Claudia Berger is our Virtual Artist-in-Residence 2024-2025; register for their April 15th virtual talk and a local viewing of their data quilt in the Scholars’ Lab Common Room!

This year I am the Scholars’ Lab’s Virtual Artist-in-Residence, and I’m working on a data quilt about the Appalachian Trail. I spent most of last semester doing the background research for the quilt and this semester I get to actually start working on the quilt itself! Was this the best division of the project, maybe not. But it is what I could do, and I am doing everything I can to get my quilt to the Lab by the event in April. I do work best with a deadline, so let’s see how it goes. I will be documenting the major steps in this project here on the blog.

Data or Design first?

This is often my biggest question, where do I even start? I can’t start the design until I know what data I have. But I also don’t know how much data I need until I do the design. It is really easy to get trapped in this stage, which may be why I didn’t start actively working on this part of the project until January. It can be daunting.

N.B. For some making projects this may not apply because the project might be about a particular dataset or a particular design. I started with a question though, and needed to figure out both.

However, like many things in life, it is a false binary. You don’t have to fully get one settled before tackling the other, go figure. I came up with a design concept, a quilt made up of nine equally sized blocks in a 3x3 grid. Then I just needed to find enough data to go into nine visualizations. I made a list of the major themes I was drawn to in my research and went about finding some data that could fall into these categories.

What my initial planning looks like.

But what about the narrative?

So I got some data. It wasn’t necessarily nine datasets for each of the quilt blocks but it was enough to get started. I figured I could get started on the design and then see how much more I needed, especially since some of my themes were hard to quantify in data. But as I started thinking about the layout of the quilt itself I realized I didn’t know how I wanted people to “read” the quilt.

Would it be left to right and top down like how we read text (in English)?

Or in a more boustrophedon style, like how a river flows in a continuous line?

Or should I make it so it can be read in any order and so the narrative makes sense with all of its surrounding blocks? But that would make it hard to have a companion zine that was similarly free-flowing.

So instead, I started to think more about quilts and ways narrative could lend itself to some traditional layouts. I played with the idea of making a large log cabin quilt. Log cabin patterns create a sort of spiral, they are built starting with the center with pieces added to the outside. This is a pattern I’ve used in knitting and sewing before, but not in data physicalizations.

A template for making a log cabin quilt block by Nido Quilters

What I liked most about this idea is it has a set starting point in the center, and as the blocks continue around the spiral they get larger. Narratively this let me start with a simpler “seed” of the topic and keep expanding to more nuanced visualizations that needed more space to be fully realized. The narrative gets to build in a more natural way.

So while I had spent time fretting about starting with either data/the design of the visualizations, what I really needed to think through first was what is the story I am trying to tell? And how can I make the affordances of quilt design work with my narrative goals?

I make data physicalizations because it prioritizes narrative and interpretation more than the “truth” of the data, and I had lost that as I got bogged down in the details. For me, narrative is first. And I use the data and the design to support the narrative.

Time to sketch it out

This is my absolute favorite part of the whole process. I get to play with dot grid paper and all my markers, what’s not to love? Granted, I am a stationery addict at heart. So I really do look for any excuse to use all of the fun materials I have. But this is the step where I feel like I get to “play” the most. While I love sewing, once I get there I already have the design pretty settled. I am mostly following my own instructions. This is where I get to make decisions and be creative with how I approach the visualizations.

(I really find dot grid paper to be the best material to use at this stage. It gives you a structure to work with that ensures things are even, but it isn’t as dominating on a page as a full grid paper. Of course, this is just my opinion, and I love nothing more than doodling geometric patterns on dot grid paper. But using it really helps me translate dimensions to fabric and I can do my “measuring” here. For this project I am envisioning a 3 square foot quilt. The inner block. Block 1, is 12 x 12 inches, so each grid represents 3 inches.)

There is no one set way with how to approach this, this is just a documentation of how I like to do it. If this doesn’t resonate with how you like to think about your projects that is fine! Do it your own way. But I design the way I write, which is to say extremely linearly. I am not someone who can write by jumping around a document. I like to know the flow so I start in the beginning and work my way to the end.

