac” for the ways in which they offer a landing for graduate students outside of the traditional faculty path. Alt-ac staff often refer to themselves as scholar practitioners, a phrase that further serves to illuminate the fact that we often see administrative praxis itself as a subject for research and critique in its own right. The term “teaching administrator” is a similar riff, both a description of a hybridized identity and an attempt to instrumentalize it.

In moments of despair I sometimes referred to this manuscript as “the book I’m writing about bullshit and how to deal with it.” Invariably, others would respond with their own, similar frustrations at their own institutions. Embedded pedagogies carry power, in part, because they refuse to be seen for what they are. Writing this text is a first attempt at making legible the relationship between administrative policy and teaching in a way that makes them visible. To describe what I see so others can notice as well. To know and be known. To use the unique position of the teaching administrator to push back on the limited knowability of the institution and render legible its embedded pedagogies.

I’m realizing that if I don’t start combining things I will only ever blog about my class, so here I’m collecting notes on the last two weeks of “Data for the Rest of Us” on data description and collection into a single post. We got into the first real technical skills for the course as the students built out their understanding of the data production pipeline. The goal is for them to build datasets based around their own interests, and we took some real steps in that direction with these units.

We had previously developed a working definition of data, so we began our session on description by reviewing it briefly before quickly introducing metadata. We focused on its use: confusingly, metadata is often called data about data, but it’s more accurately thought of as data attached to other data that gives context, facilitates discovery, and enables analysis. We got to these topics by way of metadata in everyday life. We talked about the metadata categories used on driver’s licenses and by online booksellers to facilitate identification and search. And then we made our way to the Netflix page for a popular movie to show how fuzzy things can get. I pointed out the various objective, quantifiable data (release date, length) and asked the students to discuss the other kinds of qualitative data on the page. We discussed how the genre categories are often a combination of algorithmically generated and hand-selected tags. We talked about controlled vocabulary, introduced the concept of a folksonomy, and discussed the pros and cons of each. Relevant examples were hashtags on Twitter and shelving categories on Goodreads. We ended by discussing metadata standards with a particular focus on Dublin Core.

Then we moved to the actual main activity for the day that actually asked the students to practice creating descriptive metadata. I set out three stacks of materials and asked them in groups to create a spreadsheet describing them. Each set of materials had a few types of items:

• A set of books that were easy to describe
• A zine
• A book by George Eliot
• A book by Haruki Murakami (to introduce concepts of translation)
• One of a handful of especially challenging objects:
  • a CD of regional GIS information
  • the deck-of-cards novel Riding SideSaddle by Miriam Suzanne
  • the Surviving Design Projects deck

I had the students go through and describe their objects in groups using Dublin Core, fielded questions as they came up, and then rotated the unusual objects so that each group had seen them all. I periodically asked discoverability questions that prompted the students to rethink how they were organizing their data such as “which of you has a book by Mary Ann Evans?” The answer, of course, is that they all had a book by George Eliot. We talked about where that information should go in their dataset and discussed the individual choices made by different groups to solve these problems. We then touched on Riding SideSaddle specifically, which gave every group difficulty. Was the novel a genre? A format? A fuzzy concept? Their homework to pull all this together by using Dublin Core to create a small dataset that described 10 different examples of an interest of theirs.

The following class was about data collection, a topic I was especially excited about. We talked broadly about why we want to gather that in the first place:

• It’s not being done!
• To make the world better
• To make something you care about last
• Because otherwise someone else will do it instead/in spite of you

And then we discussed how to do so:

• Surveys
• Crowdsourcing
• Web scraping
• APIs
• Ethics questions and IRB

Throughout, my main takeaway was that there is a wealth of stuff out there not being gathered. Any person can take on the task of gathering ephemeral content, sustaining, and analyzing it. But we have to be careful, ethical, and thoughtful about how we do so.

The centerpiece of the class was a workshop on webscraping as a method for collecting web data. I love teaching students how to scrape because I still remember how earth shattering it felt to learn how to do for the first time. So much stuff out there! And you can reach out to touch and handle it! I don’t assume any programming knowledge in the course, so I looked around for point-and-click scraping tools that might work for a one-off workshop. I landed on webscraper.io, a freemium tool that runs as an extension in Chrome. It’s very slick and powerful for this sort of sandbox work. The free version runs locally in your browser, so not good for full-on, large-scale work. But it requires very little technical knowledge, which made it work well for my purposes. I walked the students through how to scrape the Scholars’ Lab blog, and then I gave them a few other sites to practice with:

• https://books.toscrape.com/
• https://quotes.toscrape.com/
• https://webscraper.io/test-sites

Their homework was to scrape another sandbox example and come up with ideas for real scraping projects. They’ve done great work with these scaffolding assignments that are building towards pitches for their final projects, and I’m excited to see where they go.

