I’ve a talk accepted to the 2026 Global DH conference, and share that proposal here both for its content and as another example of what a conference abstract can look like. I’ve added comments (in ‘'’code formatting’’’) highlighting how the abstract proposal is structured.

“Not having to ask: critical humanities making, zines, & analog tech for multilingual DH”

In “Having to Ask”, a doctoral colleague [2024-2025 Praxis Fellow Amna Irfan Tarar] writes about othering experiences in DH spaces, such as when staff weren’t sure if a web font used by a team project could correctly render her name in Urdu. I’m developing digital and analog letterpress resources as part of our DH center’s critical humanities makerspace studies. Letterpress moveable type is a pre-digital corollary to multilingual web fonts, and Tarar’s essay reinforced my priority of anyone printing with us being able to print their name—without singling out that name as needing special effort or research.

Motivation / underlying research question.

This lightning talk covers the DH work I’ve started toward this goal, and will be of interest to scholars curious about: zine creation for teaching, critical humanities making, multilingual DH, accessibility, book arts, and connections between historical/retro tech and current DH methods. I’ll share my first set of moveable non-English type, my forthcoming zine on how to inexpensively create similar type, and an overview of my research into historical and current strategies for fabricating non-Latin type (some of which cannot be segmented into easily interoperable rectangles the way Latin type can). I know there are too many languages for us to complete this goal; while slowly moving toward that vision language by language, I’m also developing some quick hacks to at least slightly improve type accessibility in the mean time, as well as working to replicate how such scripts were historically printed.

Specifics on what the talk will cover. Which scholars might want to attend it and why, including showing how that's not limited to e.g. "people who do letterpress" or "makerspace people". Quick note that I understand the most immediate likely challenges to this work.

I’ve wanted to contribute to a more multilingual DH, despite my monolingual ability restricting what I can do. My hope is to develop enough type design and fabrication competency to partner with colleagues who have greater language competency than me, and I’m eager to hear advice from session attendees toward this goal.

Where is this in-progress research headed, and how might that benefit others? What kind of Q&A might this talk elicit from its audience?

I bookmark sources of data that seem interesting for digital humanities teaching and research:

• showing humanists what data & datafication in their fields can look like
• having interesting examples when teaching data-using tools
• trying out new data tools

I’m focusing on sharing bookmarks with data that’s already in spreadsheet or similar structured format, rather than e.g.

• collections of digitized paper media also counting as data and worth exploring, like Josh Begley’s racebox.org, which links to full PDFs of US Census surveys re:race and ethnicity over the years; or
• 3D data, like my colleague Will Rourk’s on historic architecture and artifacts, including a local Rosenwald School and at-risk former dwellings of enslaved people

Don’t forget to cite datasets you use (e.g. build on, are influenced by, etc.)!

And if you’re looking for community, the Journal of Open Humanities Data is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a free, global virtual event on 9/26 including “lightning talks, thematic dialogues, and community discussions on the future of open humanities data”.

Data is being destroyed

U.S. fascists have destroyed or put barriers around a significant amount of public data in just the last 8 months. Check out Laura Guertin’s “Data, Interrupted” quilt blog post, then the free DIY Web Archiving zine by me, Quinn Dombrowski, Tessa Walsh, Anna Kijas, and Ilya Kreymer for a novice-friendly guide to helping preserve the pieces of the Web you care about (and why you should do it rather than assuming someone else will). The Data Rescue project is a collaborative project meant “to serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points for public US governmental data that are currently at risk. We want to know what is happening in the community so that we can coordinate focus. Efforts include: data gathering, data curation and cleaning, data cataloging, and providing sustained access and distribution of data assets.”

Interesting datasets

The Database of African American and Predominantly White American Literature Anthologies

By Amy Earhart

“Created to test how we categorize identities represented in generalist literature anthologies in a database and to analyze the canon of both areas of literary study. The dataset creation informs the monograph Digital Literary Redlining: African American Anthologies, Digital Humanities, and the Canon (Earhart 2025). It is a highly curated small data project that includes 267 individual anthology volumes, 107 editions, 319 editors, 2,844 unique individual authors, and 22,392 individual entries, and allows the user to track the shifting inclusion and exclusion of authors over more than a hundred-year period. Focusing on author inclusion, the data includes gender and race designations of authors and editors.”

