[Today was the Day of DH. This post was originally written for that crowd, hence some of the introductory material.]

Back at the Scholar’s Lab, the whole gang was hanging out at the graduate lounge waiting for our long-awaited session on grant writing and budgeting. Most of us had never seen a budget sheet until today. As we are wont to do, when the meeting started we went over our progress for the week. Annie Swafford had really good news for everyone. Solidly ahead of schedule, she demo’d Prism’s first visualization. [Cue applause]. Unspoken fears that we would not achieve visualization were laid to rest and a year’s worth of work was validated in the smiles of everyone around our camelot table.

We had other minutia to report before moving on to Bethany Nowviskie’s presentation on the cash-money. Jeremy (read my third post of the day) and Lindsay reported on their work with the left column of Prism (read my second post of the day). I reported on my progress translating the about page to German. Ja, ich weiß. Geil. I have been working on both the i18n framework for our rails application and the translations themselves. This week I will close that branch with the incorporation of links on the footer to allow users to select the language.

Bethany’s presentation was one of the best hours I’ve spent so far this year. It was both full of general advice and very specific detail. Ahead of our times, we were made privy to the contents of the briefcase. We went over budget spreadsheets, grant applications (join a grant review committee if you haven’t done so), hourly labor calculations, cost sharing, program officers, F&A (Facilities & Administrative Costs), faculty time buyouts, private funders and. public funders, looking for change under the couch, equipment, weathering budget cuts, und so weiter.  Once our time was up, I was reminded of the many ways in which our Praxis Program had succeeded in making me a different kind of professional.

[meditation ensued]