Ultimately, for quilt design, my process looks like this:

1. Pick the block I am working on
2. Pick which of the data I have gathered is a good fit for the topic
3. Think about what is the most interesting part of the data, if I could only say one thing what would that be?
4. Are there any quilting techniques that would lend itself to the nature of the data or the topic? For example: applique, English Paper Piecing, half square triangles, or traditional quilt block designs, etc.
5. Once I have the primary point designed, are there other parts of the data that work well narratively? And is there a design way to layer it?

For example, this block on the demographics of people who complete thru-hikes of the trail using annual surveys since 2016. (Since they didn’t do the survey 2020 - and it was the center of the grid - I made that one an average of all of the reported years using a different color to differentiate it.)

I used the idea of the nine-patch block as my starting point, although I adapted it to be a base grid of 16 (4x4) patches to better fit with the dimensions of the visualization. I used the nine-patch idea to show the percentage of the gender (white being men and green being all other answers - such as women, nonbinary, etc). If it was a 50-50 split, 8 of the patches in each grid should be white, but that is never the case. I liked using the grid because it is easy to count the patches in each one, and by trying to make symmetrical or repetitive designs it is more obvious where it isn’t balanced.

But I also wanted to include the data on the reported race of thru-hikers. The challenge here is that it is a completely different scale. While the gender split on average is 60-40, the average percentage of non-white hikers is 6.26%. In order to not confuse the two, I decided to use a different technique to display the data, relying on stitching instead of fabric. I felt this let me use two different scales at the same time, that are related but different. I could still play with the grid to make it easy to count, and used one full line of stitching to represent 1%. Then I could easily round the data to the nearest .25% using the grid as a guide. So the more lines in each section, the more non-white thru-hikers there were.

My last step, once I have completed a draft of the design, is to ask myself, “is this too chart-y?” It is really hard sometimes to avoid the temptation to essentially make a bar chart in fabric, so I like to challenge myself to see if there is a way I can move away from more traditional chart styles. Now, one of my blocks is essentially a bar chart, but since it was the only one and it really successfully highlighted the point I was making I decided to keep it.

These are not the final colors that I will be using. They will probably all be changed once I dye the fabric and know what I am working with.

Next steps

Now, the design isn’t final. Choosing colors is a big part of the look of the quilt, so my next step is dyeing my fabric! I am hoping to have a blogpost about the process of dyeing raw silk with plant-based dyes by the end of February. (I need deadlines, this will force me to get that done…) Once I have all of those colors I can return to the design and decide which colors will go where. More on that later. In the meantime let me know if you have any questions about this process! Happy to do a follow-up post as needed.

Last semester, I presented a paper on what I call the “Great Lesbian Panic of Eighteenth-Century France”. As part of my presentation, I chose to show an engraving from Sade’s Juliette ou les prospérités du vice, in which several lesbian couples are having sex on a stage, performing in front of a man sexually stimulated by the spectacle. Because I did not want to potentially unsettle people with pornography – even if that pornography is from the late eighteenth-century – I chose to use my great editing skills and went on Paint to add lavender-coloured circles on the characters’ genitalia. Let me just say that there were quite a lot of circles on this engraving.

Being a Praxis fellow has shed a new light on this paper I presented, and on the choice I made to show sexually explicit content in a conference. Especially, as someone who’d like to pursue a career in academia, the discussions around DH pedagogy made me question the way I would envision my future teaching. How can we present undergraduates, or even graduate students, with sexually explicit content (in this case, engravings depicting not always consensual sexual intercourse)? Putting aside the pertinent but limiting argument of tradition and memory (“This content is a significant portion of eighteenth-century French literature, which is why you should learn it: it is part of literary history”) and engaging with scholarship on care and trauma-informed practices, why would we choose to do so, and what methods should we use?

In his article “Presenting Potentially Harmful Images in College Classrooms”, Connor Kenaston reflects on his pedagogical practice to discuss what it means for a professor to choose to show potentially harmful images in class. Although the gravity of the discussed content cannot, in any way, be compared to what I am reflecting on here – as the author talks about photographs of lynching, that is, the representation of the lived and real suffering of black men – I would like to draw on his analysis of the potential physical and emotional response of students to being shown harmful images, asking myself the same questions: “Should teachers use potentially harmful images in their classroom? Is choosing to do so a form of “pedagogical violence”? And for teachers who do decide the benefits of presenting an image outweigh the potential risks, what are ways to ameliorate the harmful effects?” Connor Kenaston proposes different solutions to this last question:

1. allowing students to opt out of the class when harmful images are being displayed,
2. prepare students and provide them with ample context, and
3. maintain a posture of care.

