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.

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.

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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.

Job ads in higher education are confusing. This is especially true of digital humanities positions that can combine multiple positions—faculty, staff, student—into one. Students might have a particularly hard time decoding these job ads. I often find that the fellows I work with need some help learning to read and decipher these postings so they can feel confident seeking out and applying for their first DH job. The Association for Computers in the Humanities sometimes runs panels designed to discuss these skills. I thought I would share my own professional development activity that I often run with students to build this literacy.

You will need:

• Three printed DH job ads
  • This can be tricky, as most job ads disappear once they are filled. You can still find some evidence of a posting here or there from organizations that crosspost them outside of the institutional HR site. H-net has a series of job listings, for example, and Code4Lib does not seem to take down their copies of old jobs. I think it works well to have different kinds of jobs in the mix - one faculty, one administrator, and one programer position, for example.
• A space for conversation
  • If it’s just you and one other person you could go for coffee. Otherwise I could imagine this working in small groups.
• 60 minutes for the activity

From there, I have students spend roughly 10 minutes looking at a job and 10 minutes discussing it before repeating twice more for the other two positions. As they move through, I ask students what they notice about each job:

• What seems consistent?
• What is different about each position?
• What is confusing?
• What would make them confident applying to it?

As I go, I balance the students’ reflections with my own, and I try to guide the conversation around a specific set of topics that students are most likely to need help understanding: qualifications, responsibilities, the institutional history, and the ethics of the job. Below I share some of the things I try to point out in those conversations.

Qualifications

While qualifications often aren’t the first part of a job posting, they’re frequently the thing that students gravitate towards when seeing an ad for the first time. I think this comes from a position of anxiety. Students often are insecure in their own qualifications, and so they see a list of skills and methods and immediately feel like they don’t qualify. So some familiarity in how to understand lists of qualifications might be helpful. To begin, I often tell students to look for specific words like “and” or “or.” Does the job ask for Python, R, and JavaScript? Or does the job ask for just one of the three? Sometimes, this might even be worded as “the ability to solve technical problems with a programming language of your choice.” These distinctions might seem small, but they are often an indicator of whether or not a job is looking for a unicorn—a position that wants you to be expert in everything under the sun. In a list that asks for one or two skills out of a list you can often take them at their word. Pay attention to whether the job gives you opportunity to not know everything.

I often describe a DH job as consisting of many different kinds of buckets where each category corresponds to specific topics or methods. Some examples of these might include critical making, text analysis, 3D modeling, GIS, programming, database design, digital archives, or more. Together, in some combination, these buckets make up a job. A person. No one will actually have expertise in every single one of these things. But most professional DHers are familiar some arrangement of them and expert in a smaller subset. I often encourage students to think of themselves in these terms when starting out: identify one specific area of expertise and and then several more for familiarity.¹ I encourage the students to see the big buckets. What are they familiar with? What do they have expertise in? Sometimes a job posting will list “preferred qualifications,” a handy way to directly map the job needs to your own hierarchy of familiarity and expertise. I encourage students not to be dismayed if the position in front of them does not match up to their own profile. Instead, think about how they can develop a plan to grow the timeframe that they have. They might not fit this job, but they can have the right buckets next time.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities for a position are often where you can find out what the job will actually be doing, so it can be helpful to read these in conversation with the listed skills and qualifications. Sometimes they will give you a sense of what skills are actually likely to be key and which are more icing on the cake. If the qualifications don’t seem to line up to the responsibilities that’s probably an indication that the job might be an untenable one, or that it might be pulled in too many directions. Approach these gigs with caution.

Digital Humanities positions can be a whole broad range of things. Sometimes the job titles aren’t very descriptive. You might see something like a DH specialist, a DH coordinator, a DH librarian, and those words don’t necessarily tell you a lot about the specific institutional needs for that position. The same job title can mean very different things at different places. The responsibilities are where you were more typically find more about what would actually be asked of you. Sometimes the descriptions of responsibilities are not especially helpful. They might list things like “responsible for collaborating with faculty,” “teaches a variety of workshops,” or other kinds of generic descriptors that might only give you a general indication of what the job is. Sometimes, you’ll be luckier. An ad might list the specific projects that you would be directly involved in overseeing and implementing, as in “responsible for the development and maintenance of a digital archive of XYZ.” Those are things to note and to speak to in a cover letter and interview. But even if they aren’t explicitly listed in the position description you can often do some research on the institutional history to fill out what is left unsaid. More below.

Institutional History

Now we’re getting into a place where humanities research skills can really shine. While the institutional history of a position often isn’t technically a specific part of the job description, it can teach you an awful lot. You can learn a lot by by exploring a series of questions:

• Is this job a new job?
• Is it re-hiring someone who left?
• Is it for a grant?

