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.

Amanda Visconti and I are starting a series of process experiments with public writing, where the goal is to experiment with format and mode while still attempting to get a public piece done in a single hour. For this first session we sat together, read some intentions and affirmations to set the tone, and then pulled from the Oblique Strategies card deck to get a prompt for us each to write on. The card Amanda chose hit me in the gut:

What mistakes did you make last time?

Given everything going on in the news right now, it’s impossible not to read this in light of the new presidential administration, which has just released a flurry of executive actions and destabilizing edicts designed to harm, divide, and panic. It feels like history rhyming, this time with capital letters. The first Trump administration felt excruciating and devastating in all sorts of ways, and this one already feels worse. I have been thinking endlessly about the memory of the last time, whether or not the work that we do in digital humanities matters in this context, and how we might make it matter more. It’s easy to despair.

What mistakes did you make last time?

In some ways, the quote rings to me of the cruelty of living in the past—exactly the sort of thing my therapist tells me not to do. “Don’t ruminate,” she would say, warning me against endlessly turning over in my mind the mistakes I made, the alternate timelines that didn’t manifest. It’s not enough to just warn oneself against worrying about past mistakes, though, and my therapist always goes on: “instead lean into your toolkit and all the work you have done to prepare yourself to deal with these challenging situations.” You are prepared for this. It is not the same, because you are not the same.

What mistakes did you make last time?

This is not business as usual, but the business of the usual carries on. The sun still rises. Care still must be given to those who need it. Work must still be done. There is an absurdity to this disconnect while the world increasingly aches with fire, death, and pain. I see in the card an invitation to the future, to dream of a better world than the one we have, to think beyond mistakes and towards rewriting the equation by different rules. We all have levers to pull to work against these forces each day. Last time was different because I was different. This difference can multiply. The math of dreamers, creating a world beyond the present crisis through the mundane work of small, everyday acts.

Who were you last time? Who are you now? Who will you be tomorrow?

Dream math. Pencils ready.

In which I argue we should be less stymied by fear of “virtue signaling” and more worried about not doing enough to assert, model, celebrate just and caring choices.

Sidebar: a Writing Challenge

Brandon and I are starting some Writing Challenge! sessions Brandon dreamed up, where we spend an hour using some prompt that makes us experiment with writing method and/or form/outcome, and commit to usually publishing something at the end. Today’s our first, and we’re using a card drawn from Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” prompt card deck to shape what we write. The chosen card says “What mistakes did you make last time?”

Writing Challenge Plan:

Hourlong, in the grad office with door closed (folks can join the challenge process, but this way we’re not interrupted with unrelated things, given we’re on a tight schedule for the hour).

• 10min prep: speak Brandon’s affirmations; decide whether we each select a card, or share the same card, from the deck; set up YAML for blog post so it’s ready to go
• 25min: writing
• 5min: finalize writing such that you’re ready to push it live
• 10min: wrap = push writing live, celebrate, share on social media
• (Ends after 50min for bio break, or has padding for if we start a few minutes late)

“What mistakes did you make last time?”

I’m trying to excise “virtue signaling” from my brain, as a too-finely-meshed filter on what I say. In a week where an Executive Order on WhiteHouse.gov pivoted to a new and deadly register of transphobic rhetoric (very quick summary here), it is more urgent than ever that we assert constantly, publicly, confidently the rights and dignity of friends and fellow humans most under attack and most harmed. I have repeatedly made the mistake of being too afraid I was “virtue signaling”, or overly worrying about legit concerns that still shouldn’t act as barriers (e.g. demanding cookies for doing something you should just do without applause, because it’s right).