One could add to this list that showing potentially harmful images to students is always a conscious choice on the teacher’s end. Consequently, it should never be gratuitous: there should always be an intention, evident to the students, behind this decision. Why did I choose to show this eighteenth-century engraving to an audience of graduate students and professors? I wanted to reveal, in obvious and undeniable terms, that lesbianism was solely presented by the author (and by the engraver) as a stimulant for straight men, making my later argument about late eighteenth-century women authors refusing to show lesbian sexuality, hence creating a space of lesbian resistance and counter-discourse through silence, all the more convincing.

I take no pleasure in looking at this particular engraving – it even hurts me, to a certain extent. My lesbian identity is negatively challenged by this representation, as old as time, of lesbianism as a stimulant for straight men. But there is something healing about deconstructing the work that this engraving is doing; about showing it in order to disrupt the intended effect (sexual stimulation for the reader). This all goes back to the idea of care. In her work Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks explores the figure of the professor as a healer, the one who can heal students. But the healing goes both ways, as she argues that “when our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to the process of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice” . Keeping this in mind, one can argue that, with the appropriate parameters (allowing students to consult the material before class; allowing them to opt out; preparing them and giving them content; maintaining a posture of care; setting a clear intention), presenting students with hundred years-old pornography is not antithetical to envisioning the class as a space for healing. Just like within oppression, one can shape archipelagos of resistance, within what harms us, there is room for recovery.

“Other worlds exist beyond the stars—
More tests of love are still to come.” ¹

“People have forgotten this truth,” the fox said. “But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.”

I shall confess from the get-go that I am a fairly reluctant entrant into the world of DH. I have spent much of my life wondering how “the internet” works and where all our data actually goes when we save it on various drives and clouds. I have felt - like many others, I’m sure - that I simply don’t have the gene (or genius?) that makes one “tech savvy”. How ironic for an educator who claims that learning is for all to hold such views about themselves! This realization compelled me to take my first tentative steps into the Digital Humanities and apply for the Praxis Program. It Is here that, for the first time, the wonderful folks at the Scholar’s Lab held my hand and nudged me forward into a fledgling friendship with Git and HTML and other such monsters lurking behind my computer screen. Mike and Sulley were right, it seems: this laughter is so much more generative than terror! I now live in a world where curly brackets actually have meaning and a novice like me can dream of creating beautiful web pages.

Now that the Djinn of digital discomfort does not loom so large, however, I wonder more and more about the space technology occupies in our quotidian routines. Many passing thoughts from the last two decades have suddenly resurfaced. Chief among them is the relationship between virtual space and our religious and spiritual lives. I think back to the first time I was gifted a digital Qur’an. It was a palm-sized device with a backlit screen, a few small buttons for navigation, and the entirety of God’s word in Arabic (with Urdu translation!). A small speaker at the back allowed one to hear pre-recorded recitations of individual chapters. Ten-year-old Amna had never seen such a wonder! What soon followed the amazement, however, was utter confusion about the ethical rules of handling such a device. Was I required to make the necessary ablutions one does before touching a physical copy of the Qur’an? Could I leave it on the floor or place it near my feet? If the device was not charged, or the display screen got damaged, would it still have religious value? How would one dispose of such a thing?

With the advent of smartphones, the demarcation of sacred space is even more complex. The phone doesn’t care if you download the Pentateuch, the New Yorker, or a Judith McNaught novel; nor is it bothered by a Liberty Mutual advert interrupting hymns in a YouTube video – is the chant ‘Liberty, Liberty, Liberty’ really all that different from that of ‘Allahu, Allahu, Allahu’? People are getting married over WhatsApp video calls, but somehow one cannot perform the Ban -Yatra over Zoom.

When I shared the first draft of this post with Brandon, his response further knotted my thread of questions by raising the issue of augmented reality: “What would happen if you took a physical copy of the text and made some sort of second, intermediate space? A digital experience that supported, expanded, or complicated the sacred text that remained intact on the table in front of you?” I’ve since been daydreaming about all the different possibilities. Imagine holding your phone up to verse 22 of Surah Maryam (that describes the birth of Jesus) and seeing Caravaggio’s “Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence.” Or seeing a model of Babri Masjid when your camera points at Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. They could be instances of inter-religious dialogue or of mass moral outrage!

