Shane

What aspirations do you have for working with us?

I think I'd like to distinguish between *hopes*, which are both more expansive and less tethered to the circumstances and agency of others, and *goals*, which are concrete and immediate. My hopes for every praxis cohort are always that fellows become and remain participants in the digital humanities community, that I'll see them at our big DH conferences and maybe get to collaborate with them again, that they have happy and fruitful lives of intellectual satisfaction filled with their desired number and kinds of animals. My goals for every praxis cohort are always that fellows gain the basic technical fluency to productively learn how to use digital tools and digital sources, that they end up with some sense of how things work under the hood and what is easy or hard to do. However engaged with DH methods or the DH community they decide to be, I want fellows to be good technical collaborators who understand what the work is even if they don't ultimately do it themselves...

What does collaboration mean to you?

... which dovetails nicely with this question. I suppose I mean that good collaboration to me means sharing an understanding of the intellectual work of a scholarly project. Every collaborator has their own areas of expertise, but a collaboration shouldn't be structured so that those areas are segregated. Knowledge and methods should flow across boundaries of responsibility so that each can passably give a full accounting of the whole project and understand the decisions made by others.

What do you spend time on?

A pretty big portion of my day is working with students: Praxis teaching, support for individual fellows' research, and consultations with, mostly, grad students. A smaller portion of my time is for faculty, staff, and community consultations, personal research projects, and continuing maintenance for legacy projects and websites.

If I were a song, I would be…

"The People are the Heroes Now" from John Adams's Nixon in China