It’s mattered to hear what others care about, to see them model that in words and actions. When the Scholars’ Lab has gotten pushback over some explicit focus on social justice, reparative resource decisions, or even just webpage language, it’s mattered that we could point to the digital humanities org’s explicit statement that the sociopolitical is inextricable from scholarship, and that positive social change* is inherently part of scholarly work. (* As a colleague pointed out recently, I’m hoping we can change that ACH wording to be even more explicit, e.g. using the unmistakable phrase “social justice” rather than the ambiguous, could be used negatively “social change”.) I regularly hear from folks at other institutions that Scholars’ Lab being vocal about social justice + scholarship has mattered in what it occurs to them they can do or say, or in being able to do so safely, or encourage their institutions to do better. I think of the small ways I’ve recently seen people suggest we do something less just, to avoid something that isn’t actually worth that choice—like not showing 3D VR demos of datasets related to the history of slavery when the governor might be visiting, or not mentioning social justice is core to what the lab does in a job ad meant to hire someone who’d be working directly with the lab in case it made the Provost slow or reject the ad getting approved. More reminders of what matters, why, that others are doing this work can help in these small moments when we have a choice.

I can’t know who cares if we don’t say. There are parts of my beliefs and being that I don’t bring fully to work. I don’t mean the ones that work doesn’t get to have; I mean things I’m not sure I can bring without pushback that I don’t want to deal with, ideas that are not widespreadly adopted yet like prison and police abolition, the power and real possibility of transformational justice, a real understanding of anarchism as approaches to empowering, collective-focused, no-unneeded hierarchies work. A few years ago, we were going around the table giving introductions to ourselves at the start of our yearly Praxis Program grad cohort teaching; one of the fellows mentioned their work as an abolitionist, and it occurred to me that no one in the lab had any way of knowing that I also believe in abolition. It’s part of who I am, and other folks don’t know to ask me questions about it if they don’t know it’s something I’m interested in; fellow abolitionists don’t know they have a potential ally.

“Virtue signaling” seems fine as a term used to encourage that we not only speak, but also act; that we don’t demand cookies to not be evil. I just don’t want it to keep functioning the way it’s been for me, as a mental stop telling me not to testify. Speaking up can feel hard, despite privilege. Doing it in tiny ways more often seems to help me build that muscle and better see my comparative safety. One such practice is how I find “we don’t do that here” powerful and easy to grab words in the moment; as is following up on any offered excuses with “nevertheless, we don’t do that here”.

I’m not claiming I’m particularly good at this. But I want to be talking about it more for learning, accountability. It feels urgent I learn to speak and ct more when privilege makes it safe (if not comfortable—differentiating between fear and discomfort is also key to just choices). We’re going to need to build ability to speak and act when it isn’t safe too, and that ability starts getting ready yesterday, or at least from this moment.

Ryan Cordell wrote on Bluesky: “We’ve lost the plot with “virtue signaling”—the initial impulse was to call out entirely empty gestures, but it’s been twisted into the idea that any expression of a moral stance must be vacuous—see Zuckerberg’s recent comments—but what if people signaling virtue is sometimes good, actually?”

I want to know what other folks care about, that I’m not alone, who allies are. We want to signal what’s virtuous. And I think that ties into another necessary behavioral practice: asserting what we know is right and just and caring, not being sidetracked by others’ assertions nor letting them set the conversation.

This post includes or riffs on some earlier writing I’ve done on Bluesky, including this thread about virtue signaling on Trans Day of Rememberance, and this QT of a good post by Ryan Cordell.

I’ve been struggling with how to name my blog posts. I have approximately 1 billion ideas for blog posts, but I just can’t get myself to write a title. Why is writing 10 paragraphs easier than writing 5 to 10 words?

To understand my issue, I started to think about the other things I’ve had to write a title for. The most significant projects I’ve ever named are museum exhibitions and their titles are, obviously, very important. The first exhibition I ever titled was called Boomalli Prints & Paper: Making Space as an Art Collective. This one was fairly straight forward; the first part of the title articulates the art collective’s name and the media that the exhibition focused on, while the second part came from a quote by one of the artists in the show. I only came up with the title after my co-curators I conducted hours of interviews with the artists.