National UFO Reporting Center: “Tier 1” sighting reports

Via Ronda Grizzle, who uses this dataset when teaching Scholars’ Lab graduate Praxis Fellows how to shape research questions matching available data, and how to understand datasets as subjective and choice-based. I know UFOs sounds like a funny topic, and it can be, but there are also lots of interesting inroads like the language people use reflecting hopes, fears, imagination, otherness, certainty. A good teaching dataset given there aren’t overly many fields per report, and those include mappable, timeline-able, narrative text, and a very subjective interesting one (a taxonomy of UFO shapes). nuforc.org/subndx/?id=highlights

The Pudding

Well researched, contextualized, beautifully designed data storytelling on fun or meaningful questions, with an emphasis on cultural data and how to tell stories with data (including personally motivated ones, something that I think is both inspiring for students and great to have examples of how to do critically). pudding.cool

…and its Ham4Corpus use

Shirley Wu for The Pudding’s interactive visualization of every line in Hamilton uses my ham4corpus dataset (and data from other sources), which might be a useful example of how an afternoon’s work with open-access data (Wikipedia, lyrics) and some simple scripted data cleaning and formatting can produce foundations for research and visualization.

Responsible Datasets in Context

Dirs. Sylvia Fernandez, Miriam Posner, Anna Preus, Amardeep Singh, & Melanie Walsh

“Understanding the social and historical context of data is essential for all responsible data work. We host datasets that are paired with rich documentation, data essays, and teaching resources, all of which draw on context and humanities perspectives and methods. We provide models for responsible data curation, documentation, story-telling, and analysis.” 4 rich dataset options (as of August 2025) each including a data essay, ability to explore the data on the site, programming and discussion exercises for investigating and understanding the data. Datasets: US National park visit data, gender violence at the border, early 20th-century ~1k poems from African American periodicals, top 500 “greatest” novels according to OCLC records on novels most held by libraries. responsible-datasets-in-context.com

Post45 Data Collective

Eds Melanie Walsh, Alexander Manshel, J.D. Porter

“A peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data from 1945 to the present”, offering 11 datasets (as of August 2025) useful in investigations such as how book popularity & literary canons get manufactured. Includes datasets on “The Canon of Asian American Literature”, “International Bestsellers”, “Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction”, and “The Index of Major Literary Prizes in the US”. The project ‘provides an open-access home for humanities data, peer reviews data so scholars can gain institutional recognition, and DOIs so this work can be cited’: data.post45.org/our-data.html

CBP and ICE databases

Via Miriam Posner: A spreadsheet containing all publicly available information about CBP and ICE databases, from the American Immigration Council americanimmigrationcouncil.org/content-understanding-immigration-enforcement-databases

Data assignment in The Critical Fan Toolkit

By Cara Marta Messina

Messina’s project (which prioritizes ethical critical studies of fan works and fandom) includes this model teaching assignment on gathering and analyzing fandom data, and understanding the politics of what is represented by this data. Includes links to 2 data sources, as well as Destination Toast’s “How do I find/gather data about the ships in my fandom on AO3?”.

(Re:fan studies, note that there is/was an Archive of Our Own dataset—but it was created in a manner seen as invasive and unethical by AO3 writers and readers. Good to read about and discuss with students, but I do not recommend using it as a data source for those reasons.)

Fashion Calendar data

By Fashion Institute of Technology

Fashion Calendar was “an independent, weekly periodical that served as the official scheduling clearinghouse for the American fashion industry” 1941 to 2014; 1972-2008’s Fashion International and 1947-1951’s Home Furnishings are also included in the dataset. Allows manipulation on the site (including graping and mapping) as well as download as JSON. fashioncalendar.fitnyc.edu/page/data

Black Studies Dataverse

With datasets by Kenton Ramsby et al.

Found via Kaylen Dwyer. “The Black Studies Dataverse contains various quantitative and qualitative datasets related to the study of African American life and history that can be used in Digital Humanities research and teaching. Black studies is a systematic way of studying black people in the world – such as their history, culture, sociology, and religion. Users can access the information to perform analyses of various subjects ranging from literature, black migration patterns, and rap music. In addition, these .csv datasets can also be transformed into interactive infographics that tell stories about various topics in Black Studies. “ dataverse.tdl.org/dataverse/uta-blackstudies

Netflix Movies & Shows

kaggle.com/datasets/shivamb/netflix-shows

Billboard Hot 100 Number Ones Database

By Chris Dalla Riva

Via Alex Selby-Boothroyd: Gsheet by Chris Dalla Riva with 100+ data fields for every US Billboard Hot 100 Number One song since August 4th, 1958.

Internet Broadway Database

Found via Heather Froehlich: “provides data, publishes charts and structured tables of weekly attendance and ticket revenue, additionally available for individual shows”. ibdb.com

Structured Wikipedia Dataset

Wikimedia released this dataset sourced from their “Snapshot API which delivers bulk database dumps, aka snapshots, of Wikimedia projects—in this case, Wikipedia in English and French languages”. “Contains all articles of the English and French language editions of Wikipedia, pre-parsed and outputted as structured JSON files using a consistent schema compressed as zip” huggingface.co/datasets/wikimedia/structured-wikipedia. Do note there has been controversy in the past around Hugging Face scraping material for AI/dataset use without author permission, and differing understandings of how work published in various ways on the web is owned. (I might have a less passive description of this if I went and reminded myself what happened, but I’m not going to do that right now.)