A few other reflections:

• I keep having the students make spreadsheets to work with, and every time the students lose five minutes at the beginning of each activity as they create a blank spreadsheet and share their email addresses with each other. I should really create some blank spreadsheets ahead of time for them to reuse. It’s a small thing, but a few minutes each class really add up. And it often feels like the activities have a slow burn to really get going as the students start out engaging in tedious housekeeping.
• One small thing I’ve been interested in this semester: everyone in the class is majoring or minoring in STEM in some way. I’m finding that I have to recalibrate a lot of my expectations. For example, my own background as a teacher of literature makes me want to gear everything towards discussion in a way that feels unusual to the students. But the students are excelling with the hands-on activities and technical work. I’m finding that I need to lecture more than normal, but also that I can go deeper on some of the technical questions than I might otherwise.

As always, the slide decks I’ve put together are all available on the course website.

Crimson Fried

Description

Crimson Fried is a student-authored forum for delicious recipes and contemporary food-related discourse. Contributors are currently participating in an Advanced Studies in Writing seminar at the University of Alabama, entitled “Discourses of Food: Growing, Cooking, Consuming.”

Project Owner(s): Lauren Cardon

Topic: Food, Recipes, Culinary Journalism

Tool: WordPress

Methodology: Digital Pedagogy

Project Status: Active

View Project →

The post Crimson Fried appeared first on Alabama Digital Humanities Center.

Snow is on the ground, but I bundled up to make it to campus for week two of “Data for the Rest of Us,” a semester-long, two-credit introduction to data literacy from a humanities perspective. The general arc of the course takes students through all parts of the data construction pipeline and culminates in small groups developing datasets based around their own interests to share back with the class. This week’s topic was “Data Identification,” which I structured in two segments: theory and practice.

First, we developed a working definition of what qualifies as data. Core to this was the Wikipedia page for data, which offers a neat and actionable summary in the first paragraph: “Data (/ˈdeɪtə/ DAY-tə, US also /ˈdætə/ DAT-ə) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally.”

For our purposes, I simplified this definition as containing three key elements. Data is…

1. A collection
2. of units of meaning
3. that may be interpreted formally.

We discussed each of these pieces separately:

• What counts as a collection? Who is doing the collecting? What does it mean to arrange things together? What structures facilitate collection or collecting? When does data become a dataset?
• What counts as a unit of meaning? What is meaning in the humanities? What are the humanities anyway? What kinds of meaning units have we used in the past week?
• What do we mean by formal interpretation? In this case, I specifically referred to the kinds of interpretation made possible by computers. We talked about what computers are good at, what they are bad at, and the kinds of compromises we might have to make to move between the two. We also talked about the kinds of formal interpretations that are possible: mapping, pattern recognition, averages, counting, and more.

In the second phase of the course, we practiced putting this definition into practice. I presented a series of objects to the students and asked them to apply our definition to it. Did this count as data on our terms? That is…was it a collection of meaningful information that could interpreted quantitatively? Why or why not? What units of information were there that could become data? How would we structure things if we wanted to convert this into data as defined above, such that we could work with it computationally?

We looked at:

• A spreadsheet with stuff in it
• An empty spreadsheet
• An apple watch loaded with personal metrics
• A diagram of cell phone metadata describing call counts, shortest paths between phones data structures
• A bookcase with books in it
• The bible opened to a particular page
• A movie poster
• A set of movie posters
• A Wikipedia page about a Civil War battle
• A spreadsheet full of information about twentieth-century wars
• The front page of Vogue

Some conversations were less lively, but there were some objects that brought out great observations. With the Bible, for example, students noted how certain structural elements like chapter number, verse number, and page number might be interesting units of meaning you might want to preserve. And they got there by noting how you cite material from it. I also talked a bit about the OCR process by way of orienting them towards the path by which a physical object might become a collection of words in a plain text file.

The other “this is not a pipe” moment came when I asked the students to talk about what was contained in a movie poster. After they named all the textual elements of the image, I pulled up the CSS Color Picker tool and talked about how images are also specific organizations of color data. So in addition to the textual information we understood as people, the computer was understanding things on a very visual level and in very quantified terms. This made a nice link to the Robots Reading Vogue project and brought out a discussion of how we can make meaningful interpretations from visual information.

We closed with a short discussion of “On Missing Data Sets” by way of encouraging the students to think about what is out there, what is not, and the kinds of values, systems, and resources that go into deciding what is collected and what is not. For homework, the students have to brainstorm some datasets that don’t exist that they are interested in. I’m, frankly, a little suspicious of how successful they will be at this. It seems very hard to me! But I wanted to throw them the challenge to see how they do. Even if they struggle mightily I think it will be worthwhile.

