Ah Spring! Plenty of cliches that could go here, about renewal and growth perhaps, but not really fitting as most of these sessions occur during the icy depths of winter. Regardles, it’s a good enough time for us to shift gears and turn our workshop focus to ArcGIS Online (AGOL), Esri’s GIS solution for the cloud. AGOL is browser-based, eliminating any Windows vs. Mac shenanigans, and allowing us to provide temporary access to members of the community that don’t have UVA credentials.
All sessions are one hour and assume participants have no previous experience using GIS. Sessions will be hands-on demonstrations with step-by-step tutorials and expert assistance. All sessions will be taught on Wednesdays from 2PM to 3PM and are free and open to the UVa and larger Charlottesville community. Late-comers are welcome and encouraged, registration will remain open until the conclusion of the workshop. Use the links below to register and get a Zoom link. Yeah, I know, Zoom-fatigue and all that. We’re gonna do virtual one last time, then we will be moving to a hybrid setup for next Fall. If you’re sick of virtual, but want to put a positive spin on things, you are experiencing the end of an era. Exciting, right?
January 31st - Introduction to ArcGIS Online
ArcGIS Online is the cloud-based younger sibling of ArcGIS Pro. It can’t do some of the less flashy, GISy kind of things, but it’s in the cloud, it’s connected, which adds all the hip functionality we’ve come to expect. With ArcGIS Online, you can find and create spatial data, maps, and applications. Access a limited but powerful set of analysis tools that take advantage of cloud computing and pre-configured data and resources. Share and collaborate with small groups or with the world. It’s an easy-to-use entry into the world of GIS, all from the comfort of your browser.
February 7th - Find and Create Spatial Data
Start your data search with AGOL’s collection of geographic information from around the globe. Not finding the data you seek? We’ll cover how to create your own data, and how to share it with the world.
February 14th - Collect Data in the Field
Whether you are crowd sourcing spatial data or performing survey work, having an application that records location and uploads data directly to a mapping application is incredibly useful.
February 21st - Web Mapping and Visualization
Pop-ups, filters, clustering, advanced symbology. There are many ways to personalize your maps, enhancing the story your data tells. We’ll dive into some of the advanced functionality that allows you to fine-tune your Web Maps.
February 28th - Spatial Analysis with ArcGIS Online
Perform basic analysis with tools like Buffer and Spatial Join. Or, enhance your data, taking advantage of the always up-to-date elevation, streets, and demographics data available in ArcGIS Online with tools like Create Viewshed, Find Nearest, and Enrich. Come for the learning and stay for stories about the old days when we had to create all that data ourselves. Uphill. Both ways!!
March 6th - Spring Break, No Workshop!
Enjoy a break. We’ll see you next week!
March 13th - Instant Apps and More
Dip your toes into the world of web GIS applications with AGOL’s quick-configure app builders. We’ll explore a few of the many options for enriching your map and data with focused applications. From time animation to interactive multimedia, these easy-to-use templates and builders take your data to the next level.
March 20th - App Your Map with Experience Builder
Continuing with the app theme, we’ll go beyond templates into custom application creation. Would you like to make a custom online mapping application without having to code? We would, and do. ArcGIS Experience Builder allows users of all levels to drag and drop tools to create responsive mapping applications, from simple to expansive.
March 27th - Introduction to ArcGIS StoryMaps
StoryMaps is a web application builder that makes it easy to add narritive and multimedia context to your ArcGIS Online maps. Whether telling a story, giving a tour, or comparing historic maps, StoryMaps is an easy-to-use tool that allows you to create a polished web presentation.
]]>Our graduate fellows are joining a robust and vibrant community of past students. Look forward to more details about the Praxis Program’s work in the fall!
]]>I’m sharing this post as a creative spin on the genre: my teaching statement in thirteen images (thirteen because that’s the Praxis cohort we’re currently running). Consider it a visual collage of how I approach working with students in and out of the classroom. I used unsplash, a great source for open and free images, to search for keywords that were meaningful to my digital pedagogy. I won’t explain them beyond describing the pictures in alt-text. Instead, I think they’re useful to meditate on for yourself. When you teach, what do you see?
My ambivalence for teaching turned to disdain when I began working towards a PhD and was thrust into teaching with no training or guidance. Mine is an extremely common TA story of being paid too little to do too much; I was made to lead discussion classes on subject matter I had never seen before, pushed to teach skills to students that I had only learned myself hours earlier, and required to enforce rubrics and grading structures I had no say in determining. This introduction to teaching was not what my childhood self had dreamed, and it only reinforced the feeling that teaching was just not something I ever wanted to do again.
