I just finished my time in the Praxis fellowship, a year-long program that introduces PhD students to the various aspects of digital humanities. We concluded the program by presenting on all of our various projects that we worked on throughout the year. Leaving Praxis is hard for many reasons: where will I ever find a group of four other PhD students that I love to work with so much? How can I ever have so much fun in a classroom again? And where am I supposed to go to get my weekly little bowl of cheese that Jeremy Boggs would often provide?

While my structured time in the Scholars’ Lab is over, I realize that I now see potential DH projects wherever I go. A former Praxis fellow asked, during our final presentation, how we would want to expand on our hackathon project that analyzed the 1913-1934 issues of UVa’s satirical newspaper The Yellow Journal. I responded that I would like my cohort to present our poster at a conference and maybe even turn it into an exhibition. The month-long hackathon was hopefully only just the beginning of using digital humanities methods to engage with questions of satire and anonymity.

Brandon and I have also briefly discussed working on a DH project about the reality competition TV show Survivor. As noted in my previous blog post, I am unfortunately a huge fan of Survivor and treat every season like it’s my personal March Madness with weekly watch parties and a competitive bracket. Since the main game mechanism of Survivor is “tribal council” where someone is voted off the island every week, tracking voting stats (and stats in general) has become a huge part of being a fan of the show. For example, fans will count how often a player voted with the majority in order to determine how well they’re playing the game. Players are also judged by how many collective days they’ve been on the island, with Boston Rob lasting 152 days over 5 seasons and Parvati Shallow lasting 149 days over 4 seasons. There’s even an entire subreddit called r/Edgic (or “editing logic”) dedicated to figuring out who the winner of a season is based on how much screen time they’re edited to have and what music plays in the background of their confessionals.

There is seemingly an endless supply of “data,” including the transcripts of all 597 episodes of Survivor, to use for DH projects. I think back to one of our first text analysis assignments during Praxis: writing a code that could read the text of Much Ado About Nothing and track the total number of lines said by the two main characters, Benedick and Beatrice. That lesson could easily be applied to the transcripts of the Survivor episodes: how much more are men talking in each season? Does this change over time? Do winners speak the most? How do numbers of confessionals relate to who is voted out?

Aside from those projects that are very far outside of my own area of research, I also have been thinking about how DH informs my art historical research and intervenes in exhibition spaces. Back in November, I went to New York City on a marathon 24-hour trip to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The highlight of the trip was the Whitney’s exhibition Edges of Ailey that celebrated the life and work of the dancer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). I was attended the exhibition on a Friday evening when tickets are free and the museum is open until 10pm. The pleasantly crowded and dimly lit gallery space filled with pumping music almost resembled a nightclub instead of a museum. Above the selections of paintings, sculptures, and archival materials, there were several performance recordings projected onto the wall in a frieze that ran around the perimeter of the room. As I walked around the gallery, I thought about how much of this multimedia exhibition was made possible through DH work. It’s difficult to capture the legacy of a dancer in a space usually reserved for static materials, but the curators used timelines and data visualizations to draw connections between the wide range of displayed objects. It was clearly effective; I’ve never seen the Whitney so packed with people from every demographic (even on other free Fridays).

My current research is about Indigenous Australian video installations and performance pieces. Displaying these dynamic works in traditional gallery spaces requires a different type of intermedial design and curation. I think that DH work is the answer to a lot of the issues that multimedia installations pose. DH has the power to transform the museum space from an archive into an intercultural experience.

I am nervous about publishing this post because what if I don’t follow through on any of these projects, and this post acts as documentation of my failed aspirations? But I guess that isn’t the point… this post is about how Praxis made me think about everything through a DH lens, leading me to new questions that I wouldn’t have thought to ask before. Now every time I watch Survivor I have Brandon Walsh’s voice in my head saying “our next project awaits!”

In 2020 during lockdown, I developed a surprising new interest: reality TV. I never watched reality TV growing up but suddenly I had unbridled time to watch all forty seasons of Survivor in about six months. As my reality TV journey has led me to many different shows since then (Big Brother, The Traitors, and Love Island USA), I’ve now settled on a new project of conquering all twelve installments of The Real Housewives. With this ongoing and all-consuming project in mind, I’ve discovered that Digital Humanities is nearly indistinguishable from the concept of The Real Housewives.