If I had to run this particular class again, I probably would divide the class into smaller groups to help facilitate discussion. We ultimately got where I wanted to go, but my sense was that the students might have needed a bit more help from me structuring the discussion to get there. I think that might have been accomplished by flipping the format - rather than a group discussion about particular topics and images, I would give each group a set of images and a set of questions to answer about them before we came back to discuss. I’m still finding my way in this class of all STEM students since I’m used to exclusively teaching humanities majors.

Overall, the class discussion sent the students into something of an existential tailspin. Is it data? Yes. But also no. Could be! Depends on how much work you want to put into the question. And much more of that work is to come.

One thing that helped me a lot as a graduate student was the Scholars’ Lab’s willingness to aid me in preparing for job interviews. I had no idea what to expect, so the practice was hugely beneficial for me—as was the coaching in what a mock interview might look like at all. Now that I’m on the other side of the table and offering them myself, I thought I would document how I run mock interviews in case the information is useful for others.

The Process

You’ll first want to assemble 1-2 other interviewers for your mock committee. Part of the strangeness of interviews is the discomfort of managing a one-sided conversation. You’ll want to mirror that for students if you can. Since interview—and, accordingly, mock interview—requests come up very last minute, it’s helpful to know who in your community might be interested in participating in the process. I often find staff are very happy to accommodate these last-minute requests once they have done them once, but giving them a bit of a heads up that they are in the pool of potential interviewers can help encourage participation in the future. I also try to select people likely to be familiar with the kind of job in question, so pre-gathering a pool of participants can help you identify areas in which you could use some help.

Once you have the group together, share the following documents with them ahead of time:

• the position description
• the student’s job materials
• the plan for the mock interview (including questions to ask)

In an ideal world the committee will familiarize themselves with all the relevant materials, though since these things are often scheduled last minute I never assume this is the case. I usually plan to convey a lot of the information verbally when we meet as a committee.

Schedule 90 minutes for the mock interview, though 60 minutes will work if necessary. I typically use this format:

• 10 minutes to brief on the plan for the session and give general interview thoughts
• 60 minutes for the mock interview
• 20 minutes to debrief, give feedback, and discuss

From there you should be ready to carry out the mock. More guidance follows about how to facilitate each specific part of the interview process for your student and your collaborators.

Part 1 of the Interview: Discussion of the Mock Plan

Since most students come to us without much experience at all interviewing, let alone for the subset of alt-ac or DH positions, I typically open with just a few minutes discussing interviews in general. I often note that these types of positions are not quite full academic positions and not quite standard tech jobs. Discussing the posting ahead of time might help to give students some sense of what they can expect, as each position is unique. For example, postdoctoral positions come in many flavors. Some might be more like pre-faculty fellowships, with a heavy focus on personal research in addition to staff responsibilities. Others might be more flavored as pre-staff positions with limited research time. Temper expectations accordingly with a bit of context about the position.

Plan to mirror the format of the interview—phone, Zoom, or in-person. It’s important to practice as though it were the real thing. Each format is awful in ways that can’t be anticipated ahead of time. I typically discuss the particular weirdness of the selected format with the student quite frankly. I have seen pretty shocking things in the background of zoom interviews before. It happens. Best not to be thrown but also keep in mind how you can minimize the risks of such things for yourself.

Many formal searches have HR requirements that require interviewers to ask the same questions of each candidate. These rules carry a lot of ramifications. Committee members might ask follow-up questions, but back and forth conversation is likely to be minimal. Interviewers might aggressively be taking notes while you talk. The committee will typically move person by person down the line and each read questions from a prepared list. These procedures can give the feeling that you have no real rapport with the people in the room because you get little response visually or verbally to much of what you say. All of this is to say: the awkwardness is not you. It is almost always a reflection of the format, where people are trying to figure out who should go when, who should say what, what to do next, etc. Expect it.

I usually close by asking the student to take the mock as seriously as they would a real interview, up to and including trying their best to stumble through answers as they would for the real thing. This means avoiding the temptation to pass on any one question with a response like “well I should probably think about that more.” Just do your best—we can discuss later.

Part 2 of the Interview: The Mock Itself

The bulk of the mock is spent on the actual interview. I usually offer a few options for the mock committee. Questions can be drawn from experience and made up on the spot if they like, but I also provide a bank of examples based around different topics for my colleagues to use if necessary. During the mock, we alternate who is asking questions to mimic the odd experience of interviewing by committee. And we try to draw from across a spectrum of topics. What follows is an example list of questions I have shared with colleagues in the past. Note the first and last questions common to each mock, followed by a series of different categories we can move among at will.

