Pocket shut down just last month. One of my favorite internet finds, the web service let you bookmark pages for reading and, most important to me, save the content to read offline at a later date. As a tribute to the quirky little service that once was, I thought I’d share one of my favorite Pocket memories and the different kinds of reading habits it helped me cultivate.

“Save now, read later” might sound relaxed and methodical, but my use of Pocket was usually panicked. I typically dove into the app in a rush during pre-boarding at airports when I suddenly remembered, once again, that I had nothing to do during a flight. I never learned. One time, on the way to teach at HILT, I had digital humanities on my mind. I went to the blogs of some DH scholars who I admired and started saving as many blog posts as I could to read later. Because I was on a time crunch I went for depth over breadth. Instead of looking topically for particular things of interest, I grabbed all the blog posts from a few different people on their sites. I dove in on the flight and read each person’s blog chronologically from their first entry to the latest. As a part of my current book project, I find myself doing the same thing with the HumetricsHSS blog, reading all the posts in chronological order from the beginning.

Blogs work especially well for this immersive practice because the pieces tend to be shorter. It’s difficult to imagine reading a whole series of articles in one sitting, but you can often do that with a single person’s blog. Most of us, I would wager, tend towards a research process driven by specific questions and topics. Reading through a single scholar’s output chronologically feels like something else entirely. You get a sense of how a person’s thinking develops over time, how their projects and research questions in the past lead directly to the present. Given the nature of how people use blogs, you also see the arc of their personal as well as their professional lives. Success and loss. Pets and children. Illness and grief. I think about those reading sessions a lot.

I don’t fly very much these days, and Pocket is no more. But I want to hold onto the blogging deep dive as a reading practice. Folks often speak of the early 2010s as the moment of DH blogs. The next time I put together a syllabus, I plan to assign a few blogs in their entirety to introduce conversations about scholarly publishing, open access, and research processes. Rather than discuss the moment as something of the (not so) distant past, I want to make space for those conversations to live, for the thinkers to breath in their totality rather than as sound bites.

Sometimes, when I’m in the mood to blog but don’t have any ideas, I’ll pull from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies deck. I’ve written before about how invigorating the deck can be for pushing through creative barriers. Nothing helps me when I’m feeling stuck quite like a cryptic saying. I found today’s oblique strategy especially provocative:

Decorate, decorate

Decoration is not something I usually pursue. In my personal life, I tend to leave picture frames leaning against the wall for months after moving. I envy people who populate their home with plants, but I’ve never been able to keep things alive long enough to cultivate a green space. I can’t imagine ever getting a tattoo, though I’m always fascinated by the choices of those who do. My professional life follows this same trend. My approach to web design tends to be minimal—with a better sense of what I don’t like than what I do, I typically strip as much away as I can. I am fascinated by minimalist pedagogy, where you try to teach digital humanities methods using as little as possible. And as an editor I tend to strip things away to find the kernel inside rather than add in more text.

But I’m also put in mind of recent social media trends featuring a video of a person indulging themselves alongside unapologetic captions like “just realized I am a full-ass adult and can have ice cream for dinner.” Part of the joy in such posts is the recognition that you don’t need to justify such actions. Indulgences aren’t exactly decorations, but there’s a similar spirit of fullness. I’m thinking of my colleague Amanda Visconti’s recent DH2025 poster, which they (in their own words) decorated as aggressively as possible. There’s a freedom in decoration, in deciding to take up space in a particular way, in making a space your own. Decoration can be a survival tactic. A thing to show that you were there.

This past year our lovely students wrote a series of suggestions on our white board for how to survive 2025. I’m going to add my own: decorate. No other justification needed. To that end, here’s a photo of our cat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca Foote recently invited me to a part of an ACH panel on publishing in digital humanities along with Jojo Karlin and Nat McGartland. You can find other posts related to that conversation here.