You can often find some of this information by looking back at an organization’s website, on their blog, event pages, and more. Did someone seem to be in this role before that you can identify? While position re-hires are often opportunities to rethink what a particular job does, you can get a lot of valuable information by trying to flag exactly what the previous person in this position was doing. What kind of projects and events did they seem to be talking about? Those were likely their direct work responsibilities, and you can sometimes map those directly onto what the new job is asking of you. While you might not want to speak with full confidence in a cover letter, you could reference the history of the work this role seemed to do in a way that shows your familiarity with the institution. Similarly, if the job appears new, that would seem to suggest that the institution is committing to a new kind of work. Does the job correspond to specific initiatives or efforts? Sometimes this information will be in the job description directly. If the position is grant-funded you can often find that information either in the job description itself or in a grant announcement. If the grant was specifically awarded for a digital archiving project, you can assume that digital archiving skills are likely to be essential for it. Whereas if they are hiring for a DH generalist and list digital archives as just one of many responsibilities, you can assume that such work will just be one of many things you would take on. This kind of information can help you to assess how qualified you are, how to talk about specific elements from your background, and whether or not the job is for you.

On Job Ethics

Given my own convictions about labor transparency and ethics, I like to point out any potential issues with the jobs we are looking at. Are we looking at a job with a fixed term? Is it renewable? Is the salary livable? Does it seem to be doing too much? Is this a job that has been posted many times and never filled? Is the institution known to be toxic? Some of this will only come with experience in the field, but you can also give the students a bit of literacy in how to perform a smell test of a particular job ad. Of course, each individual will have their own set of circumstances to weigh when applying to any given position. And a one-year, fixed position might make a lot of sense for someone who is local. But I always want to make sure that students know the issues with jobs like these and how untenable they can be. We often don’t locally advertise jobs to our students in the Lab if they don’t pass the smell test unless we know of people whose specific goals and geographic limitations match up with a particular opportunity. At the very least, we want to make sure that students enter into the job search with eyes open.

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There is much more to say, of course, but hopefully this quick writeup gives someone out there the tools they need to run this activity for themselves. I find that it helps to demystify the DH job market for students and helps them feel empowered to take that next step themselves. Perhaps most importantly, it starts to peel back obscuring layers of HR-ness and starts to make DH as a professional field a bit more transparent. That’s often the first step towards students feeling more invited into the professional community, and it can help them make a plan for developing the kind of institutional profile that they will need to apply successfully 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.

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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.

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

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

Key changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smaller changes

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

Read this far?

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

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.

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

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

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

Did I still believe in what I was saying?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

(Part 3 of a 3-part series: see also the 1st post on email practices and some caveats about my particular academic job context, and the 2nd post on Slack, task management, meeting notes.)

My previous two blog posts shared some of the ways I approach “work chores” (email, Slack, tasks) to keep them more sustainable. In this third post, I wanted to share a bit about how I try to do things as a manager/director re:similar expectations-impacted work-chore practices, so that my colleagues in the lab can also try or use the approaches to work that work best for them.

Not just asking about work sustainability; offering to act

As a manager, I try to regularly check in: Do you have time blocked out for focus, work-chores, time off? But I try to not only ask “are you doing these theoretically useful approaches”; I also want to discuss if the person needs those or wants something different; what is making it difficult to use these or other work-management approaches; what can we do to make this all more sustainable. Do you need actions from me/other colleagues to support that, e.g. changing deadlines, moving or cancelling meetings, changing communication formats (emails, Slack, meetings), notes from a meeting you can’t make? If you’re going to ask if people have time blocked out for needed things like focus and time off, being prepared with possible ways to help if they don’t makes sense.

Where expectations are needed, make them as loose as possible

As a manager, I try to make space for others to figure out the what, when, how of the practices that work best for them. To do this, I try to communally discuss and set agreements on what outcomes are critical (e.g. impact colleagues and people we support) and which are nice to have; and to let folks know they can question and advocate for something different these expectations, which are often ultimately somewhat arbitrary (e.g. why answer most emails within 2 workdays rather than 3 or 4?). I try to keep expectations as high-level and brief as possible—setting these as what’s fine for us to generally at least meet, rather than what’s ideal (but not required to happen all the time—or at all, if doing so impedes other work/focus/non-work time). And I try to talk about my reasoning for expectations, since that can often be useful context (e.g. something that isn’t a big issue if 1 person does it, but I ask for because I have not 1 but 10 full-time staff reporting through me, so effect of approach x multiple people may be a big issue) or allow my colleague to suggest alternatives that still meet my goals while also meeting theirs.