• First Question
  • What drew you to this position? Why this place?
• Position-specific Questions:
  • We are really concerned about X problem local to us. How would you address it? (I often research for five minutes and come up with something ahead of time.)
  • We want to get more undergrads involved. How would you do that?
  • How do you get faculty to collaborate meaningfully with staff?
  • Do you want to use this as a faculty steppingstone (ideally yes or no depending on the position)? How can we help?
• Research Questions
  • Describe your research and what you think of as your primary intervention.
  • How does your dissertation engage in digital humanities?
  • If you had to construct a through line for your work—dissertation through extra-curricular activities—what would it be?
  • What is your next big project? (might be book, a DH project, etc.)
• Teaching Questions
  • What is your vision for pedagogy (especially re: DH) and how we might integrate it here?
  • How might that be translated to a curriculum or minor?
  • How does DH inform your approach to teaching?
  • What DH teaching have you done?
  • If you were to teach a DH course for us what would it be?
  • What kind of support do you need for teaching?
• Community Questions
  • How do you approach collaboration? (push to talk about both technical and project management strategies)
  • What experience do you have with grant writing? One problem we have is that when we write grants then the money ends. What do you do about that? How could you have this position help us (and you) grow?
  • How do you bring students into your program when you’re a multidisciplinary org like ours?
  • How do you build community and visibility on campus?
• Technical Questions
  • We are interested in how you would begin to design a digital archive. Talk us through it.
  • Hand a list of dates that have been formatted differently - What do you see here? Why does this matter? How would you address it? (an actual interview question I had once!)
  • What did you learn from your biggest technical failure?
• Last Question
  • Do you have any questions for us?

I could go on and on, but these are just meant as a starting point. I typically flavor the questions a bit towards the specific job in question. For example, a DH Developer mock might have more technical questions than an interview for a DH Specialist. But I do think giving a broad spectrum of questions, difficulties, and topics can be helpful for students as they try to figure out what they can expect. Often just seeing a big list of example questions like this can be enough to spark a student’s imagination as they continue to prep on their own.

Part 3 of the Interview: The Mock Debrief

Perhaps the most helpful piece of the mock is the feedback that students will receive from the committee. Each person will have their own things that they noticed, but I often find that there are a few points that students might especially need to hear advice on.

Because students often feel like imposters, it can be easy to overwhelm them with feedback. So, we often open debrief sessions simply by encouraging them. They survived. They can do this. Be careful to consider—and frame—your advice in the context of the circumstances. If the actual interview is the next day, a student cannot expect to change their personality wholesale based on your feedback—and advice to do so might just make the student panic. Instead, emphasize those things that feel doable and learnable in the time allotted.

One way to do this is to start with the good that you noticed in the mock performance. Were there specific questions they responded well to? Can you help them to extrapolate that performance to a more generalized approach? Were there responses where they felt particularly light on their feet? It’s easy to focus on the bad, so the students might need your help seeing their strengths. And opening with these moments can offer a healthy frame for the conversation to follow.

Students often lack confidence in their own experiences and their ability to speak from them to the job at hand. I always encourage students to think about their current identities as students as a kind of superpower. Staff and faculty putting together DH programming often have to work hard to reach out to students just like them. They’re living it! It’s just a matter of reframing their own experiences as expertise. What has worked for them in their own DH education? What has not? What lessons could they take elsewhere? They often know more than they might think!

I could offer much more in the way of specific advice that comes up repeatedly for students interviewing for DH jobs: contextualizing themselves as a PhD graduate applying for library work, saying enough for a particular question, saying too much, recognizing those questions that feel like traps, etc. But really I would just trust yourself and your students. In the same way that your students are capable of shining but might need the help to see it, I am confident that someone who has read this far in a post on this topic will have good instincts about what to share with a student about their interview performance.

Share all notes, guides, and questions (including those you didn’t ask) after the fact with the students for their own prep work. Follow up with the student close to the date and afterwards, both to encourage them and to find out how to better mirror the mock format to what they saw in reality.

Last Caveats

Some advice for readers of this post: know your own limits. I only have participated in so many kinds of search committees. Those I have served on primarily pertained to digital humanities, alt-ac, or library jobs. Other institutional contexts and types of positions will look different, in ways I cannot know. When I get a request for something more out of my wheelhouse—like a faculty position or an industry gig—I will try to pull in folks with experience in those contexts. Your university might also have a career center that could offer some advice on certain kinds of positions. Graduate students might not be their usual clientele, though, so they might need some orientation to the kinds of positions as well. I am always transparent with students about the limitations of my own experience and where they might need to look for advice from others.