It’s been weeks since Brandon’s questions, and I still have no adequate answer. What’s clear, however, is that virtual space is not merely an extension of the physical, nor does it follow the same rules. Is it the Realm of the Malakūt made visible? Am I simply experiencing Durkheimian anomie? Who knows? What I can say with certainty is that, for the religious mind, each interaction with the digital world demands that we reconfigure our notions of sacrality – and our relationship with it – in this new dimension of existence.

(This blogpost is (hopefully) the first in a series that explores my anxieties, suggestions for intervention, and tangential ruminations about the interaction of DH and digital space with religious modes of thought.)

When I was a kid, I spent hours playing with stuffed animals in a society I had created for them called AnimalLand. I remember designing and building homes using cardboard for the walls, which I then decorated with acrylic paint and wrapping paper (as wallpaper). I cobbled together a set of indoor furniture, complete with old dollhouse pieces and the three-legged miniature “tables” that were occasionally placed in the center of a pizza. I immersed myself fully in this world, creating and building on storylines that detailed the everyday lives of the stuffed animals. They lived in different towns (each named after rooms of the house, such as Kitchen Town), had friends and families, attended concerts and baseball games, and read The AnimalLand Gazette daily. Many of these stories are memorialized in old photos, home videos, and art projects that my brother and I created.

You may be familiar with stories such as The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne, and Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. In each of these stories, inanimate toys become filled with life through the children who play with them. This also describes my childhood relationship to my stuffed animals; they took on a new meaning beyond simply being stationary textile objects.

Today, I have a similarly imaginative outlook. I am delighted by seeing little birds hop along the sidewalk, and I craft stories in my head about them. I pause to observe trees and imagine different ways in which their stories could be told. Of course, my relationship to these entities is different from my relationship to my stuffed animals, as the trees and birds are part of the world around me and do not belong to me. However, I am filled with a similar sense of creative inspiration when I spend time admiring my surroundings. This tendency towards storytelling and creativity serves as the foundation for my work in music composition. One of my main goals is to reach people through stories that are meaningful, and I hope to accomplish this goal through music and multimedia projects that not only communicate stories and concepts but also speak to people on an emotional level.

I have always seen music as a wonderful tool for communicating something, whether it be ideas, stories, or emotions. In my PhD work, I have begun to more deeply explore music’s potential as a powerful and compelling storytelling tool. One example of this exploration is a piece I created in the fall of 2023 titled “On the Strangest Sea”, whose aim is to tell the story of the saltmarsh sparrow. This tidal marsh species is threatened by sea level rise and human development, and could go extinct before 2050. My piece depicts the projected population trajectory of the saltmarsh sparrow through a technique called sonification, which broadly entails the conveyance of information through sound. The piece maps population to musical density. The tracks are meant to mirror the shape of a graph from a scientific paper - for example, when all 14 tracks are layered, that corresponds to the peak in the projected population. When there are more sparrows, the music is denser. Then fewer and fewer tracks remain as the population decreases, and the piano music eventually dies away. The number of tracks at any given point is proportional to the population at that point on the graph (7 seconds of music elapsed = 1 year has gone by in the graph).

To create this piece, I recorded individual tracks, each comprising a different set of pitches from one overarching collection, to represent the birds. I listened to previously recorded tracks while I played, improvising with myself to mimic the unpredictability of the birds. They are quiet and shy, so much of what they do is left to the imagination, especially if you’re not a scientist observing them. A pulse, which I recorded on my electric violin, is heard every 7 seconds to denote each year that passes on the graph.

The graph on which the piece was based is from Field, Christopher R., et al. “High‐resolution tide projections reveal extinction threshold in response to sea‐level rise.” Global Change Biology 23.5 (2017): 2058-2070.” Below I have a screenshot of my Logic Pro project depicting how the different piano tracks layer on top of one another and mirror the shape of the graph.

You can listen to the piece here.

As I progress through graduate school, I intend to continue exploring this sort of storytelling through music projects. Some of my ideas include collaborating with animators, creating stop-motion short films, and combining music with photography. I have for several years enjoyed pursuing amateur photography, which allows me to engage more deeply with the world around me and gather inspiration for my creative process. When I take photos, I tend to zoom in on the small details so that I can examine them in relation to the bigger picture: the context within which they are situated.

