Scholars’ Lab

Digital Humanities Pedagogy And Opportunities For Hope

2019-10-17T00:00:00-04:00

In September, I visited Emory University in conjunction with the launch of their new graduate fellowship for students aiming to incorporate digital projects in their dissertations. This is the second of two posts sharing materials from the events I took part in while there. I was asked to give a workshop on project development for graduate students as well as an open talk on digital humanities pedagogy. The text of what follows pertains to the open talk I gave, where I was asked to give a broad overview of how the Scholars’ Lab works with students. I write a talk for situations like these, but I try to avoid straight-up reading the text (more info on how I approach public speaking in DH available here). So what you will see below is more like a roadmap of the general gist of what we talked about. I did not consult the text too much in the moment. The only other relevant piece of framing that you will need is that I added the phrase “he works for the students” to the end of the bio I gave Sarah McKee (Senior Associate Director for Publishing at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry) to read when she introduced me. Talk begins below!

Hello! I’m Brandon Walsh. I am the Head of Student Programs at the Scholars’ Lab, a community lab for experimental scholarship in all fields, particularly informed by digital humanities, spatial technologies, and cultural heritage. You will hear a lot more about what we mean by that in the talk to come, one that I have titled “Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Opportunities for Hope.” Thank you so much for having me and for coming today to hear me talk. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to speak with you.

I wanted to first start out by offering a couple links and thanks. If you need access to the slides or the transcript of this talk (or you’re interested in what I shared with your students in the workshop earlier today), you can find those resources at this top link. I have also made a Zotero collection here with all the resources I mention in the talk in case you want to take a look at them later on. And finally, most importantly, I wanted to take a moment to express gratitude to everyone whose work has brought me here today. I’m very grateful to all my colleagues in the Scholars’ Lab whose work you will hear about in a moment, especially Amanda Visconti, Ronda Grizzle, Jeremy Boggs, Laura Miller, and Shane Lin. And I would also like to express my thanks to Sarah McKee, Lisa Flowers, Anandi Silva Knuppel, and all the ECDS students for making this trip possible and invigorating.

Sarah asked me to give a high-level overview of the Scholars’ Lab and how we work with students. I will do that today, but my standard disclaimer about the Scholars’ Lab is that we are a complex entity with many different folks doing many kinds of jobs. And you will get a different path through our work depending on who you ask. I am the Head of Student Programs, so given my work and interests you might come away from this talk thinking, “they only work with students.” This is not true! We have an R&D team and spatial technologies staff that work with the entire university, students, faculty, and library staff alike on a variety of different projects related to digital scholarship, digital preservation, and digital project development. So what you will hear about today is about my own particular corner of the lab. One of my colleagues might have a different, overlapping story. My story is about our students, though I am happy to help flesh the full picture out for you if you would like during discussion.

At the risk of tipping my hand too early, I wanted to offer an overview of what is to come. I’ll move back and forth between example and theory, but the main takeaways, if I had to offer them are these. First, DH pedagogy does not just take place in the classroom, and it’s not just about DH. Second, digital humanities pedagogy is pedagogy. Third, DH pedagogy at every level should consider, intersect with, and reconstruct desire paths through the academy. I’ll talk more about all of these ideas in a moment. I’m not going to be offering any practical thoughts on how to carry out DH pedagogy, though I’m happy to do so in the discussion afterwards. This is more a talk about the animating philosophy for DH and pedagogy as we try to practice it in the lab, about the idea that teaching can offer spaces for hope in the university.

When Sarah invited me here today, as is usually the case for things like this, she asked me to send her a bio. I always dread this part of giving talks. When I was a student, I always felt like I hadn’t done enough, and I hated hearing people read my short list back to me. Now that I have been working in the field for a bit longer, I still find it embarrassing for different reasons. So I decided to take a cue from Chad Sansing of the Mozilla Foundation and do something with this moment of discomfort. In his bio on Medium he mentions, a bit tongue in cheek, “I teach for the users.”

I don’t want to spend my entire time here reiterating the plot of the 1982 movie Tron, but, in my reading at least, Sansing’s bio is a riff on a line from that movie: “he fights for the users.” The line describes the titular character of the movie, a security program who fights other fascist computer programs on behalf of the users who have been locked out of the computing world. It’s a lot. But I like Sansing’s adoption of it here, and I wanted to try it out for myself. I like the way that his bio ties up his identity into a kind of mission statement. “Who am I” becomes “why am I here?” He is here to teach, and he’s here to teach the users how to take back control of the web.