During the recent ACH panel on DH publishing, Jojo Karlin commented on the sheer quantity of public writing that the Scholars’ Lab puts out into the world. In the moment, I flippantly referred to that volume as a kind of sickness that we couldn’t turn off. But I followed up with a more serious answer: as I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been making a concerted effort to write every day lately as a response to the cataclysmic political times that we live in. The real truth is that I believe it would become much harder for me to write if I were to slow down. Sharing things publicly is really an accountability mechanism more than anything else, a way to force myself to keep writing.

There’s an old saying among music teachers that practicing for one hour daily is more useful than practicing for seven hours once a week. There are a few thoughts behind this. For one, you actually damage your muscles beyond a productive state if you work yourself to the point of exhaustion. By contrast, the same amount of time measured out equally across a week yields a consistent and healthy amount of stress on your muscles, recovery time, and rest to build up the neural pathways in your brain that you ultimately want to get from practicing. The once weekly seven-hour approach is also less likely to yield useful practice time. With a big stretch of time like that you will, at best, need breaks. At worst, you will find yourself distracted, pick up your cell phone, or your brain will wander. It’s difficult to imagine what you would practice for seven hours in a row, let alone the degree of concentration that would be required to sustain it. You’ll be better at deliberate, intentional practice every day.

I’ve been approaching writing the same way. I’ll share a follow-up post about some different tools and tactics I use to keep the pace, but the underlying idea behind all this is that writing is a muscle, a skill that you can practice. If you do it every day, writing ultimately becomes easier whenever you sit down to do it. The approach is akin to what Twyla Tharp calls “the creative habit,” and I have had to get creative to keep it going. Somedays I will have a substantial chunk of time, but those days are rare luxuries. It’s more common for me to be scrambling to find a way to fit writing in however I can. Even five minutes at the desk matters—it’s a way to shake off the rust. I only have ten minutes while walking? I can spend it dictating into my phone. Two minutes before a meeting waiting for others to arrive? I can make some quick notes.

Therein lies the real secret: the daily approach is a way to save time in the long run. I learn how to write regardless of whether inspiration is striking. Since starting this practice, my voice is much easier to find when sitting down to write. The editorial process feels easier to navigate; I’m much less given to endless tinkering. I need writing to be as natural and easy as possible, and the daily practice is essential for that. Sitting down to a blank page is always frightening. It would be immeasurably scarier if I weren’t facing it down everyday.

In short, I don’t write every day because I have oceans of time. I write every day because I don’t have time to waste, and the muscle needs to stay loose to confront that reality.

If you’ve ever hung out with me for more than a few seconds, you know that I’m obsessed with process. I’m always talking about some new thing that I’m trying. I’ll do X thing over Y number of days until I reach some milestone goal. Cleaning, reading, listening to music—they’ve all been the subject of some program I’m trying out. Obviously not all of these schemes stick. My latest goal has been to blog every week, though, and I’ve been doing a pretty good job so far this semester of keeping up with it. This impulse to write consistently is my own way to try and deal with the political climate we’re living in. After all, if writing didn’t matter, the powers that be wouldn’t try so strongly to silence disagreeing voices. Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song has a great quote to that effect that has really stuck with me: “We have a choice— to be on the side of creation, or surrender to the powers that destroy.” I’ve been trying to cultivate this practice of creation for myself. My long-term goal is to make progress on my book project, something that often gets kicked to the back burner. To make this happen, I’ve decided to spend some time each day writing in whatever capacity I can.

At the same time, I’ve also been trying to get back into exercise, something I have never been fairly attentive to. When I was a kid, I was the least athletic person possible. As an adult I’m a bit better but only just. I’ll run for a bit, push too hard, then stop for a while. I’ve been trying something different lately. Rather than running until I hurt myself, as I usually do when I try to get back into it, I’m working through a couch to 5k program. I’m honoring the real needs of my body, starting basically from nothing and building up to a healthier lifestyle.¹

In this context, I’ve been thinking about writing like a muscle. How can I exercise my creative skills such that, when I sit down to write, I’m not waiting for inspiration to strike? What would it mean to build daily writing up in a sustainable practice? What would a writing plan that asks you to create every day look like if it was modeled on a running program?