The second exhibition that I titled was Performing Country. This exhibition was much more open ended than the first one. Instead of an exhibition that focused on a specific collective and medium, I was attempting to connect a diverse range of media from communities all across Australia. I really struggled with this one. I worked on this exhibition for about 10 months, and I don’t think I came up with the title until I was 8 months in. And that title ended up being 2 words. It was perfect though! I think this is the one I’m most proud of. It was attention-grabbing, it encapsulated the concepts that I was working with, and it used a term (“Country,” which refers to Indigenous ancestral homelands) that the artists themselves would identify with (which is always the most important thing).

The most recent exhibition that I named was called Issuing Modernisms. This exhibition is currently on view at the Special Collections Library and includes print media from the 1910s to 1940s. The goal of Issuing Modernisms was to investigate the ways that print media informed the construction of the modern American identity. The word “issuing” in the title took on multiple meanings: it was not only a gesture to the medium, with “issuing” being a word associated with the distribution of print, but also an allusion to the complicated ways these printed objects reinforced and constructed repressive ideas about gender, sexuality, and race. I liked this title a lot. It similarly took me months and many searches through a thesaurus to come up with 2 words.

What I’ve learned from thinking about these processes is that I have to be really, really sure about something before I can title it. If a project or essay doesn’t have a title yet, it seems like it’s in an ongoing draft form that can change direction at any time. The minute it has a title, I feel like I suddenly assume some type of authority over those words. It feels final and wrong. Especially when I’m still in the learning process and I’m writing about a topic that is new to me. How can I title something that feels unfinished or ongoing?

This all sounds so dramatic because I’m struggling with titling a blog post, not my dissertation. I think this is symptomatic of other issues I’m having with the work I’m doing – I perpetually cannot commit to the end of a project, I always think I should be doing more and more work on it before it reaches its final form. As Professor Victoria Szabo said in her talk the other day, it’s hard to understand when digital humanities work is fully done. It seems like it can stretch on forever because there are always new pathways to follow. My only solution is to get over myself, understand that I did my best, and write that title…

Or, do I? Why do I need to? It’s not the same as why Drew said he needed to write a post.

It’s a thing I’ve been thinking about with some degree of frequency for quite a while. A little over eight years now.

In 2016—for all sorts of reasons I don’t feel comfortable explaining in detail—I deleted pretty much every trace of online self. My old Twitter account, @clioweb, which I registered the summer of 2006 (early adopter); My Flickr account; Del.icio.us (remember that?); even my GitHub profile and all the code repositories I had. I also deleted my entire website, clioweb.org, which I started in 2003 as a graduate student before WordPress even had themes, while colleagues at CHNM and elsewhere were wondering whether blogging was something academics should do. I don’t have backups of any of these things. I deleted it all with the intent to never return, for many definitions of return.

My favorite author is Ursula K. Le Guin, and my favorite story of her’s is “The Day Before the Revolution,” and my favorite line in that story is “True journey is return.” So, with hesitation and doubt, I returned and I continue to return. I didn’t return because of this line or this story, but I’m returning to that line now to think about why I might need to write a post here. Why I might need to write a post on my current website. Why I might need to return to sharing the thoughts and feelings and ideas in my head with whoever used to want to read those years ago, and who might still wish to read them.

This is hard for me now, though. The person that I was so many years ago, who could tweet, give a presentation, organize with energy and joy a fairly successful unconference, or even churn out a blog post without any hesitation and doubt on a weekly basis seems like a complete different person to me. It feels now just like it felt in 2016, when one day I looked around my desk and felt like all the things there belonged to someone else, and I was sitting in their chair waiting for them to return. Those memories feel like someone else’s memories, ones I can’t fathom trying to imitate now.

But like Whitman, I contain multitudes, as do we all. (Don’t worry; I’ve gone to therapy and take meds and do all sorts of “self-care” things, even though I loathe both the phrase and its overuse.) The person I was waiting for at that desk in 2016 was the person already sitting there. I still have to keep convincing myself of that. We’re all carrier of the multitudes of our selves, and work on returning to those multitudes in different ways. Who those multitudes actually are, and how they manifest to meet all of you who might read this or might meet with me over coffee or in a classroom is, for me now, part of the “true journey” I find myself on.

So, I need to write a post to simply take another step on that journey of returning to myself, and see how the journey progresses.