The bio I gave Sarah ended with the phrase “he works for the students.” That phrase is a mission statement and also the subject of this talk, which will deal with how we work in the Scholars’ Lab to have care and consideration towards our student collaborators suffuse everything we do. I’ll talk against the ideas that teaching only takes place in the classroom and that administrative work has nothing to do with teaching. I’ll start with what we do in the lab “for the students” and why. Second, I’ll contextualize this briefly as happening against the backdrop of a larger crisis in higher education. Third, I’ll offer thoughts about how we can shape a DH pedagogy that responds to such emergencies.

To begin. In the Scholars’ Lab, we try to start by approaching the whole student. We try to think about how our decisions affect lives and need to be informed by lives. Because administrative choices matter in big ways for people. When an application date gets set, who is eligible for a fellowship, or what kinds of work we allow as permissible in a particular context - choices like these affect the journeys our students are on.

So I would like to start by talking about paths. This image by an English Councillor circulated on the Digital Pedagogy Lab hashtag last month, and it illustrates a phenomenon called a “desire path” or a “desire line” – I would wager we have all seen them before. Desire lines are the paths made, over time, by people stepping on the same, unplanned path. They typically represent the organic actions of pedestrians as opposed to what was planned by the city designer. In this case, based on the Twitter conversation, the path you’re looking at appears to have been made over time by cyclists in response to the constructions you see on the left, obstacles deliberately put in place to discourage cyclists speeding along on this paved path. It is not difficult to imagine the accessibility issues caused by this same construction choice.

I’m taken with this image as a metaphor for the life of a graduate student in academia (caveat here that most of my comments will be about graduate students given who I tend to work with, but I think they are relevant for students generally as well). The image certainly resonates with me, coming as I do to work in the library without a library professional degree but instead with a PhD in English. In short, our students might get into this space for one reason, and we might imagine paths through it on their behalf. But everyone finds their own way through their own education and often through different means and to different ends than we anticipate. I certainly got pulled sideways at a certain point and wound up in a place I could not have envisioned at the beginning of my time at UVA.

I often wonder in related ways about my own activities in the administration of the Scholars’ Lab and in higher education more generally. In my role, I’m often making or offering small choices that are likely to affect the course of someone’s journey through their time as a student. These individual, local interventions in a person’s path - how do they fit into the larger journey for them? Am I helping people to form their own desire paths? Or am I the one throwing up barriers? How can I take those barriers down or help pave a new path to help the route be a little easier? Who am I to be making such decisions for other people? How can I take the responsibility of these choices as seriously as possible?

Given this logic of the desire path, for student programs to service your community in a perfect world you will be offering a diverse slate of opportunities. Because your student population does not just have broad and diverse disciplinary research questions – they also come from a range of different backgrounds and life situations. An MA student, at UVA at least, has a different course load and does not typically teach. This puts them in a fundamentally different category financially, with different pressures and needs, from a PhD student. And what works for one will not work for the other. That is to say, any conversation about DH pedagogy, for me, starts and ends with a discussion of the lived circumstances of the students. Our student activities in the lab are foremost informed by a consideration for the diverse contexts and backgrounds that our students represent.

We try to make our programs fit those many needs, and we try to offer a number of different ways in to do so. The phrase “for the students” that I mentioned earlier is also pretty close to a page on our website where I try to collect everything that a student might be interested in knowing about us. This is the “For Students” page of the Scholars’ Lab website if you would like to check it out at scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/for-students. I will talk about a few of these pieces in detail first from a nuts and bolts standpoint and then a theoretical one, though I am happy to talk in more depth about any one of them.

We regularly offer two hourly wage positions for students in the lab. The first is that we employ hourly students in our makerspace as technologists assisting community members with 3D printing jobs, experimental electronics, or sewing and wearable electronics. No experience is necessary for a student to take on the role, and we typically train people up on the job. There are a number of makerspaces on campus, but ours is distinct for being committed to teaching folks how to do the printing themselves. So you don’t drop off a file and pick up a print - you learn how the technologies work. And our makerspace primarily caters to humanities students, though we do get a fair amount of traffic from science students who tend to find our space less crowded than the ones provided by the Engineering School.

Second, our GIS specialists Drew McQueen and Chris Gist service needs related to spatial technologies for the entire University, and they regularly employ a GIS student collaborator to assist them in doing so. This student and these projects can come from across the university – not just the humanities. And they also frequently collaborate with local and regional governmental organizations on a variety of different geospatial projects. Our students are there at each step along the way as collaborators.