But there were moments of joy in learning that I can’t quite let go of, experiences that shaped me into an anti-academy academic who sees the value in educating. My kindergarten teacher who spoke to me gently and encouraged my painting, my middle school actor-turned-science teacher who told me I was smart despite the lack of AFAB individuals in STEM, my high school English teacher who supported my college essays on my mild fear of elevators and saved my writing to use as examples for future students—these individuals shaped my life in ways I could never forget. They taught me that teaching is about more than grades and participation, but about human connection, care, and kindness. They watered me and watched me grow despite others trying to trample me. They held my mind with careful attention and allowed me to question their own authority and welcomed my defiance.
The Praxis program has also been a part of that joy. This group of faculty and staff members have treated me with care and kindness, allowed me to question them and the program, and invited me to express concerns and “hot takes” at the start of each meeting. I say the lights are too bright in the room and four people jump up to accommodate me. I say I’m not so sure about the digital realm of expression and knowledge and each faculty member validates my concerns. I question my decision to begin a PhD program and three members take meetings with me to talk about alternative career paths. The experiences I’ve had with these individuals have shown me a way of teaching that places relationship building at its core, a way of being in community with students that centers each of our needs above the prestige of the academy, an experience in which I am valued as a human, not just another nondescript student.
Though I don’t have much teaching experience yet, I hope to model my teaching off the individuals who have helped me find the joy in learning. I pledge to speak gently to my students as my kindergarten teacher did to me, to encourage students who may be the minority in their fields to pursue their passions, to turn off the lights in my classroom if they’re a bit too bright. There is so much potential to move beyond the arbitrary nature of grading and into a space of healing and respect, a space where relationships are built, and humans are cared for based on their individual needs. Growing one’s knowledge is a precious thing, a thing that often is only afforded to some, only accessible to a select few, and only grown in specific directions. To teach is to hold power, that cannot be denied, but sharing that power and knowledge is something we should all aim to do in ways that cater to those who seek it out.
My research focuses on Indigenous ways of knowing and being with the land and the ways settler-colonial technologies have been deployed in the hopes of destroying Indigenous lifeways. The university is one such technology, a space that often is used to spread colonial knowledges and obscure Indigenous ones, but this technology can be used against settler knowledge. The university can and should be a space of heeling, of learning about lifeways different than our own, of exploring understandings of the world that we may not encounter elsewhere. As a settler educator, I aim to open students up to these alternative ways of knowing with care and respect. I aim to push against colonial canons and encourage students to search out media that speaks to them from outside of the academy. My way of teaching is possibly best described as an anti-university approach, one that actively challenges the parts of higher education that exclude and distract from meaning making and relational understanding.
I’m not sure if this is a teaching statement, a journal entry, a manifesto, or a chaotic rambling, but I also am unsure if teaching is ever quite as simple as a list of hopes and accomplishments. Sharing knowledge is about being in relation with others. It’s about mutual care and understanding, mutual giving and receiving of information and inquiries. I expect to learn from my students just as much as they learn from me. I expect to give them time and space as much as they do for my class. I expect to encourage growth in all directions and work together to forge new understandings through joyful exploration. I want to be a gardener, not an enforcer.
]]>Practices from disability culture include interdependence (exploring naturally collaborative ways to undertake new projects), accessibility practices (such as image descriptions and sign language interpretation), and exploring multi-modal ways of presenting work (such as nonsynchronous formats for physical and financial accessibility). These values offer an essential expansion of taking in artistic works and teaching material while intersecting with and advancing ideals of correlated identities and experiences.
Additionally, I strive to recognize and enhance students’ interests, create a learning environment with clear, fair expectations and equitable opportunity, and foster cross-cultural diversity and understanding. I deeply value objective classroom and teaching practices that allow all students to thrive regardless of skill level or background. Inviting consistent participation, sharing student interests, and collaboration advances these goals and values.
My motivation for incorporating disability culture comes from my experience acquiring a disability, as well as discovering the social model of disability. At the age of seven, I was involved in a car accident that nearly amputated my left hand, and following the accident, I journeyed from denying to embracing my disability. Included in my development was discovering the social model of disability, which identifies barriers that socially construct the notion of disability, including physical obstacles such as stairs instead of a ramp for wheelchair access and attitudes that do not recognize the spectrum of disability as invisible to visible, temporary to permanent, and congenital to acquired. Learning more about this model was enlightening, as it forced me to realize false social constructions similar to race, gender, sexuality, and normativity overall. I therefore believe it is crucial to cultivate a learning community that values all lived voices and access as a pedagogical tool to make opportunities and content as equitable and accessible as possible.