CORGIS: The Collection of Really Great, Interesting, Situated Datasets project

By Austin Cory Bart, Dennis Kafura, Clifford A. Shaffer, Javier Tibau, Luke Gusukuma, Eli Tilevich

Visualizer and exportable datasets of a lot of interesting datasets on all kinds of topics.

FiveThirtyEight’s data

I’m not a fan for various reasons, but their data underlying various political, sports, and other stats-related articles might still be useful: [data.fivethirtyeight.com(https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/) Or look at how and what they collect, include in their data and what subjective choices and biases those reveal :)

Zine Bakery zines

I maintain a database of info on hundreds of zines related to social justice, culture, and/or tech topics for my ZineBakery.com project—with over 60 metadata fields (slightly fewer for the public view) capturing descriptive and evaluative details about each zine. Use the … icon then “export as CSV” to use the dataset (I haven’t tried this yet, so let me know if you encounter issues).

OpenAlex

I don’t know much about this yet, but it looked cool and is from a non-profit that builds tools to help with the journal racket (Unsub for understanding “big deals” values and alternatvies, Unpaywall for OA article finding). “We index over 250M scholarly works from 250k sources, with extra coverage of humanities, non-English languages, and the Global South. We link these works to 90M disambiguated authors and 100k institutions, as well as enriching them with topic information, SDGs, citation counts, and much more. Export all your search results for free. For more flexibility use our API or even download the whole dataset. It’s all CC0-licensed so you can share and reuse it as you like!” openalex.org

Bonus data tools, tutorials

Matt Lincoln’s salty: “When teaching students how to clean data, it helps to have data that isn’t too clean already. salty offers functions for “salting” clean data with problems often found in datasets in the wild, such as pseudo-OCR errors, inconsistent capitalization and spelling, invalid dates, unpredictable punctuation in numeric fields, missing values or empty strings”.

The Data-Sitters Club for smart, accessible, fun tutorials and essays on computational text analysis for digital humanities.

Claudia Berger’s blog post on designing a data physicalization—a data quilt!—as well as the final quilt and free research zine exploring the data, its physicalization process, and its provocations.

The Pudding’s resources for learning & doing data journalism and research

See also The Critical Fan Toolkit by Cara Marta Messina (discussed in datasets section above), which offers both tools and links to interesting datasets.

Letterpress data, not publicly available yet…

I maintain a database of the letterpress type, graphic blocks/cuts, presses, supplies, and books related to book arts owned by me or by Scholars’ Lab. I have a very-in-progress website version I’m slowly building, without easily downloadable data, just a table view of some of the fields.

I also have a slice of this viewable online and not as downloadable data: just a gallery of the queerer letterpress graphic blocks I’ve collected or created. But I could get more online if anyone was interested in teaching or otherwise working with it?

I also am nearly done developing a database of the former VA Center for the Book: Book Arts Program’s enormous collection of type, which includes top-down photos of each case of type. I’m hoping to add more photos of example prints that use each type, too. If this is of interest to your teaching or research, let me know, as external interest might motivate me to get to the point of publishing sooner.

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.

We’re in the back half of my data for the rest of us course right now. I’ve already written a bit about the beginning of the course and how it was framed around a kind of data pipeline that aimed to give students a baseline level of data literacy. My goal for the course was always that the second half would work through the pipeline again, building towards small group work as students created datasets around their own particular interests. These final products were largely based on the model of Responsible Datasets in Context and the Post45 Data Collective. I wanted my students to work together to gather data based on their interests and produce an essay that situates that data in the larger context from which it came, demonstrates what kinds of questions you can ask of it, and makes the processed data available for other people to use in a legible manner.

The plan was always there. First half of the course: me teaching. Second half: all hands-on working. The problem I ran into was that I had more students sign up for the course than I expected. I’m used to running group work for graduate students where the entire group is working on the same project, but the number of participants is quite small: typically four to six. I framed the course with that scale in mind, and I was not ready mentally for a course where I would have 15 to 25 students. That’s what happens when you’ve taught only off the books for years! When it came time to plan how the course would actually look on a day-to-day basis once we got to the group work phase, I wasn’t actually certain what to do. What would it even look like for 15 students to work on the same thing? If I broke them into groups, how would the course’s pipeline model impact the students’ experience? With a single group over the course of a semester or a year, students will typically fall into different roles. You might have one person serve as a developer, another as a project manager, still another as a designer. But I worried after a conversation with Mackenzie Brooks that roles delineated in this way would mean one person waiting around for weeks for a partner to finish before they could even start.