We also engage students in an internship for course credit through the architecture school, where our 3D Data and Content Specialist, Will Rourk, collaborates with them on the scanning of artifacts and spaces that are significant for cultural heritage purposes. They often carry out site visits in the region, and Will also collaborates with local museums on scanning objects of importance to them.

Will then engages those same students in the production of 3D data based on these objects. Through the process, our student interns get a deep introduction to all different parts of a 3D data pipeline, and the work that they all do together is truly impressive. The previous tweet and this 3D model all relate to the McCormick observatory on UVA’s campus.

Beyond these opportunities, we also offer two yearlong fellowship programs that offer deeper dives into digital humanities. These are the programs that I most directly supervise. Our higher-level DH fellowship is for advanced PhD students at the dissertation stage who want to work on a project related to their research. They teach some, but they are largely doing a deep dive into developing a professional portfolio that will serve them on the job market. And our Praxis Program is something of an introduction to digital humanities by way of project-based pedagogy. The six students in this fellowship each year form a cohort and work collaboratively on a self-designed project over the course of two semesters. The students drive the program: the fall feels more like a seminar or workshop with us at the front of the room, but the spring is owned by them. We flick them in a direction, but they take the project and develop it in a way that feels authentically theirs both in spirit, scope, and shape.

So that’s a piece of what we do in the lab, and you might have noticed just how much we do for students. I am well aware that the Scholars’ Lab is in a privileged position as far as resources go, both for centers for digital research and even within our own library. Over 2/3 of our budget goes directly to students, and we work directly with about 50 students each year. That’s a lot. As anyone who works with budgets knows, our own budget is the result of longstanding and ongoing campaigns for more resources. I am grateful for allies in the library who recognize the value of supporting students and especially to those who fought for years before I was involved to get those numbers to where they are. These numbers are not settled, and we have to work to keep them every year. But I bring these points up to ask - what can an institution without this level of support do? What can an individual without the support of an institution do? What are small actions we can take in our pedagogy - particularly our DH pedagogy - to help the desire paths our students are trying to make for themselves, even when we’re limited by resource scarcity?

For me, one way of approaching these questions is to think more deeply about what we mean when we think of pedagogy. I remember one conversation I had about teaching, when a colleague offhandedly said, “Oh well I don’t teach.” And a nearby colleague agreed as well. I remember doing a double take. These were people who, to my mind, were constantly engaged in the work of teaching.

Even besides the workshops they regularly give, these were people who mentored students, helped with their projects, and pair programmed beside them to help them learn. Furthermore, they’re fantastic teachers. The general culture in the Scholars’ Lab is one in which we constantly engage in peer mentoring. Digital Humanities is hard - there are so many fields. No one knows all of it, and we try to offer a spirit of generous assistance to each other every day as we find our way through this field. How, then, did I have an entirely different view of these colleagues than they did of their own work?

I think my colleagues were equating teaching with teaching classes as instructors of record. And, to be fair, sometimes I’m asked whether I am teaching or not in the upcoming semester, and I don’t quite know how to respond either. While I sometimes teach semester-long courses, my primary work is not in such traditional modes of instruction. While it’s not really the question they’re asking, my gut response is usually to think, “when am I not teaching?”

This is to say that pedagogy is not something that only happens in the classroom. I especially like the way that Sean Michael Morris describes this notion in an interview with Jesse Stommel. They’re two prominent scholar-practitioners of critical digital pedagogy, and they’re the chief instigators behind Digital Pedagogy Lab. In an interview about their new collection An Urgency of Teachers, Morris describes pedagogy as not something we just enact in the classroom. Instead, it’s a system of beliefs that we carry with us. A way of orienting ourselves in the world. Or at least it should be. If we think about teaching and pedagogy as things that only take place when we’re in front of a classroom or with our names in an LMS, then I would argue that we’re not thinking of teaching in the fullest possible sense. The spaces for teaching are vast, and our students many. To be “for the students,” we need to think of education as a way of life. As something that runs deeper than sharing material with students. This about how we view them and their work. We’re always teaching, whether or not we’re in front of students for a whole semester.

It’s one thing to believe having values like these are important. But in the Lab we also believe it’s important to share them, and now we’re getting into the philosophy behind what we do. We believe it is important to write our work philosophies down and to explicitly say them in public. In the Scholars’ Lab, we believe in explicit statements of values called charters, documents that spell out your beliefs, goals, and ambitions. We have had our cohorts of Praxis students put charters together describing their shared ambitions and values each year for the last nine years. Here you have one of the Praxis charters from one of the early cohorts. They cite free and generous credit, transparency, and an awareness of each other’s diverse backgrounds and disciplinary interests as important markers for them. The hope is that by encouraging our students to examine their shared group identity we will draw out a richer sense of themselves and each other.