For example, when responding to our lab’s consult listserv, we want people to feel welcomed and know they’ve contacted folks who will get them to the right place, even if that isn’t ultimately the lab. We do also balance a lot of consultations against longer projects, teaching, fieldwork, events, etc., and try to set public expectations of our availability for consultations as usually 2-3 weeks out from original email date (though we can meet faster when there’s an urgent need). So our expectation is that we try to have someone on staff reply to any initial message requesting a consultation with us, to us within two workdays if possible; but that reply can simply be “thanks for your message; we’re discussing internally, and will get back you with more by [DATE]” if needed. This is useful when an ask requires us to talk to colleagues in different units about a project’s history, ID whether anyone has some specific software experience, and/or when multiple relevant staff across units might all be available to attend a consultation together.

This meets our goals of making sure the person contacting us feels welcomed and knows we’ll be helping them, but also does not require staff to constantly check or reply to email. As with my post on personal email/etc. approaches, we often reply to folks within the same day! But setting the minimum bar higher is good for making sure folks can set boundaries on email management, and also get non-email work done.

I try to emphasize communication over conformance: it’s okay if you need more time, need to change plans, etc. But the way you make this not adversely impact colleagues is by communicating as early as possible when you need a change and why. (E.g. if you’re repeatedly asking for extensions after deadlines pass instead of well before, it could be a sign that deadlines are being set too soon, you have too much work, or something else we should work on making more sustainable.)

Look for ways to support others’ needs

We know other Library colleagues sometimes have in-person, or urgent questions from visitors for us. While protecting time to do the kinds of focused work we’re tasked with (and acknowledging we’re not staffed to have someone guaranteed available and able to drop their work at any time for unscheduled non-emergency drop-ins), we’ve got several approaches to staying available to other Library staff, including:

• Our consult listserv goes to our whole team of 12 people, so even if each person is only checking email once a day (not the norm), when that happens would vary enough we’re getting someone seeing incoming emails who can usually note if something’s urgent.
• We use Slack a bunch, and its notification settings make it easy for us to find each other and ask for a quicker reply, when one’s actually needed.
• We’ve set “core staff hours” when it’s most likely you can find a free staffer somewhere in the lab, and shared these with library circulation desks; as well as non-public, broader core times when at least several of us are physically in the lab and findable if needed.

Ultimately, we are privileged to encounter few work-related emergencies (e.g. site is down before a conference talk about it; water is leaking into the makerspace; short-notice funding possibility). We try to make our availability and response practices clear, so folks know how and when they can find us.

Part 2 of a 3-part series: notes on what works for me, when managing alt-academic job work-chores. This one covers Slack, tasks, and meeting notes. The 1st post covers my email practices, as well as some caveats about my particular context relevant to why I can and do things this way. The 3rd post on supporting work practices like these as a manager will be linked here, once it’s published (assuming I remember…).

Slack

I have a daily “Slack catchup” time, like I do for email. This works best when I do it at a time there aren’t many folks actively chatting, so that I do eventually get to all waiting messages; on the downside.

• As with email, I do in practice check Slack elsewhen, but having the daily catchup time lets me close Slack (and Outlook) when I’ve scheduled myself to focus on getting a specific thing done. I could easily spend all day answering email and Slack if I just kept them open and checked them throughout the day.

Slack has a couple helpers I like, both superior to “mark unread” (as it’s easy to accidentally open a channel, and have it auto-mark something as read when you didn’t actually look at it):

• Bookmark icon/”save for later” holds messages in a “later area => stuff I want to remember or look at again during my weekly Brain Day time or after, but zero urgency
• Message menu > remind me about this => for messages I want to be reminded of at a specific time (e.g. something I skimmed but need to respond to by the end of the day, but not now because I’m leaving for a meeting; something I want to remember at the end of term).

Task management app

I use a task management app that allows setting recurring reminders:

• There are many good, free options; it’s worth playing with a couple to see which is comfortable and matches your particular way of handling tasks (also look for: syncing to phone/between computers; ability to export/backup in readable format). I use Things3 for Mac.
• I keep a “Brain Day” area on my task app that fills with recurring tasks on my Friday “Brain Day”s, in the order I want to do them in (stuff I can’t miss doing weekly or it’s a problem, e.g. email catchup, first).
  • I add a weekly reminder to check Slack’s “later” area for messages I should respond to, that I do once I’m on top of email.
  • This approach also helps with non-weekly reminders, like “add your consult stats to LibInsight bimonthly” and “bimonthly block out any leave days on my calendar for the next two months” (so I remember to mark stuff so people know when they can’t schedule me).
• I have task app areas for various categories of things, including
  • “flagged” (do this first when you start work on x day)
  • sets of tasks I only want to look at/work through in priority order at specific times (e.g. my ACH volunteer work, during the ACH meeting’s work time)
  • tasks I can’t/shouldn’t do until a specific date (so I don’t need to see them until then)
  • things I asked of others (as a manager; reminder of when to check in, if don’t hear back)
  • “errands” (zero-urgency things I get to in priority order, just as time allows)