What I finally landed upon was a plan to break the class into small groups of four to five students. Rather than explicitly assign clear roles, I wanted each person to contribute to every stage of the project. That way, each person would be able to demonstrate facility with each stage of the data production process as opposed to explicit mastery of any one phase. For each week, students had two assignments: a group deliverable as well as an individual reflection. One week the groups produced their metadata schema. For another, they turned in their raw data. And as they moved through these milestones, students also shared back individual reflections where they described their individual contributions to the work.

Beyond the assignments, I also needed to develop a new way for managing class work time for multiple groups. In my library fellowships, it’s very common for us to pivot at a certain time to pure group work for a number of sessions. The students decide what we need to do on a day-to-day basis, and conversation is limited to setting an agenda and then executing that plan. We’ll typically have several weeks of the calendar that are empty. In trying to adapt this structure to the undergraduate context, I’ve implemented a series of strategies from agile project development I learned from Ronda Grizzle, our expert project management and software training specialist in the Scholars’ Lab. This framework provides both a structure for each class meeting as well as a tangible experience the students can take away. We’re building every class around a series of scrums and debriefs.

If you’re not familiar, the term scrum comes from rugby, and it refers to the moment when all the players lock arms over the ball, try to gain possession of it, and attempt to move it forward across the field. It also is a term from the agile development framework that typically refers to a moderated set of practices used to facilitate project updates and agenda setting. Typically, as I’ve seen them, a scrum is a daily practice with specific time constraints and particular questions meant to be answered. At the beginning of a meeting, each person will get one minute of time to answer three questions about their work. The practice allows you to get stuff on the table for your group without spending a lot of time falling into the weeds such that you preserve actual work time. This practice is especially helpful with humanities scholars, as they can easily talk about questions so long that you run out of time before ever working. The first time you scrum, it’s almost always the case that people will run out of time, but it teaches you to move very quickly through updates. You get a quick sense of what the next state of work will be as well as what needs larger discussion.

I settled upon a modified scrumming practice for my class that incorporated both individual and group scrums. We had the same setup every day:

• Start of class scrums (5-10 minutes):
  • Within small groups, 1 minute for each person to answer three questions:
    • What have I done?
    • What is next for me?
    • What do I need from somebody else?
  • As a class, 1 minute for a representative from each group to give a project update:
    • Where is your group at?
    • What problems are you running into?
• Bulk of class time (approximately 60 minutes)
  • Work time within groups
    • I float to answer questions and help troubleshoot
• End of session debrief (5 minutes)
  • As a class, 1 minute for a representative from each group to share:
    • What did you do?
    • What is next for your group?

I brought scrums into my class as a way to provide structure to the work. They offered a way to bring people into the room and establish a ritual to mark the beginning of class as serious work—not time that could be blown off. The practice also helped students determine how they would use their time with each other. But I also wanted to use a modified scrum process to make sure the groups knew what other groups were doing. What lessons were they learning? What problems were they were running into? In this way, hopefully, the back half of the course would come to be about more than just their own group’s work but also about the larger journey the class as a whole was taking through the material. The kinds of projects that groups are working on vary broadly: video games, food and recipes, museum collections, and macroeconomic data. The groups are all dealing with similar kinds of challenges, though, and scrums have offered a good way to update each other and share advice. The practice has worked well for my purposes, and I will use it to help facilitate group work in the future.

Designing a workshop is hard. From what I understand, you need at least three components for it to be successful:

1. have an activity;
2. have a method;
3. have a takeaway.

Connecting these three components is not as easy as it seems: you might have a takeaway but no other clue as what you want to do (the potential trap of backwards design), or have a fun activity but no takeaway, other than “hey, this could be fun”. Amna and I both expressed having the same fear. What is the workshop we were supposed to design wasn’t DH enough? But what even is “DH enough”? Requiring attendees to bring their laptops, making sure we’ll be using our terminal, making sure we have a shiny tool to baffle attendees with our DH skills?

Being exposed to “pen & paper” and “beyond buttonology” pedagogies meant that we were confronted to the limitations of DH from the outset. You don’t know if everyone will even come up with a laptop (or have a functioning one, RIP to my previous laptop and its broken keyboard which required me to copy and paste each “x” and “w” for the first months of Praxis), just like you don’t know if people will actually learn something in a critical way, and not just follow orders.

Being exposed to “pen & paper” and “beyond buttonology” pedagogies meant that we rapidly became hyperaware of the limitations surrounding our practice and our format. Because it can lead to feelings such as anxiety, doubt, and the weekly imposter syndrome crisis checkup, I had to sit down with myself and outline what I understand to be enough.