1. Digital Humanities and The Real Housewives were invented around the same time. As I learned during one session of Praxis, DH was originally called “humanities computing” until the book A Companion to Digital Humanities was published in 2004. This circumstantial rebrand wound up having long-running effects on how the field thinks about itself. The first season of The Real Housewives premiered in 2006, only two years later (causal relationship?).
2. Digital Humanities and The Real Housewives both have misleading names. As we’ve learned throughout the semester (and from Oriane’s blog post), there are no restrictive rules around what is and what is not a DH project. Our DH workshops didn’t even involve working with digital tools, but instead introduced participants to different interdisciplinary methodologies. Similarly, The Real Housewives is a misnomer because its stars are generally not housewives. They’re often successful businesswomen and sometimes aren’t even married. Being a “housewife” is a very loose term that encompasses a lot of different types of people.
3. Digital Humanities and The Real Housewives are both people-centric. If you haven’t watched The Real Housewives before, every episode basically consists of wealthy women having conversations in different locations and at varying volumes. The most compelling part of the show is how the women solve (or fail to solve) complex interpersonal conflicts. I too have complex interpersonal conflicts with people in the Scholars’ Lab (Jeremy Boggs)¹ but that isn’t the point… Digital Humanities is also about drawing connections between critical humanities questions and digital tools/methods. DH work is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and dialogic.
4. Digital Humanities and The Real Housewives defined my second year of grad school. This year has been really tough for me academically: I had to submit my Qualifying Paper back in November and this month I will take my comprehensive exams. I use my brain all day long for really hard things so the last thing I want to do is watch TV that uses it even more. The Real Housewives is the perfect show to watch to escape the horrors of grad school. I feel the same about Digital Humanities… the projects that we worked on in Praxis were so different from what I was doing in my own research that it felt like an exciting and stimulating relief from my other academic pressures. Praxis meetings quickly became the highlight of every week… as did my Real Housewives of Salt Lake City study breaks.

My cohort just finished our second week of Praxathon and I wanted to reflect on the development of our project and how we ended up focusing on conducting text analysis of the UVa students’ satirical publication, The Yellow Journal.

For me, this project started back in 2018 when I was accepted into The Yellow Journal as a second year undergraduate student at UVa. The Yellow Journal is an anonymously-published satirical newspaper that has operated on and off since 1913. Undergraduate students know The Yellow Journal for its members’ semesterly tradition of disrupting libraries during the first day of finals by raucously distributing the publication while masked and wearing all yellow… and often blasting Yellow by Coldplay or Black and Yellow by Wiz Khalifa on giant speakers. I started my tenure as a satirical writer with the headline and article below:

Hardest Part of Getting Accepted into the Comm School is Needing to Replace All of Your Friends, Student Says

As the season of applying to the McIntire School of Commerce approaches for second years, older students reflect on their prior application experiences. Kody, a fourth year in the Comm school, explains that the application itself was easy; he had no doubt in his mind that he would get in. The hardest part was letting go of all of his non-Comm friends afterwards. “I just can’t let failure into my life,” Kody explains. “Once you’re in the Comm School, you have to start setting standards for your friends, and most of my friends weren’t meeting mine.” Kody was on the fence about keeping his Batten friends, but eventually decided against it. “Hanging out with them is bad for optics, in my opinion,” Kody stated. “While Batten kids are also good at networking, I can’t let their morals get in my way. They’re all about government intervention… hey dummies, what about the invisible hand?” Drew, an Economics major, elaborates on his ended friendship with Kody: “The minute my roommate Kody got accepted, he turned to me and asked me to move out. I was heartbroken, we had been living together since first year. In fact, he’s also my cousin. But I understand… it had to be done.” Drew wasn’t sure if it was worth it to even continue college after his rejection from Comm. To him, having no diploma at all is better than getting an non-Comm Economics degree.