Even with this final warning to recognize the limitations of your experiences and resources, I would encourage you to think expansively about how you can gather what you do have into useful professional development experiences for students. Students need all the help they can get as they try to apply for a broad range of opportunities in a toxic and unsettled job market. Your students will benefit from the effort you put into helping them prepare, especially for alt-ac or digital humanities positions that might feel a bit unusual for those less familiar with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seanna Viechweg and Brandon Walsh gave a talk on “Speculative Digital Pedagogies” at the 2024 ACH conference online. Texts and rough slides follow.

Seanna - Hello, I’m Seanna Viechweg, a 5th-year PhD English candidate at the University of Virginia.

Brandon - And I’m Brandon Walsh. I’m the Head of Students in the Scholars’ Lab, a digital research center in the University of Virginia Library.

Brandon - Before we get started - a few links for you. You can find the rough text and slides for our presentation at the link here. And if you are interested in the resources we are discussing today you can find them in a zotero library. So if you need access to those materials for any reason please do take a moment to open them in the browser as we’ll be moving away from this slide. But they’ll also persist after the conference is over, so you can rest assured that you’ll have access to them into the future.

This is a talk not about where we are but, instead, where we could be. Practitioners aiming to bring digital humanities (DH) into the classroom often run up against painful realities: what servers we have, what is possible in a semester, what tools are supported on campus. Reality, so often, restrains our pedagogy. This comes through in the writing on digital humanities teaching and learning. Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross has pages upon pages of expert advice on how to deal with the practical logistics of teaching DH—hosting, webstacks, resources to look for on campus, and more. The text is, of course, absolutely essential for these reasons. But we want to push back against this focus on the here and now, on how we situate our digital pedagogies in the contexts in which we live and, instead, take inspiration from André Carrington’s editorial headnote to the “futures” keyword in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: “Rather than preparing students to experience progress on terms that are not of their own making, educational strategies that employ technology to interrogate the unmet needs of the present enable students to reinvent the means and ends of learning in accordance with the futures they want to create.” Our goal in this talk is to further explore what it might mean to bind a teaching practice to the future, to the imagination, to create and practice a speculative digital pedagogy. In doing so, we situate our work in relation to DH projects like Stanford 2025, The DH RPG, and Ivanhoe, which explore the power for teachers and learners to imagine new institutions, new relationships, and new forms of educational praxis. We don’t have much time, but we’ll offer a theory of this work and then some notes towards practice.

This talk is, itself, an exercise in speculative practice. It emerges from our realization that we were each using speculation to mean something quite distinct from the other that might, nonetheless, could be powerful when brought together. My speculative pedagogies draw heavily on the field of critical digital pedagogy, on bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Sean Michael Morris, Jesse Stommel, and many others to create a space where digital humanities students can imagine into being the kinds of professional futures they want to see, a space where they can work beyond the realities of the academic job market through speculative practices in professional development. That is to say, my work tends to operate at the level of the individual who is seeking to imagine their own future within a broader present that tries to constrain this development. These forces, of course, are systems of power that consistently work in unequal ways on our students as they try to navigate them. Our work as practitioners of speculative digital pedagogy is to recognize how individual imagined futures are tied up with larger systems of power and oppression in the present.

Seanna - Our conception of a speculative digital pedagogy is in part shaped by my research background in Caribbean studies, specifically Caribbean SF (with SF being an umbrella term for several subgenres of speculative fiction such as science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror, to name a few). We rely upon definitions of speculative fiction that are entangled with objectives of transformation, namely Caribbeanist, Nicola Hunte’s definition of SF as “concerned with anti-hegemonic practices and marked by its preoccupation with social and political injustice” and as a “progression to a more hopeful treatment of the other”—particularly as they are experienced by persons of the diaspora, transitory, marginalized, and migratory communities (Hunte 17). In the context of digital pedagogy, we want instructors and students’ engagement with speculation and digital methods to be marked by an ethic of solidarity and sensitivity to what others have experienced, are experiencing, and where they are headed.

Drawing from several other scholars in Caribbean and Black DH studies—such as Kaiama L. Glover, Kelly Baker Josephs, Marlene L. Daut, Asha Maharaj, and Patricia Mohammed—we advocate for a speculative pedagogy in the digital sphere that centers consciousness-raising, coalition-building, and alternative epistemologies. Hunte similarly draws attention to the virtual Caribbean cultural community that is created on social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook, underlining key strategies of Caribbean cultural expression and resistance such as the use of Caribbean language, idiom, and iconography. Josephs, Maharaj, and Mohammed’s respective attention to alternative Caribbean storytellers (i.e. photographer Ruddy Roye, comedians Seth ‘Xcel’ Bovell and Senior Gum Boy) and movements such as #LifeinLeggings (a social media campaign highlighting gender-based violence in the Caribbean), emphasize the ways in which global communities can deeply connect with the personal experiences of communities in the Global South; fostering an empathy and awareness to the lived realities of communities they would otherwise lack exposure to. This approach provides students and instructors with innovative frameworks for their speculative practices, especially by encouraging them to draw on diverse perspectives as they might question common or established narratives.