Last year in conversation with Jeremy Boggs we realized that, even though we have our students write a charter every year, we hadn’t actually done one of our own, as a staff, for our student programs. We possessed a general charter for the lab, but we thought our student programs needed to explicitly share their own pedagogical philosophy and promises. It was time to make things clear and explicit. So we wrote one together. For the students.

You can find the whole charter on our website at scholarslab.org/student-programs-charter, and I’d encourage you to read it. It’s a document that is not perfect, but it’s one that I’m glad is out in the world. Here are a few excerpts from it that describe our approach to teaching.

We’re here, and we care. We trust in students. We teach the whole person. We’re committed to advancing pedagogical practices that are equitable, just, and ethical. It’s important that our students know where we stand, and one of the first things I have our students do is read this document along with the more general charter for the Scholars’ Lab. Our pedagogies, the ways we think about our work with students, should be shared with them. In the Lab we believe they should be part of the conversation.

Lest you think this is an artifact of the quotes I chose to emphasize, the charter doesn’t actually talk an awful lot about technology. It does occasionally, but only in oblique ways. We want our students to own their projects as well as their domains. We want them to fail in public in a way that pushes their comfort zone but not their safety. We all feel like imposters - many of us everyday. Some of you probably feel like imposters right now. I know I do. These points imply a certain interdisciplinary approach to technology, even though they are not specific to digital humanities.

And it’s also not lost on me that I’ve spent most of this talk on digital humanities pedagogy not talking all that much about digital humanities pedagogy. And that’s part of the point.

Digital humanities pedagogy is pedagogy. I’ll say that again. Digital humanities pedagogy is pedagogy. Similarly, to go back to Digital Pedagogy Lab, I’ve heard Sean Michael Morris say that the “digital” part of DPL is just an excuse to get people in the room to talk about pedagogy. The definition of digital humanities I usually give to students is one I draw from Elizabeth Grumbach: DH is asking humanities questions of technology and asking humanities questions with technology. DH pedagogy is certainly teaching that engages with those topics, materials, and methods, but leaving it there is akin to saying that you only teach if you’re an instructor of record.

Because I feel a tad guilty staying wholly theoretical I want to pause for a moment to say that there are great resources for digital humanities pedagogy from a practical perspective: I highly recommend Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom, co-authored by Claire Battershill and Shawna Ross, and Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, edited by Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris, and Jentery Sayers. These resources are exemplary for those seeking practical advice and examples on how to teach digital humanities.

But what I mean by “DH pedagogy is pedagogy” is that, for us in the Scholars’ Lab, a digital humanities pedagogy is one that thinks deeply and critically about the teaching itself and the interpersonal, societal, and institutional changes it purports to make. It’s not just about the classroom. That is to say, we certainly teach DH methods, tools, and thinking, but we’re more directly trying to think about how and why we do this work and what larger implications it might have. Digital humanities might be an especially good opportunity to make these sorts of interventions, and that brings me to the quote that the title of this talk is riffing on.

“Opportunities for Hope” is a play on Henry Giroux quoting the work of Paulo Freire. In full it reads: “Hope demanded an anchoring in transformative practices, and one of the tasks of the progressive educator was to ‘unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be.’” For Freire, education in its best shape was always about social reform, and he called for new forms of teaching that empowered students and upended traditional modes of instruction like the banking model for education that assumes students are empty vessels who need to have the knowledge of the instructor given to them only to regurgitate it back. And it’s this same spirit of transformation that we bring to the students who work with us in the Scholars’ Lab. How can our pedagogical practices as digital humanists open up space for new ideas for students, but more importantly, for imagining new lives? How can we unveil opportunities for hope, no matter the difficulties? Beyond simply giving them tools and methods, how can we go further and make the teaching we do be a political intervention?