Outside of writing headlines and articles, Yellow Journal members were also in the midst of digitizing and archiving the entire history of the paper on our Google Drive. The publication started in 1913, but it was only published regularly starting in 1920 and then was subsequently banned in 1934 by the UVa administration due to its anonymity. The publication then resumed in 1987, having its own office next to The Cavalier Daily with a modest amount of revenue from selling ad placements. The paper was discontinued again in 1999, but a group of students revived it in 2010 which resulted in its current, ongoing iteration.

In late 2019, I realized that we were approaching 100 years since The Yellow Journal was published regularly and I applied to a few grants that could possibly fund a special anniversary issue. I wanted to use the extensive archive work that members had so painstakingly organized for future members to look back on. The idea was to publish some highlights from our archive, especially the jokes that still remained relevant today. With quarantine in March 2020, however, interest from my collaborators waned and I eventually abandoned that project. I knew that I wanted to return to working on a project about The Yellow Journal someday because it provided such unique insight on the student experience of the University. Also, even 100 years later, many of the early issues are still so funny.

My position as a former member of The Yellow Journal was definitely the reason that the subject was brought up as a possible topic for our Praxathon, but I don’t think this project would have necessarily worked with other cohorts. The final section on our charter is titled “Make Learning a Playful Process.” That was a big goal of our cohort: to approach the work in a fun, lighthearted way. I wasn’t completely sure about the viability of that pledge when we first wrote the charter. I didn’t know the rest of my cohort well at the time and I was still very operating in “traditional graduate classroom” mode. As we are approaching the end of the year, however, I think I can now safely say that we made every single part of Praxis fun and playful. I spend a good portion of my time in Praxis attempting to stifle my laughter at Oriane’s 10,000 things to commit to Github, Shane’s river drawing, or Brandon attempts to find new phrases because we accidentally made him insecure about saying “for what it’s worth.”

When I first pitched The Yellow Journal as an idea for Praxathon, I was mainly thinking about how it made sense as a project in a practical way: we already had access to high quality digitized records of all of the issues. The scope seemed manageable and it did not require too much preparatory work. As we’ve progressed in the project, I’ve slowly realized why it resonated with us as a group beyond logistics. Since we’re all graduate students at UVa, we are all familiar with and invested in the University’s history (especially told from a student perspective). We want to have fun with the material, which has led to many instances of us sitting in the fellows lounge and reading funny headlines out loud to each other.

Most of all, I think that the way we’ve developed the project has played into our individual and collective strengths. I never even thought about looking at student records from the 1920s and 30s but Gramond, being an incredible historian and lover of data, introduced us to that possibility. Oriane has done some amazing research on the history of the University at the time period that we’re looking at and, more generally, on analyzing satire. Because of her research of poetry, Amna was already interested in many of the text analysis methods that we’re using so she has expertly led us in thinking about how to apply those to The Yellow Journal. Kristin, as always, has shown herself to be an amazing problem solver, ready to tackle any coding task with such resolve and creativity. I just love assigning tasks to people so I have commandeered our Trello board.

Our poster will hopefully be done in the next few weeks, but it is clear to me now that the process, or journey, through the Praxathon is much more important than the end product. As I read through our charter again, I realize how true to our goals we’ve been and how interdisciplinary (and fun!) our final project is.

…judging from my notes:

• “A blog post can be anything you want it to be”
• What would you like the Scholar’s Lab staff? SNACKS
• who is the “public”?
• Git is how you engage with the community in code
• Computers are deterministic, and determinism is a cage
• Coding as labour
• International Morse Code: actually, not a binary system but trinary (dots, dashes AND pauses)
• “DH can meld critique, social justice, technology, studies of form and language”
• Consideration for an algorithm: space and time
• US = odd Bonne Maman jars fixation
• sometimes, when we write code, we have to think about strange cases. Think about “edge cases” (technically allowed, but unexpected)
• in Python, WHITE SPACE MATTERS A LOT
• Workflow: pull, edit, save, add, commit, push
• Attention is not a renewable resource
• Speculative minimalist workshop design can offer both training in digital pedagogy and transformative professional development
• Idea of “beyond buttonology”
• Hack-a-thon: short-term collaboration intervention together, lightweight, interesting
• 1. Entice, 2. Inform, 3. Provoke
• SAVE THE FILE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (for changes to appear) (ctrl+s)
• Praxathon = research interest + format + method
• Is it happy or is it sad?
• Just because it’s low tech, doesn’t mean it’s not technical
• Teaching is more than delivering content. Your classroom may be the only safe space some students have.
• “Too many ghosts:(“
• How to credit: potentially create a humans.txt. file
• Inside HTML, tells it to treat it as Javascript
• Favourite Yellow Journal headline: “UVA OUT OF NOTABLE ALUMNI, FORCED TO NAME THE NEW DORM “BANJO KAZOOIE”