Meeting notes

I use a Remarkable 2 tablet (e-ink tablet) to take notes during meetings:

• I use a different notebook for each meeting kind: 1 notebook per
  • recurring 1:1,
  • recurring groups like our all-staff meeting,
  • related aggregators of ad hoc meetings, such as external consultations, SLab website sprint discussions
• Each new meeting date starts on a new page of the notebook, with the date and meeting title at the top.
• I keep a small lined paper pad and pen next to the Remarkable. If a task for me comes up during the meeting (something I need to do or say), I write it on the paper tablet:
  • Things that must be done before my next “Brain Day” get a star, and I try to remember to do them or add them to my task app that day. I used to use symbols in my meeting notes to mark things that were tasks, but that means I need to look back through my meeting notes to find tasks from the past week, and I repeatedly did not and let those build up.
  • Keeping tasks on their own paper list means I can just see all incoming tasks there; paper vs. directly into task app means that the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and “I can do this in 30 seconds after meeting ends” don’t clog the task app (I used to struggle with putting way too many “wouldn’t it be cool if” ideas into my task app, making it hard to see what’s actually urgent and look like I’m behind on working though tasks).

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.

I’m sharing some approaches to work chores (email, Slack, etc.) that are currently working for me. This is another “my SLab colleague told me I should write a post about this” post—thanks to Brandon Walsh for suggesting I make some of my more personally-successful work-chore practices (which I periodically have shared with various staff, when asked) into a public post. I’ve found it most useful to try out small changes at a time, not huge swerves among different systems of task management.

Short version, pls

tl;dr of the hacks detailed below and on subsequent posts in this series:

1. Have a daily email/message triage time, putting those messages that can wait for reading/reply until a weekly email catchup time, into a folder to attend to then.
2. Block that weekly catchup time on your calendar, preferably the same time each week, at a time you won’t struggle to put aside other work to finish going through those emails (e.g. I do it first thing Friday mornings).
3. Use: Outlook rules to divert low-priority emails and highlight high-priority emails; Slack “save for later” and “remind me about this” (not “mark unread”); a task manager that supports recurring tasks.

Some caveats

This is a very “your mileage might vary” post; this doctor is not saying whether these approaches are right for you. Directing a library-based DH research center means my workday involves a variety of communications (e.g. Workday notifications, budget reports, sending many recurring meeting invites to various groups) that make it more useful to have a more formal system for balancing them against focused work time, as do my own particular work habits and neurodivergence. (FWIW, I am very much an Always Inbox Zero, Task App: Too-Many person.)

I also recognize my privilege in having the job type, security, supervision level, accessibility accommodations, and more that mean I get to make these choices. Some workplaces have invasive policies about when, how, how often; some jobs actually need you to be checking or replying to communications as they come in; some teams would be negatively impacted by someone not checking messages as often as the group truly needs. Different jobs have different needs and/or culture regarding what goes into email, Slack, recurring meetings, or ad hoc conversations.

In particular, the part about how often I check my email felt a bit fraught to share, especially without sharing more context about accessibility. But it’s made a significant improvement in how well I can focus, make progress, maintain work boundaries and sustainability, as well as do well by my colleagues—so I wanted to share it, even if it isn’t necessarily something everyone else can implement as described. (Part two of this blog post will discuss how I try to accommodate similar practices for my colleagues, as a manager/director).

Ultimately, I try to balance two things:

• being able to get to the kinds of focused work that are part of my job, without interruption (unless something is truly an emergency)
• responding to messages within a reasonable timeframe, and having a triage system keeping my inbox manageable so I can more easily see if a colleague sends an urgent-response-needed message

Some approaches that work for me, right now

Email management

I use a daily triage practice, plus a weekly block for catching up on reading/replying to things that can wait until then:

• I have a daily time when I’m always free (5-30min?), that I block for managing email (Outlook is what UVA uses for staff). I put this daily email time as a recurring hold on my calendar until it became habit, and now I just do it first thing, before any meetings.
• I have a “process today” email folder; when this daily email time happens, I dump everything currently in my inbox into “process today”. I don’t require myself to look at my inbox again until the following day, unless* I’m done with all my other work and feel like it.
  • This helps me not get caught up answering constantly incoming stuff, which can usually wait a bit, and get to older reading/replies first.
  • * In practice, I do actually check my work email several times per workday. I try not to do so until I’ve both done that initial transfer to the “process today” folder, and until I’ve processed that “process today” folder (as described below). This means that any other emails I get to are a bonus, so they don’t carry the same feeling of “I’m behind until I clear this from my inbox”.
• Emails that can wait until my weekly “catch up on work chores” block (Friday mornings) get moved to a “Brain Day” folder.
  • This keeps my inbox more manageable, so I can more easily visually skim it between meetings to notice if someone does have an urgent and/or easy-to-answer question
• I try to reply to everything else in the “process today” folder during that daily time, even if it’s just to say “I received this, but it’ll be [a couple days] before I will have a more substantive response”. I send that kind of message if I’m not sure I’ll get to something (better to followup up sooner than promised, than to forget to respond).