More specifically, how do we unveil opportunities for hope in a climate like the one in which we all live, where it often feels higher education is on fire? Tenure track positions are vanishing, adjunctification is on the rise, and an enormous number of students and staff are in precarious positions. A so-called “free speech” crisis threatens actual free expression and freethinking in our classrooms. I could go on and on. I spoke about the privileged position the Scholars’ Lab is in, in terms of funding. But, no matter how much funding we’re able to direct to students, it’s never enough. There are always more students applying for fellowships than we have spots to give. Since I’ve been teaching, students have spoken with me about homelessness, food insecurity, precarious finances, uncertain job futures, mental health crises, chronic health conditions, and more. And I know the student populations I’ve worked with are not unique in higher education. How do we find hope for ourselves and for our students in the face of these situations? And what can pedagogy do here? I’ll offer three provisional responses to this question. In the face of a crisis in higher education, we should think of the work we do as creating spaces of shelter and intervention, as empowering student voices, and as changing culture more broadly.

My first response is that we can think of the teaching work that we do in digital humanities spaces as work that seeks to shelter and also to intervene. “What is a feminist lab?” was a symposium that took place at University of Colorado Boulder earlier this year. I got permission from Jacqueline Wernimont to cite her remarks, quoted here: “A lab can be a technology to survive the institutions we work in while we seek to transform them.” Our students in the Scholars’ Lab frequently refer to it as an oasis in the larger academy, by which I take them to mean that we value their futures, their concerns, and anxieties in ways that are not as well supported elsewhere. As they develop charters and have conversations about the values they want to develop and promote during their time with us, I often encourage them to think of it as an opportunity to shape the sort of kind, generous, and transformative space they want to see in the academy.

That is to say, we also engage students in a wide variety of support that is not particular to wage employment or research. Some of these are programmatic. We offer mock interviews if students wind up applying for library or digital humanities related jobs. We read materials. We circulate job postings relevant to this kind of work. But more generally we have frank conversations with students about our lives and theirs and try to make space for them in ways that might otherwise be difficult in other parts of the university. Our fellowships don’t carry grades, we allow deferment of our fellowships, and we generally try to make lives a little easier. For us, this is the work of pedagogy, and the fact that we are operating in a library-based digital humanities space helps facilitate this. Your own mileage may vary, as your circumstances are likely to be different. Given your own limitations, how can you use your position as teachers to inject more kindness into the academy?

Second – we can respond by asking, “where are the students?”

It’s important that we keep student interests and needs in mind. They are an important audience for our work, but sometimes they can disappear from the conversation when we discuss long-term strategy. So simply asking how students fit in is a place to start, and even small actions like making sure the word “student” appears on mission statements can be important interventions. But we can go further. Student voices need to be included in discussions about their own education. Digital humanities pedagogy is often quite amenable to this, as project-based pedagogy of the sort that is common in DH can often invite students to have an active role in shaping their experiences. The UCLA Student Collaborator Bill of Rights has other good advice for how to engage student voices and to make sure that you’re doing so in an ethical way. It’s a touchstone for us in the Lab.

The Small Liberal Arts Community (as exemplified by ILiADS) offers fantastic models for how you can engage students as true partners in research projects and disrupt the labor distinctions that all too often exist in our work. I’d encourage you to explore the ILiADS site for examples of projects that might offer models as you think through how to work with students. For my money, the SLAC community is offering some of the most exciting digital pedagogy work. This kind of flattened distinction between student and teacher, as much as possible, is something we try to aim for in the Scholars’ Lab. It’s expressed in a concise way, I think, in this Instagram story by Nicholas Payton, a prominent jazz trumpet player and composer.

In a recent “ask me anything” session on Instagram, Payton was asked, “Who are the best trumpet teachers alive right now?” He responded, “There are no great teachers, only great students who give tools to other students.” That is the world I want to live in. A world in which the Scholars’ Lab students see themselves as experts, and in which their staff and faculty see themselves as equal partners in the pursuit of knowledge.

We’re all students at the end of the day.

This can sometimes feel difficult to square with digital humanities, though, where often we quite literally have things we need to share with students that they are encountering for the first time. One thing we try to do in the Lab, beyond adapting our curriculum to the needs of the students, is talk to our students about the work of teaching and learning in which we are all engaged. We talk to them about why we are doing what we are doing, what difficulties we’re having, and what thoughts they might have for making a better experience.

For example, I mentioned the Praxis Program, our yearlong fellowship where our students go from soup-to-nuts with digital humanities, from knowing little to launching their own collaborative digital project by the end. For years, the interdisciplinary makeup of the team has been a recipe for real interpersonal conflict. Usually in March. Every year, right when the rubber hits the road and they’re trying to launch their project. Finally this past year we decided to talk to the team about it.