1. Things I have learnt from the Scholars’ Lab folks:
• How to brew the perfect cup of coffee.
• It is okay to love speculative fiction as a grown adult.
• Silent presence can be as welcoming as words.
• Imposter syndrome is here to stay. But that’s okay.

2. Things I have learnt from my Praxis cohort:
• The joy of lazy consensus.
• Stuffed toys are acceptable gifts for adults.
• The words ‘Lesbian’ and ‘cannibalism’ can be used in the same breath.
• My childhood obsession with the Little Mermaid was more damaging than I could have imagined.
• The corrupting influence of power is lost on Project Manager Emmy.

3. Why Praxis works:
The ‘digital’ in DH may be what attracts grad students, but two months in, it’s the people that make you want to stay. Seeing glimpses of the relationships built over years shows students what it means to truly practice the humanities. To acknowledge one’s own humanity and grapple with its needs, and to learn how to navigate the networks of identities within us at each given moment.

4. Things that I may or may not steal on my last day as a Praxis Fellow:
• Shane’s book on miniatures that I initially thought was about miniature painting.
• Brandon’s poster of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Shapes of Stories.’
• Amanda’s giant baguette.
• Jeremy’s general air of nonchalance.
• Ronda’s hair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two months into this fellowship, I have prayed in the following places:

• The Grad lounge
• Brandon’s office
• Shane’s office
• Amanda’s office

The first time, it felt strange. I had barely known everyone for a week. I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I didn’t want to seem like I was putting on a show of religiosity. I didn’t want to be stereotyped and put into a box.

Each time I asked if I could pray in the Scholars’ Lab space, those around me were extremely accommodating, offering to leave the room to give me privacy. That made it feel like even more of an imposition. I felt too conspicuous, too seen. The kinder everyone was, the more uncomfortable I felt. I couldn’t make sense of it. Why did this kindness make me feel like an outsider?

Soon enough, the afternoon prayer started eliciting other uncomfortable thoughts. Once, as I unfurled my prayer mat, I wondered if the DH tools we discovered would ever support Punjabi or Urdu (my research languages). Shane and I had spent an entire morning trying Tesseract’s OCR software on images with Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi text, but the invariable result was gibberish. A few weeks later, when I wanted my name in both English and Urdu on our Charter website, Jeremy said he’d figure out if and how that was possible. I nearly told him to forget I mentioned it. I remember noticing how brown my skin was as I prayed that day.

The experience of double consciousness each time I pray in the Scholars’ Lab is a stark reminder that I don’t fully belong in the ‘Digital’ Humanities. I have to be accommodated for, adjusted to, and worked around. It doesn’t matter how sincerely the Scholars’ Lab staff welcome me into their physical space. As soon as we face a laptop screen, I am stripped down to an anglicized, areligious, apolitical version of myself. For the computer only recognizes these fragments. Here, too, it has become the job of the SLab folks to stretch themselves in unexpected ways to make me whole again: by trying to find digital platforms and tools with Right-To-Left (RTL) language support; by hunting down essays on Global DH and Minimal Computing; by dredging up their own insecurities and limitations in conversations to assure me of my place in DH.

The message is clear: It takes the kindness and effort of individual DH scholars to make space for me within systems that were not designed for people like me. Grateful as I am, it is not kindness I want, but the chance to be an equal collaborator. To create and share knowledge across the linguistic communities I belong to.