A “DH enough” workshop is…

• a workshop in which people are invited to think critically about a specific subject
• a workshop that allows you to ask questions about the field of DH in general
• a workshop in which you assume that everyone is interested and happy to be there
• a workshop in which learning goes hand in hand with some level of creativity
• a workshop in which you look at limitations as something exciting
• a workshop in which adults are encouraged to use crayons

I’ve been experimenting with lasercutting type-high wood to make letterpress blocks for letterpress printing with, greatly helped by forum posts on the BriarPress.org letterpress community site about topics like type-high wood/shims and lasercutting viability (for example). I wrote up my work to share there in return, and wanted to blog it as well in case it can help others.

Here’s the best lasercut letterpress block I’ve made yet! I’ll update with a print once I next get to use the local Vandercook with it.

Here’s the art I used to make it, digitally flipped for readability (for non-letterpress folks: the cut block needs to be reflected horizontally, so when pressed to paper with ink the image comes out correctly):

Fun images first, followed by in-depth details of what/why/how below

Skip past them for detailed info on why/what/how, for folks who want that. Any cuts that look like I made them wrong (that are readable left to right, thus would print wrong) are actually digitally flipped to make your reading easier; I just got was lazy about including a note to that effect on each one.

Earliest tests, using only 1 lasercutter pass

These produced pretty shallow cuts; they could be printed okay on a Vandercook, with some of the chatter because I was lazy and wanted to print a bunch of slightly-different-heights cuts at the same time without packing under individual cuts to balance them all, and also didn’t sand/seal these at all before printing (some of the chatter was from the height being shallow, though). I also deliberately kept some of the prints with more chatter, as I thought the wood-grain effect was neat, and wanted to remember to explore deliberately including it on some cuts in the future (as well as cutting deeper to avoid it on most cuts).

This one is especially fun, as it started as a shape cut from craft foam using safety scissors and printed on a BookBeetle; I then scanned the print, cleaned that scan digitally, lasercut it into wood, and printed from that.

You can see the cut is fairly shallow:

Here’s the original BookBeetle/craft foam print the above cut came from:

Photo digitally flipped for readability. Sometimes there is flame; optimally, there is not any (power was too high and/or speed too slow):

Testing different laser methods & settings

Next two photos are digitally flipped for readability, zoomed in to show text height from block surface. On the “zines zines zines” block, each word looks slightly different because a different lasercutter method was used on each, with raster cutting deepest (far right) but also burning most, cut (far left) cutting least, and etch in the middle. It probably didn’t help I used subpar random mystery Ebay wood…

Best outcome yet

“Critical tech: no ‘innovation’ serving profit over people.” 5 lasercutter passes, passes 1, 2 or 3?, 5 shown below (final photo digitally flipped for readability):

Why do this at all?

Because experimenting is fun; because you can make longlasting cuts from your own or other favorite images, including things you can’t buy historical or new cuts of; to design your own type (very advanced to do well); to have type in hard- or impossible-to-find (at least in the U.S.) languages and scripts (ditto). If you have free access to a good-enough lasercutter (eg thorugh a local library or college makerspace), the total cost can be very cheap in general (just the cost of evenly-cut maple blocks and one of many options for materials to make a shim bringing it up to type-high).

What lasercutter & settings?

I’m using the VLS 6.75 lasercutter (aka “Vader”) in Scholars’ Lab’s makerspace, for which I wrote my first zine (a cheatsheet on cutting and etching on acrylic using this lasercutter). You need to be trained by us before using it, but it’s available to anyone who can visit us in-person (no UVA affiliation needed!) and we offer both periodic workshops and 1:1 training by appointment. Non-commercial use is free, but you do need to bring your own materials to cut/etch (unlike our 3D printers, where we provide the filament for free for most non-commercial projects). Luckily, materials can be fairly inexpensive, starting from scrap cardboard, and even nicer looking wood can be fairly reasonable (e.g. a nicely finished bamboo cutting board from Ikea is a great lasercutting block, and costs ~$10).

The final 2 passes I did on the Luddite/critical tech cut above were set to 90 power, 90 speed, and 500 PPI, using 5 total complete lasercutter passes. I’ll continue tweaking those, and ideally I would have done maybe 7-8 passes but I ran out of time. (I varied the settings over the course of the 5 passes, but each took around 13 minutes, which included time the laser was doing nothing cutting the empty space above where my material was because I didn’t know how to move the start point lower, lol).

The SVG file producing the cut was color inverted so that the parts I wanted cut away were black, and the parts I wanted to remain raised were white. I also horizontally flipped the image so it would come out correctly readable when printed.

Finding a lasercutter

If you haven’t used a lasercutter before but are curious, I encourage you to ask a local or college/university librarian if they have or know of any nearby that can be used—with cheaper and smaller versions becoming more available, at least in the U.S. these seem to be popping up in more makerspaces in the last couple years. I’m not sure, but think the standing rather than tabletop kind are the ones with enough power (and safe venting requirements) to cut deep enough into hard woods, though other materials are also possible.