“Brain Day” for weekly work chores

I use a weekly, scheduled catchup block (“Brain Day”):

• During “Brain Day”, I catch up on all emails I moved to the “Brain Day” folder during the week—the ones that could wait to be read (including non-urgent FYI things, newsletters), and emails I told people I’d need more time to reply to.
• If I can’t finish working through all my email then, I block time to do so the following week (rare/ugh).

After completing email catchup, I also use that “Brain Day” block to do other weekly or monthly recurring work chores, like updating our budget, planning what tasks I’m doing the following week, and prepping for the next week’s meetings.

Other email hacks

I use Outlook rules to:

• route stuff that I mostly only need to skim or can wait to read until my weekly “Brain Day” (e.g. from our “general announcements to all Library staff” listserv, which tends to more “here’s an interesting webinar” and less “urgent info to read today”) into the “Brain Day” folder, so I don’t have to look at it nor manually sort it until Fridays
• route stuff I need to get to sooner (e.g. emails to the SLab consult listserv; emails from SLab staff, supervisors) into a place I’ll see them easily
• Move some sent emails to a “Waiting to hear” folder, if I need to make sure I do hear back a response (vs. assuming someone will definitely write back); I check this during weekly “Brain Day” to see if I need to ping anyone about a non-response (when enough time has gone by)

I don’t currently need this, but if staying out of your inbox is hard because you need to notice specific things: I used to use USB LEDs called Blink(1)s to alert me to things I wanted to notice. For me, that was during my dissertation’s Infinite Ulysses open beta, when I wanted to know when someone created a new account on my digital edition, or posted an annotation. But you could hook these up to IFTTT or Zapier and have specific combinations of person and text on Slack or Outlook trigger the light turning on, or blinking in a pattern. (I can’t use sound notifications—if you can, you can of course set up Slack/Outlook to make a noise for certain things, though I think this isn’t granular down to e.g. “make this sound if x person pings me”?)

The next two posts will deal with Slack, task management, and meeting notes; and handling expectations vs. healthy work practices, as a manager.

“I am not a woman,” says Megwind, “I am a spirit, although the form of the thing is misleading I will admit.[..] You are taken with my form which I admit is beautiful,” says the girl, “but know that this form you see is not necessary but contingent, sometimes I am a fine brown-speckled egg and sometimes I am an escape of steam from a hole in the ground and sometimes I am an armadillo.”

“That is amazing,” says my grandfather, “a shape-shifter are you.”

“That is a thing I could do,” says Megwind, “if I choose.”

“Tell me,” says my grandfather, “could you change yourself into one million board feet of one-by-ten of the very poorest quality neatly stacked in railroad cars on a siding outside of Fort Riley, Kansas?”

“That is a thing I could do,” says the girl, “but I do not see the beauty of it.”

“The beauty of it,” says my grandfather, “is two cents a board foot.”

- Donald Barthelme, “Departures” (emphasis added)

Jeremy Boggs’ Scholars’ Lab Praxis Program DesignLab class today had fellows sharing quotes that resonated with them, from Frank Chimero’s Shape of Design. Many of their choices focused on the importance of beauty, creativity, magic in design choices/work, sitting alongside function (or being a part of functionality). This conversation added to my thinking on how I divide scholarly values, from specific current instantiations of those values. For example: the point of a dissertation isn’t a proto-monograph; it’s practicing building and sharing knowledge as an active member of a specific community.

Or, another example: during my dissertation research, I tried to separate foundational textual scholarship field values (e.g. around authority, methodology, documentation), from how traditional Scholarly Editions usually look. It’s useful to have Scholarly Edition as term of art; and it’s useful to imagine additional ways we can realize those same scholarly field values, that look very different (like my participatory digital Ulysses edition).

I’ve shorthanded for myself this kind of parsing what we’re trying to do with scholarship from how we most often go about that, this values vs. the popular form of those values we’ve settled on, as “values vs. their instantiations”. That last word is an awkward choice! but it’s where my brain settled. (In a forthcoming-imminently journal article, I talk more about this kind of comparison of motivating scholarly values vs. how scholars including me—for good reasons, often!—default to time-tested specific forms and methods for pursuing those values.)