In a recent paper, Masoud Ghorbaninejad, Nathan P. Gibson and David Joseph Wrisley have discussed the Anglocentric nature of current DH infrastructures that largely ignore the “digital habitus”¹ of RTL language users. They state that “knowledge is not just cultural content embedded in language; it is also infrastructure that allows that content to be represented, circulated, and preserved for the concerned communities.” Of the many tools I have discovered these past few months – Omeka, Voyant tools, MALLET, Tesseract, to name a few – not a single one supports Urdu or Punjabi in any meaningful way. As a multilingual South Asian and a student of Muslim literatures, each interaction with these tools involves two things: (1) silencing the very voices within me that have already undergone violence at the hands of the English language, and (2) a fervent hope for alternatives.

(Thank you Brandon for the title!)

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…

In my last blog post, I talked a little about the Mulka Project which is an archive in an Indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia. Mulka has two parts: the digital archive, which consists of historical and contemporary material, and the digital production house, which uses the archival material to produce installations and works of art. Mulka began as a digital repatriation project that aimed to give Yolngu people access to their own family documents. Before Mulka, Yolngu people had to travel to institutions across Australia and internationally in order to see photos, videos, and recordings of their family members that had been collected by anthropologists and linguists. Now, Yolngu people can just pop into Mulka and download these documents whenever they want.

I visited Yirrkala, the home of Mulka, last summer and got to see the archive in action. They have a computer room where people can access the archive and put anything they want on USB drives. They also have an auditorium where visitors can queue up videos to watch on the big screen. It was incredible to watch people download hours and hours of family videos, and then come back the next day to download even more. Photos and videos of elders are cherished by many people in the community.

Perhaps most relevant to my work, however, is the space where the “new stuff” gets made (that’s how people at Mulka refer to it). Shortly after Mulka started in 2007, artists became interested in incorporating the archival documents into their artistic practice. Yolngu artists have produced films, songs, sculptural works, and projection installations using the digital materials of their ancestors.

One artist who works at Mulka, Dhukumul Wanambi, was recently a finalist for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in Multimedia. Her work was titled Gurka’wuy, the name of her father’s ancestral homeland, and featured the projected image of drone footage he recorded at Gurka’wuy surrounded by animated rings of his clan designs.

I had the privilege of moderating a panel with Dhukumul and another artist from Yirrkala, Milminyina Dhamarrandji, at the Asia Society in New York on Saturday, September 21st as part of the exhibition opening of Madayin: Eight Decades of Bark Painting from Yirrkala. It seemed so timely because I had just finished drafting my previous blog post about video art and the way that Indigenous artists are engaging with and building their own archives. I was not originally supposed to be the moderator for that event, but circumstance made it so that I had about 12 hours notice before I was supposed to get up on stage, in front of an auditorium of people at a major New York City museum, and facilitate a discussion about Mulka and Yolngu filmmaking. It was the first panel I ever moderated and it was going to be at such an immense scale!

After my initial freak out over being on stage and having to do public speaking, I reminded myself that my role was just to give Dhukumul and Milminyina the space to talk about what they wanted to talk about. It helped that I had been to Yirrkala recently and was such a huge fan of their work. Dhukumul talked so beautifully about how she wanted to use video to show the inextricable connection between land and Yolngu culture, like with Gurka’wuy’s footage of her father’s Country surrounded by his clan designs. The medium of video makes that connection so explicit while simultaneously acting as an archival document. Milminyina spoke about how important Mulka was for preserving culture for future generations.

Archives and their relationship with Indigenous people is very complex. Archives were used as a tool of colonization, stealing cultural objects in the name of “preservation.” There are many scholars who explain this ongoing history much more eloquently than I ever could. But it is really interesting to watch how Indigenous people conceive of and build their own archive, and how culturally generative Mulka has become.

Because I am only just starting my second year of my PhD, I am still in the process of trying to figure out what my dissertation project will be about. Coupled with my pursuit of Digital Humanities through Praxis, it feels like something keeps pulling me in the direction of video, performance, and the archive. And I’m lucky to know Dhukumul, Milminyina, and other artists who will continue to teach me about their art.