During the second session of Praxis this year, Amanda Visconti and I ran a discussion for our new cohort of Praxis students on good collaboration and community. And we laid this pedagogical problem out – we talked about issues we had in the program in the past not as interpersonal issues between specific people but as expressions of larger difficulties in collaborative work. We discussed what seemed to help and what did not. What’s more, we also talked about what good collaboration looked like for each other and how the students could make sure they treated each other with respect and kindness first. The students took the conversation very seriously. Last year was the best year yet as far as collaboration is concerned, and Amanda and I just ran the conversation for a new cohort last week. In short, there’s no need to treat pedagogy like something that has to be hidden from your students. Particularly in DH, as it asks so much of students professionally, interpersonally, and emotionally, we need to involve student voices in the development of good teaching practices. They deserve it, and everyone’s experience will be enriched.

Third, and I think it’s apparent from this talk, we have to think about the work that we do, even at the level of the individual assignment, as engaged in a larger project of shifting the culture of the university. When I spoke to the graduate students earlier today, we ended our workshop by talking about values. The workshop was called “getting from here to there” with a digital project, but the point was that there is always going to be another project. Another semester. Another student. It’s more important to think about why you’re doing this work: what are the animating philosophies behind what you’re doing? I’ve tried to give you a glimpse today of the “why” for the Scholars’ Lab.

I encouraged the students earlier to think about their work as opportunities to open up small spaces for more generous, kind, and productive spaces in the academy, to imagine the future they want to see into the world. In the Lab we see our work as part of a larger attempt to shift the culture of the university, both in terms of what graduate training in the humanities can look like but also in terms of what kinds of conversations are acceptable.

At UVA, we’re plugged into a larger network of like-minded programs working to train graduate students for a broad range of lives and future careers. This program, called PHD+, has been instrumental for us in helping to see that the work we’re doing as being part of a larger movement to rethink what graduate education can look like. Thinkers like Katina Rogers and Cathy Davidson, both at CUNY, and Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, co-founders of the Digital Pedagogy Lab, have been instrumental for me in seeing the work of the classroom as intimately connected to the work outside it. And, to go back to my point about student voices, we talk about these issues explicitly with our students. We have a session on diverse career options for them, on labor precarity and employment in digital humanities. We’re not solely interested in getting them jobs; we want to make sure that they can find their ways to happy futures no matter the outcome.

So to bring it back to an earlier image and earlier questions - when working on DH pedagogy decisions I’d encourage you to think about this image. I know I will. How are our decisions helping people navigate their own desire paths through the university? Throwing up new barriers for them? Paving new roads? How can we make even small assignments part of larger culture shifts? How might digital humanities pedagogy, in libraries and out of them, make space for these conversations?

That’s my talk. Thanks for listening. I’m happy to talk more about Tron, the Scholars’ Lab, nuts and bolts of digital humanities pedagogy, other opportunities for hope, and anything else you’d like.

Reading Grammar: First Attempts

2019-10-14T00:00:00-04:00

I am not a grammar whiz. I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what makes a verb transitive, much less how to identify a “nominal subject.” I haven’t taken a linguistics class or really thought all that much about the field past Saussure (the starting point for a lot of 101-level literary theory classes) and Chomsky (the point where mainline literary theory seems to diverge from linguistics). On the spectrum between descriptivism and prescriptivism I’m an apathetic descriptivist. But in writing the last couple chapters of my dissertation, I suddenly found myself brushing up on the basics. I’m taking something that I’ve known by feel for 20 years and trying to understand a bit more about how it’s formalized. One of the tools I’ve been using is not really from linguistics but rather out-of-date writing pedagogy.

In my first post I gave some backstory for my fellowship project studying grammar structures in Gertrude Stein. I’m going to use this post to show how I’ve implemented one piece of the puzzle. What I think is really interesting about this example, from a digital humanities perspective, is the way that computation can resurrect some old forms or inquiry that people have neither the time nor inclination for. I’d struggle mightily to diagram a single sentence by hand, but I’ve generated hundreds of diagrams while writing about Stein. They have changed how I read them. With all the big claims about what machine learning does to our experience of the world here’s a very minor, very specific one: reconstructing an old pedagogical task in order to inhabit an old way of thinking about composition.