Scholarly values can be realized via many many methods, forms. What I’m getting from Jeremy’s session today, and my Praxis Fellow colleagues’ interpretations of Chimero’s design book, is: how I often pursue creative rereads of scholarly values—using different methods/forms than norms—isn’t just about the best way I can reach the “functional” values of my scholarly fields. (I’d thought it was!)

What I’m doing is also adding to those values (at least how I frame them to myself), trying to include joy, experimentation, justice, community (and Chimero’s “magic”?) as equivalent scholarly values, fully alongside the more widely agreed on Values of a Given Scholarly Field (e.g. clearly communicating the methodology of digital edition interface design choices, is one such Field Value).

(Thanks to my colleagues Jeremy Boggs, Oriane Guiziou-Lamour, Kristin Hauge, Gramond McPherson, Emmy Monaghan, Amna Tarar, and Brandon Walsh for teaching me via today’s conversation!

This post is an expanded version of some Bluesky tweets I posted 9/26/2024 during the session.)

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. So I will tag the posts accordingly to make them easy to connect. Happy to hear feedback, either on social media or by email at bmw9t@virginia.edu.

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“What is digital humanities?”

I was on my way to the annual meeting of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute when the customs officer posed the question to me. DH is a baggy and specialized academic field that suffers from as many competing definitions as it does detractors. I have been asked to define the field more times than I count, but, standing in the immigration line at the Canadian border, I suddenly felt renewed urgency to get my terms straight. To describe my work with precision and clarity for a general audience. The officer ostensibly asked for an explanation, a narrative of my being in this place at this time, but he really just wanted facts. My actual response was unimportant. They just wanted to determine that I had a plausible reason for attending a conference they already knew was taking place (it was a small port of immigration and a large conference). There was a right and a wrong to the exchange. He wanted me to prove that I knew the proper response.

There was a pedagogy to the conversation, even though the officer might never have framed it as such. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire speaks at length of the banking model of education, the sense that typical educational practice sees students as operating at a deficit. The instructor, with their surplus of knowledge, deposits this valuable commodity in their pupils who are asked, in turn, to regurgitate learned facts at a later date. Power exists in the hands of the teacher, whose position of authority structures the economics of the classroom. Even though teaching and learning were far from the arm of the state I encountered at the Canadian border, a similar system of policies, power, and relationships structured our exchange. I was asked to participate in a quiz without being properly coached in the material, but the expected response was clear. “Show me you have the appropriate knowledge to show you are not a threat. Show that you have learned what it means to be a docile traveler,” the officer seemed to say, “and I will let you pass.” Freire’s central metaphor for this kind of encounter was economic: deposits, withdrawals, deficits, and surplus. But my encounter with customs showed that the same pedagogical apparatus operates in many walks of life. In this moment, I felt the pressure to teach this person something about digital humanities. To teach, in the face of an administrative official whose response to that instruction carried real stakes. To teach, while being confronted with an architecture that appeared to force my work to justify itself before knowing anything about it. Teach well, and I could continue to the conference. Teach poorly, and I would be subject to unknown bureaucratic hurdles. I only got so far as “Digital Humanities is…” before the official stamped my passport and let me through.

My encounter with Freire while traveling haunted me even once I returned to the University of Virginia and faced a different kind of border. It was the cusp of a new semester and the end of summer, so I took a few days to scout out the room I would be teaching in for the upcoming term. The space I found was a relic of an older era, before smart boards, inclusive design, or dynamic classrooms. With horror I found rows of old, wooden desks fastened to the ground with a series of bolts that prevented them from moving. The chairs produced an almost visceral response for students: they were physically uncomfortable, designed for normative bodies, and unyielding to whatever adjustments the user might need for their own work. I too had once sat in these very chairs during my undergraduate days at the same institution, and I remembered well the discomfort they caused. With an almost inexorable effect, the sense of being trapped led students to vandalize the chairs, and each chair was scrawled with the ink, carvings, and etchings of graffiti from decades of students. The chaotic, jubilant writings on each desk felt like an explicit act of rebellion against the physical space of the room and the desks themselves. Where the chairs spoke of quiet restraint, their surfaces told a different story, narrating favorite bands, quotations, weekend adventures, and more. Freedom. Flexibility. Movement. Waiting to get out of the chair.

A fresh-faced graduate instructor, I viewed these rows of desks from a perspective that was new to me: the front of the room. They might make sense for one kind of classroom, but I was puzzled as to how I would fit them to my needs for literary discussion. After all, they enforced a specific relationship between teacher and student by means of what Jesse Stommel has referred to as the “rhetoric of the room”—“the ways the shape of the room affects the learning we do inside of it.” The bolted chairs demanded the instructor take center stage, whether they wished to or not. While I had observed teachers carry out group work in those spaces, the physically restricted desks required students to turn sideways in their chairs in order to see one another. The room quite literally fought back against the pedagogy of the teacher and tried to enforce its own. Lecture; not discussion. Hierarchy; not democracy. As if aware of the tense dynamic between the instructor and the spaces given to them for teaching and learning, the students found themselves drawn back to carving their own frustrations into the furniture itself.