I set about putting together a writing plan with this framing in mind. In running, conventional wisdom is that you only want to be adding distance or increasing speed any given week—not both. Applying this to writing, I aimed to produce a concrete number of words each day as opposed to, say, writing for a specified amount of time. This meant that I could fit my work into the cracks between things, typing on my phone or dictating while driving. I developed a plan for myself modeled on running programs that start out with small, set intervals—e.g., run for 15 seconds, walk for two minutes, run for 30 seconds, walk for two minutes. The proportions change, and the amount increases week by week.

Without further ado, here is the plan that I wrote and executed for myself in April:

• Week 1:
  • Write one book sentence every workday.
  • Write one sentence of creative work each day on the weekend.
• Week 2:
  • Write two book sentences every workday.
  • Write two sentences of creative work each day on the weekend.
• Week 3:
  • Write three book sentences every workday.
  • Write three sentences of creative work each day on the weekend.
• Week 4:
  • Write four book sentences every workday.
  • Write four sentences of creative work each day on the weekend.

My goals were very modest starting out: just craft one sentence. Each day, I added pebble by pebble to my final product, a mound that grew over the course of the month. This might feel ridiculous. What is the point of writing one sentence? How can you even get into that mindset? Fair critiques. It depends on how you work, but this is also part of the point. I treated it like an exercise by warming up. For me, this most often meant that I would spend five minutes while driving just thinking and then ten minutes dictating. At first, I intentionally stopped myself after the target number of sentences, but I would make a note of the upcoming topic for the next day’s work. Hemingway famously suggested that you stop writing in the middle of a sentence, and I similarly tried to make sure that the next day’s work would be ready to go. The pivot to creative work on the weekends was a way to keep my momentum going while adopting a restful mentality, a way to tie in something enjoyable while still respecting work/life boundaries. The creative work has been incredibly nourishing, and the practice has really helped push my writing muscles.

I’ve been very satisfied with the results of this program, and I’m going to keep it going as long as I can. Writing aside, I found that I was in a much better mood each day this past month knowing that I was creeping along. By the end of the month, I was writing nearly a full paragraph each day, and I abandoned my goal to stop writing after reaching my target. I found that I kept finding new ways to fit words in—five minutes here, five minutes there. Huge chunks of time are a luxury; I need to be able to grab the words when I can. All those sentences will accumulate. Slow progress still goes forward.

Gotta start walking.

Rebecca Foote recently invited me to a part of an ACH panel on publishing in digital humanities along with Jojo Karlin and Nat McGartland. Rebecca circulated some questions in advance of the panel that we might use to orient our thinking. What follows are some slightly edited responses to those prompts. More to come soon based on the conversation!

What has publishing and DH meant for you? What are some of the various platforms, venues, and structures you’ve used to publish your work?

The platform, venues, and structures are easier to start with. I have published in more traditional venues: journal articles, collected editions, and edited journal issues. And I’ve done a fair amount of work in spaces that are a bit edgier for the humanities but are pretty typical for DH: open access textbooks, open educational resources, blogging, and lots of cowriting. I’m currently working on a more traditional monograph that blends the two worlds by blogging as I go. And I also consider social media a form of publishing that I engage in regularly.

These spaces have had a wide range of tech stacks: WordPress, GitHub, Manifold, a Zoom discussion series that has outcomes hosted on Knowledge Commons, my own self-hosted Jekyll blog, and more. Perhaps the one anecdote that springs to mind most forcefully when considering the question: for my first article, I actually had to put a physical CD in an envelope and mail it to an older scholar. The thing got lost in the mail, and it wound up getting published three and a half years later. I think my frustration with that process actually affected a lot of how I approach publishing my work.