Materials

Lots of good posts if you search the Briar Press forum. For wood, end-grain maple seems to hit the sweet spot for price, hardness, results, but I’ve seen folks mention other options including cherry hardwood.

• So far I’ve used type-high, maple wood blanks from Virgin Wood Press, McKellier, and Ebay old letterpress blanks with the lead piece chipped off (don’t put lead in a lasercutter, the fumes are toxic)
• Non-type-high wood: get wood from anywhere cheaper (eg McClains) then add a shim (of wood, 3D printed block, tape, ?) to bring it to type-high
• Other materials: acrylic (I’ve used this in a lasercutter, lovely results, very quick <2min cuts, can get fun seethrough neon colors!); harder (grey, not “EZ Cut”) or other labeled-laser-safe linoleum (thanks for advice from Ryan Cordell*)

What’s involved: basic

Basic lasercutter use is not overly complicated to learn, if you have some comfort using computer programs, especially saving image files containing letters or shapes from any drawing program. You use a drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator to create the lines or shape you want to cut or etch—any program that can save as an SVG file—give the lasercutter some info (e.g. what kind of material you’re cutting, how thick the material is), and position the material or image so the cuts happen in the right places, then click a button and it does the rest.

A more even and precise press (e.g. Vandercook, rather than hand-pressing or craft press) may be able to print cleaner from shallower-lasercut blocks.

What’s involved: intermediate

I’ve found the non-basic part to be figuring out the best lasercutter settings (such as speed and power) for the material you’re using. Harder materials take more power to cut into and to cut deeper. With wood, speed and power impact whether you get from zero burning, to small flames, to burnt wood.

So far, I’ve had the most success playing with these using cheap sample wood (though preferably of same/similar wood type and height to what you’ll ultimately use, so the settings work the same) to find the highest power (deepest cutting) and highest speed (finishes fastest) that don’t overly burn the wood, then doing multiple passes of the lasercutter (not touching the material at all in between, so that it remains exactly perfectly registered with the cuts going in the exact same places each time).

What’s involved: advanced

I’m not at any advanced stage doing this yet :) but lots of folks are, including users on the Briar Press forum, and some of the folks producing new wood type available via online stores too. Cordell recommended starting cuts on a lasercutter, then using a CNC router to dig out most of the wood farther away from the left-as-type-high bits faster and deeper than a lasercutter can.

There are also a number of folks creating blocks and type completely via CNC router; I took a very fun and informative virtual workshop from Ryan Molloy on this topic via Partners in Print last fall.

* P.S. Thanks to Ryan Cordell (Skeumorph Press) for generously sharing insights on his lasercutting letterpress experience. And unrelatedly, to the extremely generous Briar Press forum users platenman and jnbirdhouse, who’ve helped Scholars’ Lab be able to get closer to starting to teach full-size letterpress to the public!

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

You will need:

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

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

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

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

Qualifications

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

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

Responsibilities

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

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

Institutional History

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

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

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

On Job Ethics

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

---

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

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

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

Data or Design first?

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

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

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

What my initial planning looks like.

But what about the narrative?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to sketch it out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next steps

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

(Note: Brandon is going to blog about related work! Will link here once that’s live.)

This is a post to tell yall about a neat little web development thing that’s allowed me to easily make (and keep updated!) nifty things displaying kinds of data related to both professional development (easy CV webpage and printable format generation!) and bibliography/book arts (an online type speciment book, based on an easily-updatable Gsheet backend!). If you aren’t interested in the code, do just skim to see the photos showing the neat webpage things this can make.

Figure 1: Screenshot of a type specimen webpage created with Jekyll and a CSV of data.

Figure 2: Screenshot of a CV webpage created with Jekyll and a CSV of data.

Jekyll (skip this section if you know what Jekyll is)

Jekyll is a tool for making websites that sit in a middle ground between using a complex tool like WordPress or Drupal (a content management system, aka CMS) or completely coding each page of your website in HTML by hand, and I think easier to create and manage than either extreme. It’s set up to follow principles of “minimal computing” (aka #mincomp), which is a movement toward making technical things more manageably scoped with an emphasis on accessibility for various meanings of that. For example, using website development tools that keep the size of your website files small lets folks with slow internet still access your site.