Emmy Monaghan with Dhukumul Wanambi and Milminyina Dhamarrandji at the Asia Society

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

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

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

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

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

This post is inspired by ‘“The Bolted Desk”’, written by Brandon Walsh. A sentence in particular keeps haunting me: “Where the chairs spoke of quiet restraint, their surfaces told a different story, narrating favorite bands, quotations, weekend adventures, and more. Freedom. Flexibility. Movement. Waiting to get out of the chair”. Here, Brandon opposes the chair as limitation and constraint, and the desk as a means to escape, to resist, to free oneself from not only what the chair is, but also what it represents.

As we found ourselves thinking about our Charter and what we were ready to commit to for the duration of the year together, I went back to this article and to the idea of the “bolted desk”. I expressed to the other Fellows a concern I had. As a TA, you learn that as soon as you make something mandatory, students will dread it, as apparently appealing as it seem. Similarly, I felt that convening of a specific time where we would meet each time could be theoretically beneficial, but concretely ineffective – especially as, because one of us lives a few hours from Charlottesville, there were only two days of the week where we could potentially meet up (and that excludes classes and other personal commitments). Shifting the concern from time to space, I suggested we could commit to hanging out in the Fellows’ Lounge as much as we could before or after Praxis, something we had started doing from the start of semester anyway.

After all, we are the first Praxis cohort to get to enjoy the fully renovated Scholars’ Lab and Shannon Library, which means that we are also the first cohort to experiment with a space dedicated to our needs. Amanda, Brandon, Jeremy and the rest of the Scholar’s Lab people are vocal about hearing our suggestions, in order to make the Fellow’s Lounge a space where we feel comfortable and accepted. Here, I have to single someone out and personally thank Amanda for their perpetual efforts in making the Scholars’ Lab space inclusive.

Creating a space where all students (especially students from minorities) feel included, is not an easy task. When I talked to Brandon about the Fellow’s space, he summed up my feelings perfectly: everything in the room, from posters to furniture, was “intentional”. Spatial inclusivity is the embodiment of an idea, not just the sign of mere decoration but the means to a deep connection and interaction.

Thinking of ideas to make the Fellow’s Lounge even more of our own, here are a few suggestions I collected:

• Praxis memento, so that each fellow leaves a trace of their passage here, for the future cohorts to add on to
• A yoga mat and yoga block
• A few cushions and a throw
• A coat rack
• Even more snacks!
• A poster (as opposed to a screen, for sustainability reasons) of a view, as there are no windows in the Fellow’s space (although some can argue that knowledge is already a window to the world…)

One of the best decisions I ever made, upon starting my PhD, was probably purchasing a console. The last thing you want to do, coming home after a day spent looking at and talking about books, is probably reading one. In this doctoral journey, playing videogames has been key to preserving my mental health. The Fable saga got me through my coursework. The Witcher 3 got me through my dissertation proposal. Similarly to what Gramond is reflecting on in his most recent post “Praxis is Invading My Life…In A Good Way”, I find myself seeing Praxis everywhere and applying the lessons we collectively learn each week to my personal life. Little did I know, these lessons would also apply to the game I am spending hours on this semester: Baldur’s Gate 3. I realize that Baldur’s Gate 3 is making me a better digital humanist. Just like Praxis is making me a better Baldur’s Gate 3 player.