Still pondering these desks, I made my way over to the Scholars’ Lab, a center for digital research in the University Library where I had recently begun the first in a series of digital humanities fellowships that would lead to my present-day position as digital library professional. As was often the case, I plugged away on a group project with my fellowship cohort while sharing space with the librarians who taught us. I remember well the kinds of staff conversations we would overhear as we worked: endlessly supportive student mentoring, careful guidance in digital humanities project design, and the best instruction I had ever observed in my time as an educator. After one such meeting, as I expressed my frustrations with my role as a graduate instructor, one of these mentors floored me with their response: “I imagine that would be frustrating, but I don’t really teach.” This librarian was one of the best mentors I had ever had, and I regularly saw them shaping not just student research projects, but also providing expert guidance in how to shape a life doing this work.

How could someone so engaged in the act of teaching be so convinced that their work did not count? What was teaching, if not this? And who gets to make such determinations?

The immigration officer. The bolted desk. The university. They each regulate bodies, attitudes, and relationships. They share a crucial connection to my coworker in denial about their own teacherly identity. Our institutions carve out pedagogical relationships using spaces, policies, and actions while at the same time often rendering these dynamics invisible. As Stommel’s rhetoric of the room shows, spaces exert unexpected wills of their own, often over and above those of their inhabitants. But we can take his formulation one step further. The Canadian officer was acting in accordance with a long series of governmental policies enforcing social and legal procedures at the border. And rooms do not exist in isolation. The campus buildings at UVA contained many such rooms with bolted desks. Each of these roles and rooms was designed. Even though the UVA architect might not have thought of themselves as a teacher, their decisions actively shaped the experiences and pedagogies of those who do. Institutions of higher education are comprised of thousands of small decisions like these, innumerable small acts of pedagogy that affect teachers and learners—who we are allowed to be and who counts themselves as part of our number.

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

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

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

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

The following contains my lightly edited contribution to the ADHO2024 session entitled “Missions Accomplished? The Future of Mission-Driven Digital Scholarship Journals in DH.” The panel had representatives from several different digital humanities journals talking about ideological underpinnings for their publications.

Hello! My name is Brandon Walsh, and I’m the Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab in the University of Virginia Library.

It’s wonderful to be with you today to talk about the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, a publication based out of CUNY that I have had the pleasure of working on for several years now. We are “A journal promoting open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of technology in teaching, learning, and research.”

My initial pitch for this group was to talk about the journal as doing more than just writing about teaching and learning: we also build pedagogy into our publishing process and infrastructure. But as I was researching for this talk I actually found that some of my colleagues on the journal’s editorial collective have already made that argument, so I wanted to first and foremost point you to their publication entitled “Who Guards the Gates? Feminist Methods of Scholarly Publishing” by Laura Wildemann Kane, Amanda Licastro, and Danica Savonick. They do a better job of articulating what I was hoping to discuss than I could, and I’d encourage you to go there first. In my brief time here I’ll just give the cliffs notes version of their work and try to build upon it. Laura, Amanda, and Danica discuss JITP in the following terms—as model for feminist modes of collaboration and inclusivity:

Publishing timeline - the journal publishes twice a year, usually alternating a general issue with a themed issue. This extraordinarily rapid timeline has students and early-career scholars on the job market in mind - those in need of a publication on their CV don’t have the luxury of waiting years for more traditional venues. EC student quota - the journal has written into its governance structure that the collective be between 21 and 25 active members and roughly half of those members should be students. The journal’s managing editor is also a student whose full-time gig with the journal offers him membership in CUNY’s union.

Variety of publication genres- in addition to the twice-a-year issues that share long-form essays, we publish, on a rolling basis, a variety of “short forms” that expand the kinds of work we share: assignments, teaching fails, blueprints, and book reviews. This makes it possible for students to find a range of ways to represent their work professionally. The article has lots more in it—lots of great data, history, and argument about the journal and what it means for students on the EC. It’s a space to learn about all parts of the publishing process, from editorial skills to technical web publishing literacies to inclusive and equitable publication practices.

All of this means that the infrastructure of the journal has teaching and professional development in its bones. We’re not just publishing the work of teaching: we’re baking it into the dough. Our plumbing is pedagogy. We’re not just a venue: we’re a means by which the professional development of young scholars is the core activity of the journal, where members of a scholarly unit can grow. In this way, I see our work as a natural evolution of what Matthew Gold, Katharine Harris, Rebecca Frost Davis, and Jenterey Sayers have called for under the #citepedagogy movement, which is the idea that we need to cite teaching materials and syllabi as scholarly work in their own right to make them part of the scholarly record. In short, teaching is not the thing that distracts from research output. It’s a part of it. But JITP shows that our publishing infrastructure itself can be built and rebuilt with students at the core. In short, it’s not enough to publish pedagogy. We can work towards pedagogical publication, a publishing infrastructure that cares about the needs of students and early career folks first and foremost.