I aim to foster a learning environment that values all lived experiences, specifically re-envisioning normative social models and the aforementioned access as pedagogy. I implement this by providing samples and frameworks of music across genres through the material I present or by inviting students to share examples. This has resulted in students presenting work that reflects their backgrounds and interests, such as disability stigmatization within Hispanic communities for Disability and the Arts and Broadway music examples for second-inversion chords in Music Theory. I also invite guest artists across identities to present work to share practices of working artists across a range of experiences and perspectives, and with recent guests including Jerron Herman, Finnegan Shannon, and Angélica Negrón. With access, I make material cross-sensory accessible by providing visual and spoken output, such as visual PowerPoint slides (for visual learners and Deaf/hard-of-hearing users), spoken image and video descriptions, and high-contrast slides (for aural learners and blind/low-vision users). I often engage students in accessibility exercises, such as creating image, audio, and sound descriptions, to creatively practice making artistic work cross-sensory accessible and equitable. I believe these efforts are recognized in a recent student comment via email: “This class is where I feel I can truly be myself without being judged by anyone…as well as fully bringing others into the awareness of issues disabled people have.”
Finally, throughout engagement with students, I strive to provide a variety of learning modes and explore multi-modal ways of presenting work. This ranges from online teaching with Berklee Online and Wagner College, where pedagogical activities spanned live Zoom classes and activities within those (breakout rooms, surveys, guest speakers), to in-person classes at New York University with guest instrumental musicians for Orchestration to getting out of the classroom with teaching disability arts at Wagner College, such as having students find inaccessible architecture and structures throughout the built campus.
Throughout this range of teaching activities and learning styles, I aim to recognize and enhance students’ interests, create a learning environment with clear, fair expectations and equitable opportunity, and foster cross-cultural diversity and understanding while underscoring access as pedagogy. Through this combination, I believe an objective and accessible learning environment that values all lived voices and provides equitable learning opportunities can be created and valued.
]]>The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. There are a range of useful terms here: instrumentarian, big other, shadow text, behavioral surplus, and more. They all cricle around the titular term, which refer to the new economic systems pioneered by technology companies that profit on the use of private data, data which enables those companies to further target consumers more precisely and efficiently in a kind of feedback loop.
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin. This is an essential text for anyone interested broadly in how race intersects with technology. The “New Jim Code” is a useful takeaway term, and Wikipedia has good summary definition: “In it, Benjamin develops her concept of the “New Jim Code,” which references Michelle Alexander’s work The New Jim Crow, to analyze how seemingly ‘neutral’ algorithms and applications can replicate or worsen racial bias.”
Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers by Jessamyn Neuhaus. The main takeaway I got from this text was that sometimes new teachers assume that their passion for their subject matter will make them effective in the classroom. But this enthusiasm is not enough. Instead, Neuhaus offers a range of reflections to help new teachers from a broad range of categories–Intellectuals, Introverts, Nerds, Geeks–more effectively and inclusively reach a range of student audiences.
Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics by Joli Jensen. This book contains a range of strategies and tactics for fitting writing into the cracks of the academic day. While I disagree with the way the book treats labor within academic structures–really no matter what?–I did find some helpful approaches to developing process-oriented methods for getting writing done.
That’s all for now! More next time.
]]>I use a rake task to automate the building of the initial post, which saves a little time by generating everything for my post templates.
That command looks like this:
desc "Begin a new post in #{posts_dir}"
task :new_post, :title do |t, args|
if args.title
title = args.title
end
clean_title = title.downcase.gsub(/\s/,'-')
title_slug =clean_title.downcase.gsub(' ', '-').gsub(/[^\w-]/, '')
filename = "#{posts_dir}/#{Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}-#{clean_title}.#{new_post_ext}"
if File.exist?(filename)
abort("rake aborted!") if ask("#{filename} already exists. Do you want to overwrite?", ['y', 'n']) == 'n'
end
puts "Creating new post: #{filename}"
open(filename, 'w') do |post|
post.puts "---"
post.puts "layout: post"
post.puts "title: \"#{title.gsub(/&/,'&')}\""
post.puts "date: #{Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}"
post.puts "tags: [digital-humanities]"
post.puts "crosspost:
- title: #{crosspost_title}
url: #{crosspost_url}#{title_slug}"
post.puts "---"
end
end
A lot of the core code here was adapted from Octopress, a blogging framework I haven’t used per se in several years. There are some useful rake tasks that have persisted as my blog changed though. There’s a lot of Ruby above, but the upshot is that, when I go to blog, I give a command in this form from the terminal:
$ rake new_post["Flashy title here"]
The rake task will create a new post in my _drafts folder with 2023-10-23-flashy-title-here.md that looks like this:
---
layout: post
title: "Flashy title here"
date: 2023-10-23
tags: [digital-humanities]
crosspost:
- title: the Scholars' Lab blog
url: https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/flasy-title-here
---
I’ll then fill in the content of the post below the triple dashes. After years of manually crossposting things, I decided to make another rake task that would mirror this one, a terminal command that I could run from my blog folder like so:
$ rake crosspost['2023-10-23-flashy-title-here.md','True']
This command would copy my completed post file to the other project folder for the Scholars’ Lab site, spin up the necessary metadata, and copy over any images that are necessary for the post.