If you want to know more about Jekyll, I’ve written peer-reviewed pieces on the what, why, and how to learn to make your own Jekyll-generated DH websites—suitable for folks with no previous web development experience!—as well as (with co-author Brandon Walsh) how to turn that into a collaborative research blog with a review workflow (like how ScholarsLab.org manages its blog posts). Basically, Jekyll requires some webpage handcoding, but:

• takes care of automating bits that you want to use across your website so you don’t have to paste/code them on every page (e.g. you header menu)
• lets you reuse and display pieces of text (e.g. blog posts, events info, projects) easily across the website (like how ScholarsLab.org has interlinked blog posts, author info, people bio pages, and project pages linking out to people and blog posts involved with that project)

DATA PLOP TIME

The cool Jekyll thing I’ve been enjoying recently is that you can easily make webpages doing things with info from a spreadsheet. I am vaguely aware that may not sound riveting to some people, so let me give you examples of specific uses:

• I manage my CV info in a spreadsheet (a Gsheet, so I have browser access anywhere), with a row per CV item (e.g. invited talk, published article)
• I also keep a record of the letterpress type and cuts (letterpress illustrations) owned by SLab and by me in a Gsheet

I periodically export these Gsheets as a CSV file, and plop the CSV file into a /_data folder in a Jekyll site I’ve created. Then, I’ve coded webpages to pull from those spreadsheets and display that info.

Figure 3: Screenshot of my letterpress specimen Gsheet

Data Plop Op #1: Online Letterpress Type Specimen Book

You don’t need to understand the code in the screenshot below; just skim it, and then I’ll explain:

Figure 4: Screenshot of some of the code pulling my letterpress Gsheet data into my Jekyll webpage

I include this screenshot to show what’s involved to code a webpage that displays data from a CSV. What this shows is how I’m able to call a particular spreadsheet column’s data by just typing “”, rather than pasting in the actual contents of the spreadsheet! LOTS of time saved, and when I edit the spreadsheet to add more rows of data, I just need to re-export the CSV and the website automatically updates to include those edits. For example, in the above screenshot, my CSV has a column that records whether a set of letterpress type is “type high” or not (type high = .918”, the standard height that lets you letterpress print more easily with different typefaces in one printing, or use presses that are set to a fixed height). In the code, I just place “” where I want it in the webpage; you can see I’ve styled it to be part of a bullet list (using the “<li>” tag that creates lists).

In the screenshot, I also use some basic logic to display different emoji, depending on what’s in one of the CSV columns. My “uppercase” column says whether a set of letterpress type includes uppercase letters or not. My code pulls that column (“”) and checks whether a given row (i.e. set of letterpress type or cut) says Uppercase = yes or no; then displays an emoji checkmark instead of “yes”, and emoji red X instead of “no”.

Here’s how one CSV line displayed by my specimen book webpage looks (I haven’t finished styling it, so it doesn’t look shiny and isn’t yet live on my very drafty book arts website):

And I was also able to code a table version, pulling from the same data:

If the code discussion is confusing, the main takeaway is that this method lets you

1. manage data that’s easier to manage in a spreadsheet, in a spreadsheet instead of coded in a webpage file; and
2. easily display stuff from that spreadsheet, without needing to make a copy of the data that could become disjoint from the spreadsheet if you forget to update both exactly the same.

Data Plop Op #2: Keeping your CV updated

I used to manage my CV/resume as Google Docs, but that quickly turned into a dozen GDocs all with different info from different ways I’d edited what I included for different CV-needing opportunities. When I had a new piece of scholarship to add, it wasn’t clear which GDoc to add it to, or how to make sure CV items I’d dropped from one CV (e.g. because it needed to focus on teaching experience, so I’d dropped some less-applicable coding experiences from it) didn’t get forgotten when I made a CV that should include them.

UGH.

A happy solution: I have 1 CV Gsheet, with each row representing a “CV line”/something I’ve done:

I periodically export that CSV and plop it into a Jekyll site folder. Now, I can do 2 cool things: the first is the same as the letterpress specimen book, just styling and displaying Gsheet data on the web. This lets me have both webpages showing a full version of my CV, and a short version of my CV, and theoretically other pages (e.g. code a page to display a CV that only includes xyz categories):

And! I’ve also coded a printable CV. This uses a separate CSS stylesheet that fits how I want a printed CV to look different from a website, e.g. don’t break up a CV line item between two pages, don’t include the website menu/logo/footer. Same text as above, styled for printing:

When I need a whittled down CV that fits a page limit, or that just shows my experience in one area and not others I’m skilled in, I can just make a CSV deleting the unneeded lines—my spreadsheet ahs category and subcategory columns making it easy to sort these, and also to tag lines that could appear in different sections depending on CV use (e.g. sometimes a DH project goes under a peer-reviewed publication section, or sometimes it goes under a coding section as I want my publication section to only include longform writing). But I add new lines always to the same core Gsheet, so I don’t get confused about what I’ve remembered to record for future CV inclusion where.

I currently don’t have this CV website online—I just run it locally when I need to generate a printable CV. But I’ll be adding it to my professional site once I have a bit more time to finish polishing the styling!

In conclusion

Jekyll + CSV files =

(One of the letterpress cuts recorded by my specimen book Gsheet/webpage, as discussed above!)