Like I mentioned above, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about how grammar structures are formalized. This is probably in large part because I’ve been word-processing digitally more or less since I started writing. I’ve always had those squiggly underlines to tell me when I had something wrong with my grammar. From the late 1800s to the 1960s or so when the practice began to fall out of fashion, American schools had students drill “sentence diagrams” in order to learn writing and the basic tenets of grammar.¹

Reviving the Grammar Tree

So what do sentence diagrams actually look like? There’s no one standard, even though an 1877 textbook by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg was the most influential in writing pedagogy of the late 19th century. A lot of the hand-drawn diagrams look something like this:

It’s safe to assume Stein would have been creating diagrams that looked similar. I’ve been generating diagrams using the natural language processing package SpaCy for Python and a module called explacy. Explacy ‘prints’ out grammar trees in a monospaced font as a low-tech way of generating grammar diagrams of various length.

For a while I was using these tools locally, but eventually it seemed worth finding a way to put them online. You can try out a (very rough!) demo of the sentence parser here.

I started thinking about sentence diagrams because they appear to have been quite formative to the young Stein. If other students dreaded the rote (and as it turns out fairly useless) “grammar school” task, Stein loved the systematic approach to language:

When you are at school and learn grammar grammar is very exciting. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagramming sentences and that has been to me ever since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. (Lectures in America 210-211)

When I use modern natural language processing technologies to generate sentence diagrams, I get to share in Stein’s act of “completely completing” an analysis the skeleton of a sentence. Neither do I feel like I’m missing too much by automating the process–even Stein, who was drawing the diagrams by hand, phrases the activity as something inherent in the language–sentences “diagram themselves.”

Participating in the act of diagramming gives me not only a glimpse of how Stein and her American contemporaries would have been trained to think about composition, but also a better technical vocabulary for closely reading the mechanics of Steinese. William H. Gass once wrote about seven pages closely reading Stein’s use of the word ‘the’ in a single sentence from Stein’s Three Lives. It’s even an interesting read! Gass’ eye for the subtleties of ‘the’ is a skill that only comes with a super-analytic approach towards language mechanics, drilled from childhood. I frankly don’t have the stamina or skill set for that sort of reading, but by crunching the numbers with a computer rather than working by hand, I can at least borrow the correct terminology. For as often as digital humanities gets branded as being about new methods, sometimes it’s worth simply resurrecting the old. You learn something about the linguistic world your subjects lived in, and pick up some maneuvers of your own along the way.

Endnotes

Grammar was always important to pedagogy, a component of the lower “trivium” within the classical hierarchy of the liberal arts, alongside logic and rhetoric. But Americans, apparently, took the idea of studying grammar quite literally. ↩

How We Talk and Write about DH Jobs

2019-10-09T00:00:00-04:00

Early this summer, we (authors Brandon and Amanda!) planned a post about job search materials, but finishing up the draft got delayed by several weeks. In the intervening time, a small Twitter debate on the subject of academic job advice occurred, and we ended up holding off this post for a few months while discussing how to do it well.

The debate in question: someone shared the job advice they generally give students on the academic job market, and folks responded with frustrations about the prescriptiveness, privilege, and goals of the academic job advice genre. Since then, we’ve also appreciated inspiring work being done on the topic by Hannah Alpert-Abrams. The Academic Job Market Support Network that she spearheads shares a lot of the spirit behind what we intended to do with our job search materials, so we’re taking this as an opportunity to revisit the post we had planned. We have both uploaded cover letters from our pasts to the AJMSN (Brandon’s letter here and Amanda’s letter here), and we talk a bit about our reasoning below. We’ll offer some general thoughts about job searches in digital humanities, and annotate each other’s cover letters. We thought the latter might be a useful exercise beyond just sharing them.

Slightly Better Job Advice, Take Two

Framing an academic job search exclusively in terms of handy tips undervalues the degree of luck that goes into any search. Do these things, such advice seems to suggest, and the just and right meritocracy will reward you with a job. But the academic job market is anything but just, and anything but a pure measure of merit¹. The same is true, of course, for job markets beyond academia. Digital humanities job searches, be they for faculty positions or otherwise, suffer from the same issues. Internally we’ve had a lot of conversation about how to share job advice with our students. We’re frequently called upon to do so, and we want to do it well. So we thought it worth sharing a few of the things we try to consider below. Keep in mind, of course, that this is not an exhaustive list.