Here’s what that rake command looks like:
desc "Makes a crossposted file in the slab folder"
task :crosspost, [:file_name, :images] do |t, args|
if args.file_name
file_name = args.file_name
end
puts file_name
old_file = "_posts/#{file_name}"
new_file = "#{slab_dir}/#{file_name}"
puts new_file
parsed = FrontMatterParser::Parser.parse_file(old_file, loader: FrontMatterParser::Loader::Yaml.new(allowlist_classes: [Date]))
title_slug = parsed.front_matter['title'].downcase.gsub(' ', '-').gsub(/[^\w-]/, '')
if File.exists?(new_file)
File.delete(new_file)
end
File.open(new_file, 'w'){|f|
f.puts("---
author: brandon-walsh
date: #{parsed.front_matter['date']}
layout: post
slug: #{title_slug}
title: #{parsed.front_matter['title']}
categories:
- Digital Humanities
tags:
- Digital humanities
crosspost:
- title: #{blog_title}
url: #{blog_url}/#{title_slug}
---
#{parsed.content}
")
}
puts "Crossposted file created at #{new_file}"
post_image_folder = blog_image_dir + '/' + title_slug
crosspost_image_folder = slab_image_dir + '/' + title_slug
if args.images
if File.exists?(crosspost_image_folder)
FileUtils.rm_rf(crosspost_image_folder)
Dir.mkdir(crosspost_image_folder)
end
FileUtils.cp_r(post_image_folder + '/.', crosspost_image_folder)
end
end
This lets me pass the name of the post file and whether or not it contains images to a new crosspost rake task, which will then handle everything else for me. Now my workflow is much more streamlined. If you’re interested in setting this for on your crossposting needs, you can follow these steps.
Assumptions:
To implement on your own, then, do the following:
$ gem install front_matter_parser
{% if page.crosspost %}
<div class="post_crosspost">
{% if page.crosspost.size == 1 %}
Crossposted to <a href="{{ page.crosspost[0].url }}">{{ page.crosspost[0].title }}</a>.
{% else %}
{% capture crosspostings %}
{% for target in page.crosspost %}
<a href="{{ target.url }}">{{ target.title }}</a>,
{% endfor %}
{% endcapture %}
{% assign crosspostarray = crosspostings | strip | split: "," %}
Crossposted to {{ crosspostarray | array_to_sentence_string }}.
{% endif %}
<br><br>
</div>
{% endif %}
Now you should be able to do something like the following as your workflow.
$ rake new_post["Title of Blog post"]
$ rake crosspost["year-month-day-sluggified-title.md","True"]
Hope that helps! I tried to abstract things so that this could be usable by others with slightly different setups than mine, but let me know if you try to use it and run into problems.
]]>If you’re interested in learning more about the fellowship or have questions about anything you read below, please consider attending the information session for the 2024-2025 cohort - Monday, January 15th, 2024 from 11:00-12:00 on Zoom. Please register to attend. You are, of course, encouraged to write for an individual meeting to discuss your application so that you can begin your application.
The Digital Humanities Fellowship supports advanced doctoral students doing innovative work in the digital humanities at the University of Virginia. The Scholars’ Lab offers Grad Fellows advice and assistance with the creation and analysis of digital content, as well as consultation on intellectual property issues and best practices in digital scholarship and DH software development. The highly competitive Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities is designed to advance the humanities and provide emerging digital scholars with an opportunity for growth.
Fellows join our vibrant community, have a voice in intellectual programming for the Scholars’ Lab, and participate in one formal colloquium at the Library per fellowship year. As such, students are expected to be in residence on Grounds for the duration of the fellowship.
We have received some questions about how the Scholars’ Lab Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities will be affected by new departmental support packages. Going forward, including for the coming academic year, the Scholars’ Lab fellowship will provide $24,480 in living support during the academic year, and the package will include health insurance, fees, and tuition remission. No teaching is required as a part of the fellowship. Students will apply to this fellowship in their fifth year of the PhD for a sixth year of funding in conjunction with the Scholars’ Lab.