I think that the Praxis Program will serve as an ideal environment for me to learn new modes of storytelling and become better acquainted with different audiences. I am excited to learn how to use various digital humanities tools and to learn how others use these tools in their work. In addition, I am looking forward to exploring possibilities for collaborating with scholars in other disciplines. I can’t wait to collaborate with the Praxis fellows and the staff of the Scholars’ Lab!

My stuffed animals are still treasured companions. I often reflect on the time I spent in childhood imagining worlds for them; every scrap of paper I drew on, every newspaper article I wrote, and every stuffed animal’s story holds immense meaning. All of this “pretend play” served as a crucial aspect of my development as an artist and musician, helped me to develop my creativity, and deeply influenced my approach to the work I do. I’m excited to explore new worlds of storytelling through my time in the Praxis Program!

Bun & Lambie, some recent additions to my collection!

“With the younger generation, video is more acceptable. Kids have phones, iPads, everything you know? So if you’re using this media that’s accessible to kids, you’re at least feeding culture and language into the digital space. The digital space right now, a lot of people are scared that it’s taking our young people away. Moving away from culture. So we need to put culture into that space, because that’s already where they are.”

- Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri, Tiwi artist

This quote is from an interview I did with Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri during the Darwin Aboriginal Arts Fair this past August. I study contemporary First Nations art from Australia, so I was lucky enough to visit his community, Milikapiti on the Tiwi Islands, back in June as part of my research for graduate school. I was introduced to art from the Tiwi Islands when I had the opportunity to curate an exhibition titled Performing Country at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection (March 2023-Februrary 2024). One of the galleries of the exhibition was entirely dedicated to Tiwi art and, through the research and consultation process of that project, I interviewed Tiwi artists about their work.

Performing Country was centered around the concept of performance and its relationship to art production. Much of Tiwi artistic practice is related to song, dance, and the performance of ceremony. The designs seen in prints and paintings in museum galleries are derived from the practice of painting the body for ceremony. When I started to speak with the Tiwi artists about their ideas of performance in artmaking, they introduced me to their recent work with video.

Video art is relatively new on the Tiwi Islands, with the first piece produced by their art center, Jilamara, in 2020. The piece was called YOYI (dance) and it involved 30 artists dancing their totems on their Country. When talking with the artists who worked on it, they said that the piece not only functioned to share their culture with outsiders, but it also was a way of documenting their cultural practices for their own community.

Heenan-Puruntatameri very adeptly articulates this tension in his quote: technology is moving the younger generation away from Tiwi practices, but video and digital projects seem to be the way forward in preserving and generating culture. A lot of Indigenous Australian communities are grappling with the same issues, and a common solution seems to be digital learning centers and cultural archives.

The Mulka Project in Yirrkala is perhaps the prime example of this type of institution in practice. Mulka is attached to the community’s art center and provides a space for photographs, videos, and documents to be digitally stored and continuously accessed. The founders of Mulka, like many Aboriginal communities, realized that a lot of media about their ancestors were dispersed in national and international collections. Mulka provided an on-site keeping place for all of this material. Originally envisioned as an archive, now artists have used old voice recordings, films, and photographs of their ancestors in artistic projects, like Ishmael Marika’s piece Rarrirarri (2023). In this large installation piece, Ishmael digitally recreated and then projected the footsteps of his grandmother onto the floor of the gallery. The installation is accompanied by an audio recording of his grandmother singing.

Jilamara is trying to construct a similar digital media center in Milikapiti. Artists like Heenan-Puruntatameri lead the way in thinking about how to engage with digital media in a way that will respect Tiwi tradition by moving the culture forward.

As a fellow in the Scholars’ Lab this year, I am very lucky that I get the tools to think about Tiwi video/archival work not only art historically but also through a digital humanities lens. In addition to being a graduate student, I am also the Assistant Registrar at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection which means that I am often the person who chooses how to store and format the museum’s data. With video and performance art possibly becoming a part of the museum’s collection in the future, I am left with a lot of questions about these media that I hope to explore in future blog posts:

• What does it mean to own a piece of video art, especially when it involves the performance of ceremony?

• How can museums conserve video work?

• What does video allow Tiwi artists to do that other media doesn’t?

• How does the medium of video change the audience of the artworks?