For me, DH publishing has primarily been a full court press, a focus on everything. I try not to throw anything away, because any piece of what we do in the Scholars’ Lab might be useful for someone. Publishing openly and frequently is, to some degree, about passing on the generosity, mentoring, and privilege that I’ve been lucky enough to receive so that others can benefit from it. I think of DH publishing less as about showing off my successes. It’s always felt more about trying to speak to people who might not have the resources that I’ve been lucky to enjoy, such that they can learn from what I’ve learned.

I often, frankly, think of it as answering the question “what have I learned today that I wish I knew yesterday? And how can I share it in a way that’s useful for someone else tomorrow?” Professionally legible components of the publication process have generally followed. A tweet might become a blog post might become a peer-reviewed article. But that has all happened as a byproduct of following my own North Star, which is sharing process-oriented work in public.

What do you consider when taking a project or your research from something that you develop for yourself into something designed for a larger audience? How do different publishing media and platforms affect your understanding of audience?

I think I take a pretty extreme view on this question: the bar is extremely low for me take something that was for me and put it in front of a broader audience. I think the reason for that is that I learn an awful lot from trying to put together a blog post. It helps me to refine my ideas. It helps me to feel like I have made a statement, and it’s often integral for me when I’m putting together larger pieces of work. Even if no one reads my work, even if the audience is just me, I still find it worthwhile to share a thing in public. I often start with that eventual aim in mind.

But that response is a bit of a dodge. To actually answer the question: what does it take for me to think about moving something from myself or a broader audience? It often starts in conversation with the people around me. If I have doubts, I’ll say to a student or coworker, “Hey, this is the thing I’m thinking about. Does that seem interesting?” The answer is usually yes. I don’t mean this to imply anything about the quality of my own work. I mean this more as a commentary on the deep sense in which we are all engaged in a collective attempt to work in a really difficult field, to understand challenging methods and how to pass them on to others. We are all trying to understand the place that these ideas and methods have in the larger academic economy. We’re all trying to sort that out, and we’re all looking for guideposts. And we all have something to share that is helpful to someone else, far more than traditional publishing structures allow us. I’m always happy to see others share work in process outside of traditional scholarly norms, and I try hard to promote the work others, particularly students and early-career scholars. I think it’s an important part of the mission of Digital Humanities to do so, a kind of wall-to-wall, collective solidarity of intellectual practice.

To your other question about how different platforms affect my understanding of audience—I think it’s especially important here to note social media, which sometimes gets left out of conversations about publishing. If there is a collective hesitation towards publishing openly for fear that it might have an adverse effect on your ability to publish traditionally, I think such fears are only amplified for sharing work on social media. For me, all these forms of publishing are interconnected. I have had tweets turn into blog posts turn into articles. I don’t think that time spent on social media platforms is a waste. Intentional time in those spaces trying out ideas, building an audience, and engaging with that network is time well spent. To sum up, all of these different venues do all have distinct characteristics and distinct audiences, but I try to think about them all as continuous. Each one has different affordances and limitations for doing so, but at the end of the day, it’s about the writing and the sharing. The technology I’m working with is writing.

How have you navigated conventional institutional pressures and expectations in the publishing process?

It’s important to contextualize my answers so far in response to this question. I occupy what is sometimes referred to as an alternative academic career. It is digital humanities position within a university library. I am Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab, and, within that role, my promotional structure actually doesn’t care all that much if I do any publishing. I think the library is happy to have me publish in an abstract sense, but I’m not getting any kind of direct promotional legibility for it. I’m never going to submit a report of my citation metrics to my place of work. I am extraordinarily lucky to be in a position that writing is supported by my direct supervisor anyway, even with the inherent challenges of fitting this work into my other job responsibilities.