History
Since its beginnings in 2007, the Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities has supported a number of students. Past fellowship winners can be found on our People page. In the past, the program itself has been supported by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The fellowship is currently sustained by the Jeffrey C. Walker Library Fund for Technology in the Humanities, and the Matthew & Nancy Walker Library Fund.
Eligibility, Conditions, and Requirements
How to Apply
A complete application package will include the following materials:
Completed application materials can be uploaded through the GSAS application portal. Please do consider this application to be part of a process - the beginning of a conversation about how we can work together.
During the 2024-2025 cycle, Brandon will be on leave starting January 15th, 2024. Applicants with questions about Grad Fellowships, the application process, or their eligibility are encouraged to write soon for clarification. After January 15th, correspondence regarding DH project proposals can be directed to Ronda Grizzle.
]]>The context for the two assignments is that all DH involves teaching at some level. Graduate students rarely receive adequate training in teaching, and they often teach under very specific departmental constraints. The two activities are meant to give them experience thinking about a range of teaching possibilities that they might not otherwise get to experience. I would wager further that most departments don’t offer much training in writing about teaching, either in formalized teaching statements or otherwise. Ashley Hosbach-Wallman, UVA’s Education and Social Research Librarian, gives our students a wonderful introduction to writing about teaching. I pair Ashley’s workshop with a free-writing activity to help the students move past fears they might have about writing correctly on the topic. The only way to begin is by beginning, after all.1 I couldn’t actually be there in person to run this activity for the students, so I’m sharing these slides and the context for them in the hopes that they will run it at home.
The spirit of this activity is heavily inspired by a workshop that Sean Michael Morris ran at Digital Pedagogy Lab on writing about teaching. All the good here comes from Sean - I merely adapted it for my own particular context. The gist is that the activity gives students a topic, a set amount of time to free write on it, and some rules to guide the process. The rules Sean gave for that writing process are mostly about self-criticism:
Keep writing, and don’t let your own internal voice get in the way of putting words down on the page. With those guidelines in mind, students move through a set of curated topics you give them. As facilitator, my job is mostly to encourage them to use the whole time saying things like “if you think you’re done keep going because you’ll go somewhere unexpected.” Mostly I just watch the timer. The activity is quite flexible and can be adapted to any circumstance: just change the prompts. In my experience, graduate students find it quite transformative and request the workshop a second time later in the year. The first time I ran it one of the students exclaimed, “I wrote 2000 words in an hour! My dissertation feels like it will be no problem!” For students accustomed to working towards perfection, free writing offers a radical reorientation towards what the writing process can feel like.
I start the workshop with a slide of my cat on a piece of paper just because I can. I usually offer some point of entry to the effect of…Pepper loves boxes. But they can also be scary? And what can make you feel more boxed in than a blank sheet of paper? Here is Pepper surrounded by frightening sheets. Free writing can help us get past the fear of the page and just put words down. But this has also just been an excuse to share photos of my beloved cat.
Moving on to the first free writing exercise. At this point in the curriculum, our students have done a mind mapping exercise that encourages them to free associate different linked concepts related to teaching and learning. I haven’t written up that actvity just yet (I will!), but you can find the slide deck on the Praxis site if you wanted to run it on your own. To get started with our free writing:
What are the most important values that you bring to teaching? To digital pedagogy? Write for eight minutes on this.
When designing your speculative DH workshop, how might you craft it in such a way that it reflects the values you just wrote about? How will you teach digital methods in a way that honors the things you care about? Write for eight minutes.
What activity are you planning for your workshop? What are the actual nuts and bolts of what you might do in the room? If you’re struggling to come up with an idea for the workshop, how might you explain the concept you’re interested in to a third grader? Write for eight minutes.
What sorts of anxieties do you have about teaching and learning? What fears do you have about digital pedagogy? What sort of things can you do to mitigate those concerns? Eight minutes again.
I usually close the workshop with another photo of Pepper. Now, having written, he is happily asleep and at peace. He’s moved past the box.
And that’s it! The activity is very flexible–add topics or take them away. Add time or subtract depending on the amount of time you have. Run the activities for yourself or others. If this approach to writing feels completely anathema to the way you work, you might find yourself pushed in new directions. If this all feels familiar, maybe the slides will help give you more material for what you’re already doing. I’m really grateful to Sean for the workshop that got me going in this direction. His workshop on writing about teaching really taught me a lot about both.
Ashley’s workshop also incorporates free writing as well! She does a great job linking formal and informal ways of writing about teaching. ↩