On my very first day at UVA, I met Rennie Mapp at a bus stop. I asked this random woman for directions, we shared the short ride to Central Grounds, and she asked me about what my plans were here in Charlottesville. I was absolutely beaming with energy for all the plans I didn’t yet have, and after listening to my ecstatic ramblings, Rennie gave me an enthusiastic pitch about all the exciting opportunities available for digital humanities research at the university. She gave me her card, and I had to know more. I wasn’t a medievalist then, I didn’t have an advisor yet, I didn’t even really know where to find New Cabell, but first thing, I knew I ought to look into this DH business.¹ Since then, I’ve been dipping my toes into all things DH at UVA. I have spent the past several years exploring DH methods through workshops, coursework, conferences, and collaborative projects — building a prototype of a digital edition (something I’ll touch on in another blog post) and working on XML-encoding projects like Lives of the Saints: The Medieval French Hagiography Project with the mentorship of my advisor Amy Ogden. My dissertation project is the culmination of all these experiences and a chance to push the boundaries of what a digital edition can offer.

So, salut, SLab enthusiasts! My name’s Loren Lee (from Tennessee) and I’m thrilled to continue integrating DH methods into my research and to contribute to the Scholars’ Lab as this year’s Digital Humanities Fellow. I’m in the last year of my PhD in the French Department, where I specialize in medieval literature, manuscript studies, and Old French translation. For years now, I’ve benefited from the relentless encouragement of my mentors in the French Department, and now, I have fuller access to the rich guidance available through the Scholars’ Lab community. The DH Fellowship gives me the opportunity to dedicate this year to completing my dissertation — a digital edition of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman verse redaction of La Vie de sainte Marie l’Égyptienne known as Version T.

Version T, which has never before been published translated into a modern language, offers a compelling narrative of bodily and spiritual transformation as the penitent saint Mary chooses to abandon her former life as a prolific sex worker in favor of ascetic, solitary existence in the desert. For decades, she lives peacefully, grazing on grasses and drinking directly from streams, modeling for readers profound humility. But Version T complicates the basic narrative of good-girl-gone-bad-gone-good-again, suggesting that the act of offering one’s body for the comfort of others is not just redeemable, it is downright Christ-like. Despite the rich manuscript tradition surrounding this text, it has been somewhat neglected in scholarship, which is another one of the reasons why I’m so eager to work on it. Although saints’ Lives as a genre was hugely popular in the middle ages, modern scholarship on the literature of the period has been largely fixated on more ‘secular’ texts like romances. By examining challenging texts like La vie de sainte Marie l’Égyptienne, we can gain a greater appreciation of medieval popular culture and we can build a more nuanced understanding of female representation in the middle ages.

My dissertation will offer new insights into this puzzling text while also experimenting with innovative digital editorial methods. Readers of my edition will be able to more intuitively visualize common medieval manuscript features like textual variations among the extant copies, excised elements like cut out miniatures and ripped folios, and scribal errors and abbreviations. All of these common aspects of medieval manuscripts are typically lost as they are tidied up in print editions, but they are integral to the manuscript reading experience. Flexibility is something that digital editions can offer in a way print cannot, and I’m eager to explore how dynamic publishing systems like Quarto can shape the way a modern audience reads a medieval text. My project seeks to make a commentary on the profound digital turn in manuscript studies, which has forever changed how we access and interact with premodern sources and how we conceptualize preservation and accessibility.

This year at the Scholars’ Lab, I’ll be working on transforming my XML-encoded manuscript data into a functional, interactive digital edition. While I’ve laid much of the groundwork already — completing XML encoding for the eight manuscript copies I’m working with and making progress on key translations (more on this in another blog post) — I still have a lot of work ahead. My hope is to create an edition that not only presents the text but also fosters a deeper understanding of the editorial choices that go into creating such a work.

The Scholars’ Lab is the perfect place for this next phase of my research. With mentorship from the SLab’s experts like Jeremy Boggs and the chance to collaborate with my fellow DH scholars in Praxis, I am confident that I’ll be able to produce something truly innovative. I’m also looking forward to engaging with the wider digital medievalist community, learning from their insights, and hopefully establishing for myself a foothold in the field as both an early career medievalist and DH scholar.

Throughout the year, my blog posts will share updates about my own progress, challenges, and discoveries, and I’ll point interested readers in the direction of other cool developments in the intersection between digital humanities and medieval manuscript studies.² I’m eager to see how the year unfolds with the support of the Scholars’ Lab team and how we can do some new tricks with some very old books.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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