My advocacy for speculative pedagogy arises from my own experiences in graduate school where I attempted to integrate speculative practices into my reading of canonical texts. In analyzing Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, my background in Caribbean studies led me to speculate on the connection prefigured by Bronte’s novel as put in conversation with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea—both a ‘prequel’ and Caribbeanist text that reimagines the colonial backstory of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ in Bronte’s novel. Not only did my professor disagree with my reading but she also publicly reprimanded me for not reading Jane Eyre on ‘its own terms.’ While her stance may seem to simply mirror early literary theory, primarily in New Criticism, my professor failed to realize that my use of speculation between the two novels was one that could have opened up discussions of empire, silencing, and the Caribbean in our (virtual) classroom. Speculation, for me in this case, was about creating a dialogue across time and space; emphasizing the underrepresented experiences of Caribbean women that underpin Bronte’s (canonical) novel. Though initially disheartened by this incident, this experience shaped my teaching objectives as a culturally-relevant and socially-engaged instructor. I now view speculative practices as essential tools to reexamine histories, our present, as well as the canons that persist in many classrooms.

Brandon - Speculation, then, can be a pathway for practitioners of digital pedagogy to re-imagine a more equitable and just future for their communities of teachers and learners, to work beyond a limiting present even as it aims to change it. In the time we have remaining, we wanted to offer a few rapid-fire examples, exercises, and prompts for how you might, today and tomorrow, implement a speculative digital pedagogy in your own practice. They will necessarily be incomplete but will hopefully spark a sense of wonder.

We’ll start broadly, where many begin when thinking of their teaching. When we plan courses we quickly turn to the calendar, the course requirements, the texts to be read, the goals for the course. This is, of course, due to circumstance: we frequently teach to the moment, to the registrar, to the material needs around us. DH syllabi can often feel overloaded and weighted down, in particular, by the pressure to appear DH enough. What if, instead, we resisted the institutional pull to fix things in place? What if, instead, we allowed our syllabi to dwell in possibility?

One way to do so is to draw upon minimal and iterative design practices, a process by which rapid prototyping leads to more refined ideas. What if we applied this to syllabus design? Take a course title and rename it. Rename it again ten times. Twenty. Take the list of assigned authors and redo that list ten times. Twenty. Take your final digital project assignment and iterate through a list of fifty options. While the idea might sound absurd, we would wager that, if you push through, something transformative might happen to your idea of the course, of your students, and the role of your teaching. Allow the iterative pressure to blow the lid of your conception of the classroom. What happens to your sense of the canonical works you must teach? To your sense of what DH is? And what might happen if you kept this feeling alive and invited students into this course as a thing-in-process? As an imaginative, porous space of instability? How can you navigate this together and learn to critique educational practices that purport towards a false sense of fixity?

Seanna - We might also consider the impact our individual assignments and digital projects have on the stories we share with our students, as well as encourage them to tell. My investment in speculation, in what Saidiya Hartman calls “Critical Fabulation,” has been deeply shaped by digital projects that uncover and ethically reimagine diasporic and indigenous histories—such as the “Barbados Runaways Project,” “In the Same Boats,” and the “Dark Laboratory,” to name a few. “In The Same Boats” traces the migratory journeys of significant cultural actors from the Caribbean, wider Americas, Africa, and Europe in the 20th century; both presenting and speculating on spaces in which these actors met, were in conversation, and where they might have influenced each other’s work. The Dark Laboratory challenges conventional narratives about Black and Indigenous history, using digital tools, interactive archives, and storytelling to reimagine hidden histories and alternative futures while the Barbados Runaways Project allows users to interact with digitized and colonial newspapers in Barbados with information about enslaved individuals who escaped slavery. I was fortunate enough to become involved with the Barbados Runaways Project when doing a Fulbright in Barbados as the ads were being digitized. I was invited to lead a workshop that encouraged participants to engage with the question, “How can we use these ads to speculate on their lives with the forms that are given?” One woman used the advertisement of a young woman, with limited description, to work on a screenplay that speculated on acts of resistance that the young woman exhibited under the conditions of enslavement. As an aspiring professor in Black and Caribbean studies, I aim to use speculative digital pedagogy to push students to engage with alternative archives in similar ways—drawing on Hartman’s practice of critical fabulation, by not imposing one narrative on the archive but instead remaining open to one of its many possible realities and histories.