• “A balanced party makes the journey easier”. I used to be afraid of close combat, hence excluding melee class characters from my party, while cherishing complementarity in AFK life (as Legacy Russell would say). This year, learning with diverse people from entirely different backgrounds has made me realize how true and applicable this BDG3 reminder is. Praxis fellows are just a team of adventurers, and the interdisciplinary nature of our present cohort is our best asset. Don’t get me started on what class each person would be (Brandon is the Scholar’s Lab bard, Amna would be a great cleric, etc)…
• Glitches are possible, but unlikely. In all likehood, there is something wrong with the data you entered. Close the game/VS Code, take a break, and go back to it once you’ve cleared up your mind. You’ll probably notice what the solution is then.
• When in doubt, just look it up online. Or rather: having to find the answer to your problem online is not something to be ashamed of. If you stumble upon a difficulty, chances are you are not the only one – someone probably asked the question online, just like someone probably solved the problem. Let IGN’s BDG3 walkthrough be your CodeNewbie community.
• Saving is a prerequisite and should be like breathing (here, I have a flashback of Brandon looking over my shoulder, whispering “You forgot to save it”). I used to hate having to save the game every minute or so. I remember getting visibly mad at my Divinity 2 coop partner because of his perpetual interruptions to save the game. It is only through Praxis and coding that I learnt that one cannot advance any further if the progress is not saved. Goodbye old me, who would insist on having a single save because it looked more aesthetically pleasing, and less messy. At least, now I don’t have to fight an entire market square just because I desperately wanted to loot a potato.
• Regular expressions are Illithid powers. Can you use it? Of course. Should you use it? Well… Jeremy told me regular expressions were a form of powerful voodoo or witchcraft – something you should not really mess with, especially if you are just learning code. Yes, I want to make coding easier, but turning into a mind flyer is not worth the sacrifice.

Now, is this post an elaborate strategy to have a D&D one-shot at the Scholar’s Lab? Perhaps. Note for the Slab’s Dungeon Master: I hope that the notes above convinced you that Praxis makes perfect. I am learning a lot. No more disgraceful potato looting.

I have always been intrigued by the process of coding. Part of this intrigue came from watching action and adventure television shows or movies that usually featured a tech person or hacker. Whether serving the interests of the protagonist(s), the antagonist(s), or sometimes both either willingly or by force, the tech person would navigate a dark screen full of numbers and letters that I now understand involves coding.

Recently, I have been rewatching the 2016 reboot version of the MacGyver television series which features a character named Riley who is an expert computer hacker who uses her skills to benefit the covert Phoenix Foundation. In one episode, the city of Los Angeles is under a ransomware attack by a hacker that causes a citywide blackout and takes control of a nuclear power plant that threatens the surrounding area. Upon recognizing the name N3mesis encoded within the ransomware code, Riley reveals that she helped write the code with two friends during her illicit hacking days before her work with the Phoenix, meaning one of her former friends was responsible for the attacks.

As the name N3mesis visibly appeared on the screen within the code, I had an epiphany from our conversations during the Code Lab on September 19 about how one can leave notes within the code to alert others of changes. In other similar TV shows and movies that I have watched involving coding, there have been references to messages hidden within the code that the protagonists have used to successfully confront the imminent threat or danger. Perhaps a month ago, these references to coding would have gone over my head, so it was refreshing to make connections to Praxis from popular culture.

Within television shows and movies, the image of a computer hacker features someone typing very fast, sometimes in an isolated location, and manipulating code to accomplish a task, whether for altruistic or selfish reasons, as seen in the image below. (Thanks Brandon for the introduction to HackerTyper.

Yet, as the exercises in writing algorithms in plain English have shown, there is a lot more involved in coding. With the tutorials to Git, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code, Shane, Jeremy, and Brandon emphasized that coding starts with the basics, learning and understanding commands like add, commit, pull, push, and reset.

With exercises in Code Lab such as the icebreaker assignment using Git, I believe it serves as a metaphor for the collaboration exercise. We add by contributing to a project, we commit to our changes, we push those changes to a larger context that includes the work of others, and then we pull to help merge those changes. If necessary, we may have to reset things and start the process over again.

The activity among our cohort was a bit of trial and error, such as accidentally clearing someone else’s work when seeking to make new changes. However, with assistance from members of the Scholar’s Lab, we eventually made progress in making changes without errors as reflected in GitHub. This icebreaker exercise serves as a metaphor for collaboration in general. Our cohort contributed to one project and sometimes we face challenges like inadvertently clearing someone else’s work. However, we can easily correct mistakes (or in the case of GitHub, see previous versions of our work) and we can take lessons about these mistakes to avoid making them in the future.

Praxis is invading my life…but in a good way. I hope to continue to make connections between my Praxis life, my academic life, and my personal life, such as the connections between coding and popular movie and television culture. I plan to take advantage of the opportunities of these experiences within the Praxis Program.