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

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

Not just asking about work sustainability; offering to act

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

Where expectations are needed, make them as loose as possible

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

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

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

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

Look for ways to support others’ needs

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

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

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

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

Slack

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

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

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

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

Task management app

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

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

Meeting notes

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

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

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

Short version, pls

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

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

Some caveats

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

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

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

Ultimately, I try to balance two things:

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

Some approaches that work for me, right now

Email management

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

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

“Brain Day” for weekly work chores

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

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

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

Other email hacks

I use Outlook rules to:

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

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

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

I’m in the middle of listening to an audiobook of David Byrne’s How Music Works. The book is a fascinating glimpse into the music industry, but I almost had to pull my car over when he started talking about digital humanities centers.

Okay–Byrne was actually in the middle of a whole chapter describing the special character of CBGB, the renowned music club that opened in 1973 and that was the frequent haunt of punk and new wave bands. But I was struck by just how resonant so much of his advice for cultivating a special and identifiable community was to me, someone who spends a lot of time working to do the same with students new to digital humanities. Once I parked, I quickly made some notes riffing on Byrne’s own eight characteristics of a successful music scene. I’ll share Byrne’s elements below and then riff on them as they relate to our own practice of cultivating collective DH experiences. You can find out more about Byrne’s own points by reading David A. Zimmerman’s summarizing blog post about the text.

1. There must be a venue that is of appropriate size and location in which to present material.
   • Space matters. It’s challenging to develop a sense of DH community without a space to gather, a place to house the energies of the group. One of the first tasks of a DH scene is often figuring out where it takes place. If physical space is not available to you—such locations are typically contested and hard won—take stock of other options. Virtual space, social media, community by mail, and more might be viable options, and they each offer their own affordances and limitations. And then make those spaces available to your people—as a student, it was impossible for me to reserve space. So friendly librarians who helped me do so meant the world to me.
2. The artists should be allowed to play their own material.
   • It’s not enough for community members to be passive contributors to the projects of others. They must be given the space and resources to allow their own creativity and their own original research projects to flourish. This also means making space for intentional play as a pathway to finding projects. Don’t ask people to show their DH project credentials at the door in order to get in!
3. Performing musicians must get in for free on their off nights (and maybe get free beer too)
   • Belonging should come cheap and often for those who want to join. In the Scholars’ Lab, we try to offer free tea and coffee to folks as often as possible. This might seem flippant, but it actually contributes in large ways to a sense of buy in with our group. Besides offering a ritual of belonging—we make this together for you—free coffee also offers a pathway into the Lab for those with economic hardship. Such resources are scarce for different communities, but it’s worth taking stock of what you can offer cheaply. What levers do you have?
4. There must be a sense of alienation from the prevailing music scene
   • For a DH scene to matter to someone, it has to stand for something. And that something typically stands in opposition to the larger institution around it. Look to your group’s larger context—what is left out? Who? How can your specific scene make space for those absences, center them, and give them a home? Discuss these values intentionally and find ways to act on them.
5. Rent must be low – and it must stay low
   • For Byrne, this was a larger commentary on the challenges of low-rent housing in a gentrifying area of New York City. For our own purposes, keep in mind that this work costs, but it should not cost the community. To keep your scene sustainable, it is worth regularly revisiting your prior assumptions about what is necessary to keep it flourishing. What might need to be sacrificed to maintain the ideological cohesion of your group? How does the changing financial landscape of your institution affect the underlying budgetary structures that make your work possible?
6. Bands must be paid fairly
   • Those who cultivate a DH scene have a responsibility to provide equitable compensation for the labor that its community members take on. Pay a living wage when possible. Advocate for better wages when it is not. Recognize and support labor organizing activities in the broader institution as you are able. Healthy labor practices ensure that your community knows you stand for and with them. They will notice.
7. Social transparency must be encouraged
   • Your community members make up your scene as much as the administrators who work in private to make it possible. Allow outside voices to help shape your practices—that’s how they become insiders. To cultivate the kind of DH scene your people want to see you need to ask them what they want. Ask what you can do for them—actions, events, speakers, and the like mean more when they come from community interest.
8. It must be possible to ignore the band when necessary
   • A flexible scene allows many smaller groups and communities to flourish. That is to say, a DH scene accommodates more than one use at one time. This is not to say smaller initiatives need be neglected. On the contrary—it allows your community to be agile, to flexibly act in many directions at once. Walk and chew gum at the same time. There are limitations to a group’s energies, of course, so be mindful of when you can ignore one aspect so as to safeguard energies for where you are needed.

I found, in particular, Byrne’s commentary on the intersections between spaces, policies, and creativity to be illuminating. Obviously there is much more to be said, and the analogy to Byrne’s music scene is not a 1:1 comparison. All communities have limitations, and we cannot be all things to all people. But hopefully these quick notes riffing on Byrne are helpful as we all work to cultivate a sense of belonging and community in our own DH spaces. As you try to find your own scene.

Let’s jam.