Brandon- And, finally, we might consider the roles we play as educators outside the classroom, as we work with students to plot out their professional futures against the constraining realities of the job market. This is imaginative work, especially when it comes to humanities students learning about digital methods—and careers—for the first time. Our job is so often to help them imagine new ways of being. In contrast, professional CV’s typically read as a record of past accomplishments sanctioned by the academy. For students just starting out, it can be easy to look at one’s own document and struggle to see your own way past the gatekeepers. Instead, we can design activities for our students that help to imagine their professional future into being and then create tools for them to manifest them. Ask your students to sketch the CV of the person they want to be in five years. Ten years. To write a biographical sketch for that person. What do they see in that person that you can help with them right now? In our Lab, this means a focus on blogged public writing as a means to write that future into existence without waiting on a publisher to OK it (though the work often leads to that!). Another example - we have students design and deliver DH workshops on an unfamiliar topic or method with the goal that they will begin to see their own developing relationship to technical expertise as one of possibility. And these workshops are intentionally meant to be creative and low-tech (think network analysis by way of string and rope, or data visualization by way of drawing what you had for breakfast this week) as a means of making professional development into a space of play as opposed to pain. The hope is that these activities bring a student’s provisional future one CV line closer to existence. And they also offer a way for students to find their ways into professional communities without waiting for institutional permission to do so. Because a more just and equitable future will never arrive if we allow institutions to control whose voices they allow to speak within their walls. To quote Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Our pedagogies can be a space to demand better futures for our students.

Seanna - Our examples have attempted to show how speculation can be used to challenge the present, to offer students a space to develop their own futures. But, as the anecdote about my own negative experiences in the classroom shows, imagination can also be a weapon of power. My experience underscores the ethical dimensions of the imagination that have been practiced in academic spaces—begging the question of who has the right to imagine and reinterpret texts, as well as whose perspectives are allowed into academic discourse. It is important to note that when my professor denounced my comment, I was in my first semester of graduate school during the pandemic. I left our Zoom classroom feeling dispirited and questioning my place in academia as an aspiring scholar in Caribbean studies—had I let this experience overcome me, then I would not have been able to begin practicing the speculative pedagogy that we are advocating for in the digital sphere. When speculative practices are dismissed or outright rejected, there is a policing of the imagination that limits new and diverse interpretations and ultimately, reinforces dominant narratives that have excluded marginalized communities, as well as communities outside of academia. To practice speculative digital pedagogy, we must rely on an ethical imagination that acknowledges and values the contributions of those whose knowledges, histories, and day-to-day lives look quite differently than our own. Advocating for a speculative digital pedagogy is about cultivating spaces online and in person where students, instructors, and scholars can freely explore new interpretations, push beyond traditional forms of analysis and discourse, and imagine new lives for themselves in the present. New stories to tell. New futures.

The following is a short, internal lightning talk I gave to UVA Library staff as a part of the Library’s Open Access Week in fall 2024.

Hello! My name is Brandon Walsh, and I’m Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab, one of the twin branches of the UVA Library’s Digital Humanities Center. I was asked to talk a bit about my work in open pedagogy as it intersects with digital humanities, a big baggy field in which we’re constantly confronting what we don’t know and helping others to do the same. From my earliest days working in DH, way back when I was a student myself in the Lab and in the Library, I was drawn to this pedagogical through line. The sheer importance of learning to it all. And this, in turn, has deeply informed how I approach Open with my students.

Always learning. Always teaching.

Together.

My practice of open digital pedagogy is informed by three intertwining principles:

1. Humanities students see themselves as imposters more often than not, particularly when it comes to technical concepts and methods.
2. Students are experts in teaching and learning. There is no one better equipped to explain something complicated than a person who has just learned it.
3. The labor of teaching and learning is often invisible.

My whole career has been about the commingling of these three concepts when it comes to pedagogy—self-confidence, expertise, and visibility.

Open has been the space in which they meet.

Often, this takes the shape of co-authored OER materials with my students. I co-wrote A Humanist’s Cookbook for Natural Language Processing in Python with Rebecca Bultman, then a UVA religious studies PhD. When I was a postdoc at Washington and Lee University, I co-wrote a course book on text analysis with Sarah Horowitz, a faculty collaborator who I was co-teaching with at the time. In each case, the process of co-writing, I hoped, would offer my partners a space to teach themselves something about the topic as well as the technical stack that it took to make it. They learned the terminal, Python, text analysis, markdown, version control, and more. I, in turn, learned to be a better teacher: the materials were much improved by having them involved as partners. The outcomes also presented this labor—the work of teaching and learning—in a space that was available to other learners and also CV-friendly. By positioning these student collaborators as co-writers, co-experts, I hoped to gently affirm that they were more than capable of doing this work. And the work aimed to present this new material in a space that would be more comfortable for humanists, grounding the learning process in public writing and conversation as opposed to pounding away at a programming script.