Again, please check out Laura, Amanda, and Danica’s work on this. In preparing for this talk, Amanda Licastro and I actually realized we were both presenting on related topics. Amanda will be doing a follow-up presentation at MLA this year about JITP and professional development so stay tuned for that one. We recently zoomed to discuss the overlap between this talk and her upcoming one, so I want to further give her credit for my thinking on this—I’ll mention her a lot in what’s to come and I think she’s here. I want to focus on one thing in particular—the makeup of the board.

To reiterate: the editorial collective is mandated to have a certain number of student voices on it. Every time we put a call out we specify that a certain number of those selected will be students. This is fantastic - it makes it so much easier to address feelings of imposterdom with students that I’m trying to recruit because I can say “no you are exactly qualified in so many ways. We are looking for people just like you!” It means that student experience, opinion, and vision is always centered on the collective. But there are also other ways in which this makeup causes significant challenges. The thing about students is they will eventually, one way or another, no longer be students. If all goes well they will graduate and move on to better things. This sort of turnover is a sustainability problem faced by all projects and all journals—but it’s especially salient for us because even if people stay they no longer count as students. The journal’s greatest triumph is if we provide a vehicle for professional development such that our students no longer count as such. This means that a healthy editorial collective oriented in this way will constantly refresh itself with new ideas and new persons on the board. It also means, of course, that there is a constant churn—always new folks to mentor, new visions to weigh. But this is the only way to continue to keep student needs in mind. What it even means to be a student is constantly changing. Students are not the same now as they were before COVID, as they were a decade ago when I was a student. Two decades ago. Three. Every year my own memory of what it meant to be a student living paycheck to paycheck recedes into the rearview mirror and it also, either way, bears only a tenuous relationship to current student experience. We need actual student representation in order to maintain that point of view.

To ground a publishing process in student needs and experiences might be an attempt to castles made of sand, to found our publishing practices on ideological and ethical grounds that must change, by design. I’m put in mind of Jesse Mitchell’s description of inclusive design as like bathing—you’ve gotta keep doing it. Orienting a publishing process around teaching, pedagogy, professional development is an ongoing, never ending challenge. A living wage today might be untenable tomorrow. What counts as meaningful professional development for one student might not parse for another. In this way, the instability that our student focus brings is perhaps a strength. You’ve got to keep bathing. If you want to do good, equitable and ethical student-centered work you have to keep re-evaluating your priors and how you think things need to be done.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about: what do older hands bring to publishing pipelines that model themselves on newer voices? In a journal centered around the changing needs of students, what is the role of the non-student editor? What are our responsibilities? For one, we bring memory. The ability of the institution to remember its own history is always challenged by the fact that those with the memories are likely to move on. Amanda likened it, astutely, to the efforts by Cheryl Ball and Douglas Eyman to chronicle the history of Kairos. Simply remembering is labor in its own right. I wonder how much pedagogy publishing is itself an attempt to solidify and preserve the ephemeral acts in the classroom.

There is also, of course, a certain amount of social and administrative capital that the more experienced editorial publisher can offer. A lot of what Amanda and I see our work on the collective as is to signal boost - to use our network to promote and extend the reach of the journal in a way that a graduate student might struggle with. Those networks just take time to build. I also try, at virtually every event I attend, to plug the journal and offer to people the opportunity to talk about our publishing process, how to submit, and offer feedback they might have potential article ideas. I extend this to you here and now as well! It’s a way to try to pay forward the good luck and mentoring that I have received.

In addition, Amanda works on the governance and oversight committee and had wonderful thoughts on her own relationship to that work. I love that our journal models itself on asking students to act in public as professionals and contributors to the scholarly conversation. But that process is not always smooth. It can be asking a lot for students, with little to no job security, to shoulder the weight of tense moments of internal or external conflict. It can be the responsibility of more established scholars to help shape a space for radical professional development and mentoring by doing but in a way that helps to mitigate the risks of acting as professionals in public in this way.

To put a button on these things—JITP is a model, I think, for how to build a publishing process that, in form and function, centers student pedagogy. It’s not enough to publish pedagogy or to cite it. Our scholarly structures need to be built and rebuilt with student voices, experiences, and needs in mind. This process is challenging, tenuous, and always in process. For those of us lucky enough to still be here, to be in full-time positions, it’s on us to help the students of today meet the challenges of this work. To help make space for students. To hold the bucket and shovel and dig in. Thanks!