I think it’s incumbent on those who enjoy institutional privilege to think about how this work can benefit those most feeling those institutional pressures you mention. I often think that the real beneficiaries of my publishing activities are my students, because I always think of any networks and opportunities I get from this work as in the service of what I can pass along to them so they can shine as the expert collaborators they are. I am working with lots of people who have much more direct intersections with the kinds of institutional pressures that one might expect from a publish or perish model. It’s my students who are considering whether or not to go on the job market. For them, the CV line can often be much more important. I often try to think in these terms when considering how to work with them. I absolutely love collaborative writing. So I frequently find myself asking: am I the best person to write a particular thing, or would it be better with other people? And if better with others, what venues could we find for it? So, to take one example, I asked my students to cowrite with me when I felt it was time to write about the pedagogical interventions in the Praxis Program. Writing together was useful to them, but it also made the piece better for including their voices.

How do you approach publishing when a project is collaborative?

As I mentioned before, collaborative authorship is pretty important to me, and it tends to be the bulk of what I do. It’s also frankly untrue to suggest that publishing is ever done fully in isolation (hat tip to textual criticism and Jerome McGann here). Whether it is your peers or your students, your editors or the people who host your finished product…writing is always a collaboration.

I’m especially interested in proactively cultivating this shared writing culture. In the Scholars’ Lab, we started a weekly opt-in writing time, where people can join and work on whatever they need to do. And then we also have monthly time to share back material for feedback. These tools are all throwbacks to my own dissertation writing process, when I had a writing group that was absolutely essential to me finishing. But I’m also interested in pushing us to think about the craft of writing in different ways. I’m obsessive about process. I have all sorts of different approaches to writing I’m trying any given week. One week I’ll try pulling a card from a deck for blogging inspiration. Right now I’m building out a writing program based on the couch to 5k model, where I’ll write one sentence every day for a week, two sentences a day for a week, and so on. By the time the month is done I’ll be used to writing a paragraph every day, and hopefully it will be easier to activate my writing muscles on command. I bring this up, because I’m constantly trying to enroll other people in kinds of experiments. “I’m doing this weird thing this week. Do you want to join?” I have found people are often up for it. This feeds into my answer for the last question, which is…

What advice do you have for someone looking to publish in the age but who is unsure of where and how to start?

My most important piece of advice is to look at what you’re already doing. I mean, really look at what you’re doing and break it down into all of its component parts. The academy tends to train us to think about publishing as one particular kind of thing that looks one particular way. But, in fact, what you are doing has so much more to it than you can fit into a single journal article or book. The process can all be meaningful, both personally and professionally. So my primary piece of advice is to start writing now. And don’t stop. Start making a practice of writing constantly, in as many different formats as you can, about as many different things as you can. Because you will find platforms for it, and it can all be useful to you. The more you write, the easier it will get to do so. My first piece of advice is just to start writing, and don’t wait for the publishing industry to tell you that you can do something. Your work is more meaningful than that, and it’s worth getting out there sooner than later. One could, quite reasonably, respond that there is only so much time in the day. And I hear you—I really do. We’re all trying to find ways to squeeze as much out of each day as we can, and everyone has their own pressures. Figure out what works for you and what you can sustain without burning out. You might have to get creative. I actually wrote this post by dictating it into my phone on the drive into work. It still counts! And I think my other writing has benefited from trying out all sorts of approaches to making it happen. In terms of finding your own platforms, I would find the people out there that you admire, find the work that they’re doing and the places they’re working, and try to find ways to join the conversation. Maybe that means starting a blog. Maybe that means starting email correspondence. Maybe that means using social media.

I’ve been conveying messages like these to students for years, and I typically offer a huge caveat. It’s truer, now more than ever, that it is not safe for every kind of person to be online. In particular, your work may increase the degree of risk you feel existing in such spaces. It is not for me to tell you what makes sense for you in this context. Your safety is more important. But I would encourage readers to think about the approach to open I have been describing not as a binary. Your work does not need to be only either fully open or completely closed until peer reviewed. Think of it as a continuum. What parts of your process are you able to put online sooner for others? What opportunities or risks might that entail? At the very least, make a practice of writing every day, whether you ultimately share that material or not. Because I think you’ll find it far easier to publish when the time comes. As John Coltrane perhaps apocryphally said, “We practice so when the doors of perception open, we’re prepared to step through.”

Creativity is a discipline. It takes practice.