The production of open materials, by, for, and with students like these has always been a core part of my DH practice. Sometimes, as with these examples, the result explicitly looks like OER, but it’s often just about asking students to write in public about the process of teaching and learning. They teach themselves new techniques, develop workshops for each other, and document the teaching materials for others. My students use open writing as a means of imagining into existence the kind of scholars they want to be on their own terms—they don’t wait for academic publishers to credential them accordingly. The examples I used here were specific to me, but virtually every member of the Scholars’ Lab staff is engaged in this work in some capacity. We want our students to see the Lab and the Library as spaces that see them for who they are—worthy and capable even as they are learning.

All of this is to say that open pedagogy for me means treating students as true partners in the production of scholarly knowledge. They teach me as much as I them, and it happens in public. I’ll close with a quotation by Nicholas Payton, a jazz hero of mine. It’s one I sit with every day.

“There are no great teachers, only great students who give tools to other students.”

I sit uncomfortably with teaching each time we face each other—quite the predicament for a PhD candidate still considering committing to academic life, I know. It’s taken me years to write this sentence, too, partly because I never imagined myself as a teacher, but also because grad students are strongly advised against prioritizing teaching. Scholars of the tenured kind should be researching, publishing, applying for grants, attending key conferences, serving on committees, planning research trips, and then, yes, teaching. Both the urgency and priority of these activities are not entirely up to individual faculty, always caught between the never-ending list of tasks on their path to tenure, and their own vocational commitments to the profession. Unfortunately, this confusing, deeply individualistic, and oftentimes contradicting working environment is the one inherited by graduate students to parse, survive, and make their own.

Conventionally, doctoral programs include a required pedagogy course all students must take before teaching at the institution and, in many cases, this course constitutes the full extent of the pedagogical training grads will receive. And so, just like that, one day, after completing the course and still grappling with my commitment to pedagogy, I had students calling me professor, asking questions about grading, and textbook alternatives. I struggled to keep the teaching working load under 20 hours per week while also taking courses, researching, putting together exam reading lists, and applying for grants. Something’s got to give. Your mentors, looking out for you as a budding academic, will tell you something like “teaching should never take most of your time,” or “it’s ok if you can’t be the best teacher this semester, focus on your research.” But doesn’t teaching define what a professor is?

It took me some time to become aware of the paradoxical truth: though teaching is the core essence of being a professor, the graduate curriculum is instead training you to be a doctor, a field expert. Who you are as an instructor and the development of your own pedagogy is largely left up to you. Moreover, prioritizing teaching means spending precious time in an activity that won’t weigh nearly as much as robust published peer-reviewed articles for the search committee of a tenure-track job. It’s also difficult to notice the intentional faults in the system since the official discourse on teaching still positions it as an activity central to the identity of the professor despite its institutional devaluation to a kind of burden that comes with the job. Once I did see the cracks, I had to come to terms with the reality that the PhD was not going to naturally train me how to teach, as I’d originally thought, but that pedagogical training was an added extracurricular matter I’d have to pursue for passion—one I didn’t have. Thus, I decided that I hated teaching as a way to avoid it whenever possible. I hated how vulnerable it made me feel, how time consuming the grading and lesson planning was, how meaningless standard exams are, and how little time 50 minutes actually is for connecting with students.

Against all my odds, however, I came to go through two punctual occasions that changed the outlook of teaching for me, and I owe both of them to the folks at the UVA Scholars’ Lab. The first instance it happened was when they had each of us in the Praxis Fellowship design and teach a pencil and paper workshop exercise, which you can read more about in here. The second happened early this summer, in one of the sessions of the Intro to Digital Humanities I led for the Leadership Alliance Mellon Initiative Program, which hosts the summer research projects of a small group (4–5) of undergraduates across different fields and institutions. Both times, there was a moment in the middle of the discussion where I forgot I was a teacher, “the person in charge,” and for some blissful moments, I had fun. Rather than focusing on proving that I was capable of providing new knowledge to my audience, the informal and intimate nature of both environments allowed me to relax and concentrate on sharing information about common interests with people similarly invested in them.

It was then that it occurred to me: I don’t want to be a teacher. What I do want, and brings me joy, is discussing what I’m curious about and sharing what I’ve learned with others. I want to organize reading groups and co-create learning activities with people in different spaces, formats, with bespoke outputs that respond to the needs of the group. I want to be another learner joining a conversation in a multitude of small, collective pedagogical encounters.