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?

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.

I was always very quiet in coursework as a student. I have always had some measure of social anxiety, and I felt it especially acutely when pressured to participate in the service of a grade. This was a constant in every course I took except one: in graduate school I took a course with David Vander Meulen on textual editing, and I felt more engaged and free to do so than ever before or after. While David was an exceptional teacher, there were other specific reasons I credit with the vibe in the room: it was a three hour seminar and there were only four students in the room. I could not hide and, perhaps most importantly, in a group that small there was a real sense that we were in it together, that we were accountable to each other for keeping the conversation alive. The social anxiety persisted after the course, but I’ve always remembered that group dynamic fondly.

Did I mention the course met Friday mornings at 8:00AM? We really depended on each other to stay awake.

We’re trying a new thing this year in the Praxis program to bring something of this same spirit into the room, to encourage the students to feel more direct accountability for each other in discussion. In the past, whenever we’ve run unmoderated discussions I’ve generally facilitated them myself or in the company of a couple other Scholars’ Lab staff. Even when the students present their individual research projects for a design jam, a staff member serves as primary respondent and facilitator. This generally works fine, and the students are usually up for it. But the result is that the students are most accountable to the staff. This year I am going to experiment with rotating this role through the room a bit more, to spread the accountability around a bit more intentionally. For each session that will have discussion, I’ve assigned one or two students as primary facilitators. For sessions where a student will present, I’ve assigned another student as a respondent.

I’m trying not to overthink this too much: the real goal of this is to encourage collaboration, co-teaching, and collective buy-in in ways that might not take place if the students only feel accountable to the staff. But Jeremy wisely noted that not everyone might know how to facilitate a discussion. I come from the English department, where I’m used to teaching and learning based around open-ended conversation. But not every discipline is structured that way. Jeremy suggested I make a few notes about how I approach running discussions. What follows is my own starter pack for running a conversation. I have our own students in mind as the primary audience, but I imagine there is something useful here for others as well.

• Questions not answers. This one comes from my literary studies background. I tend to see my role as a discussion facilitator as primarily about opening rather than closing, about shaping doors and inviting the group through. They can choose to enter or not, as distinct from other approaches to teaching that might pull the group along in a specific direction. When I write lesson plans they are almost always lists of questions to ask. Note that this is different from a project meeting, which has a specific goal and purpose! More on that in a different post.
• Other shapes. I am not the sole giver of knowledge in the room. Instead of an arrow that I carve into the ground, what other shapes can the group draw together? How can we design our own ways of building knowledge together? Everyone has something to contribute, and I am there to learn as much as everyone else. The experience is not unidirectional. It twists, turns, folds back.
• Give space. More than you think. I like to count silently to make room for others. When in doubt, sit quietly. Thinking is hard work, and hard work takes time. Don’t mistake silence for confusion or lack of engagement. Your silence can be a gift.
• Be mindful. Who has spoken a lot? Who has not? How can you enlist the aid of the sturdy talkers in making room for others? How can you draw in the quiet ones? Pay attention to where you’re going as well as where you’ve been. Don’t think of yourself as yanking the group towards an end goal. Can you point the way and then follow? Can you help draw connections among various things that have already been said? At the end, can you sum up where you’ve gone together? I often like to drawn on the board to visually represent the flow of our conversation.

It should be clear from all this that my approach is as much about community building as an end in itself as it is about the actual material. That is to say—I like my students and my discussions to live out a specific kind of learning experience together using the material as a vehicle. We discuss the material too-quite deeply-but the particular manner in which we do so is as important to the learning goals as any particular message about the specific topic of conversation. When Jeremy asked me to write this post I immediately wanted to turn the question back around. How does he run a discussion, coming from history? How does Ronda’s own background as a life coach and project manager change her angle of approach? Everyone brings their own selves to running the classroom, and I think there is beauty in this diverse range of teacherly identities. I would love to hear how others take on this role and how they approach the difficult task of developing group identity, making space for other voices, and building up a collective teaching experience.