The academic job market is not identical with all job markets in academia. There is a range of different careers that engage in intellectual work, careers that might be called alt-ac (though there are good reasons for not using that term to describe them). Paths to these careers are often just as obscured as paths to professorships, and resources for how to navigate these types of job searches are scarce. Resources for finding and thinking about these kinds of careers are one of the key things we can provide students.
Students need our support. In particular, refusing to share resources about job searches, even if the act is well meaning, can reinforce privileged access to those same materials. Our initial reason for writing this post was that we noticed we were repeatedly sharing the same cover letters with folks looking for work. We found ourselves wondering how many other people at UVA or elsewhere might not know to ask for such resources.
Offers to aid in job searches, on and off the tenure track, are better when they go beyond lists of advice. In particular, we try to help folks think through backup plans and suggest talking with a career center as part of the conversation about how to seek positions in the digital humanities. We try to speak from our own experiences but also to recognize our own limitations as resources. We do not have all the answers, but we still might be able to help in some way.
Student support like this necessarily includes emotional labor. For us (the authors), this has proven unavoidable. In conversations we try to emphasize that the student is smart enough and good enough for this work, that the job market is not a reflection on them, and that our current jobs are the results of luck in a lottery system (where every time you win a lottery it makes winning future lotteries a bit more tipped in your favor…). The fact that we have jobs does not necessarily mean our advice will be helpful (CW for war: see e.g. Abraham Wald on survivorship bias²). In short, it is not enough to tell students that they need do X and Y in order to be successful. In the Lab we believe these conversations need to engage with the messy work of what the job search entails.
Advice about any job market should come with a frank discussion about all the factors involved in being offered a job (i.e. how many factors are out of candidates’ hands), and about the precarious nature of employment in the field that the particular position may or may not play into.

We’re not sure how we share our cover letters given this context, but it still seems worth doing; we’re going to continue advising the local students who work with us, and we’d like to help students who are elsewhere if we can. Some of the ways we try to make our advising do more good than harm include:

Thinking about intent vs. impact: job advice is often “well meaning”, but what matters is the environment it builds up or dismantles, who it tells is worthwhile as they already are vs. who it tells to change, who it empowers with information. Consider whether telling a student that you don’t judge them for XYZ, but that interviewers will, has the same impact as you judging them.
Not posting job ads to the SLab Slack fellows channels (where they might be regular, unwanted reminders of job market stress to folks who aren’t even looking for work right now, or otherwise want to limit when they’re thinking about jobs). We’ve moved to including a list of interesting jobs to the end of our lab newsletter instead, where students can regularly choose to look at them if they choose.
Moving to a public newsletter as a means of distributing these posts means that students can opt in without self-declaring themselves as on the job market, which allows for greater transparency about the process. It becomes less about knowing who you have to ask - anyone (even non-UVA people) can get access to that newsletter if they choose.
Focusing our commentary not on “what others will expect” or “the right way to do things” (e.g. how to write the salutation), but instead on examples of how to best communicate one’s personal strengths via cover letter. In this way, we hope to keep the focus on the individual person and how they can take ownership of their own background rather than on how to please an anonymous committee (this can be a moving target).
Leavening advice with affirmation of students as scholars and humans; helping them think about how to do what they value in life, even if they can’t do that as their main job. In short, academia has a way of encouraging people to think about their academic work and academic “merit” as deep reflections of their “worth” as a person. We try to reaffirm the fact that every person is worthwhile

Thoughts on some specific DH cover letters

Below, each of us shares the text of one of our cover letters for the other to annotate. The comments below reflect what we’ve tried to do when we have served on hiring committees and reviewed cover letters: avoid the stuff we feel we shouldn’t evaluate on, and what we do look for. Of course, these should be taken with a grain of salt. Our hope is that sharing the letters in this format will offer a bit more insight into how we think about DH job searches. It’s also worth noting that we each clearly read for different things. Similarly, other people serving on DH hiring committees might look for different things. We’ll focus on the hiring experience for:

Brandon’s current role: Head of Student Programs at the University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab³
Amanda’s previous role: tenure-track assistant professor and DH specialist at Purdue University Libraries⁴

While our comments below are about our cover letters, you might be interested in checking out other hiring and school info we’ve shared: Brandon’s job talk for his current role, Amanda’s job talks for her current role (with links to job talks shared by three other scholars as well!) and her previous faculty role; and Amanda’s doctoral defense talk, advice about defense talks, and literature/DH PhD exams list and advice. We’ve added the cover letters to an existing effort to gather and contextualize job materials led by Hannah Alpert-Abrams on Humanities Commons—check out their files page for other cover letters, various types of written statement, etc.

We started working at SLab on the same day and were not involved in the hiring of each other, so all comments are views from outside the search committee. You can check out the full cover letters on Humanities Commons, and reading them in full first might be useful: Brandon’s cover letter and Amanda’s cover letter. You might wish to compare these to how the job ads described these roles: Head of Graduate Programs and Digital Humanities Specialist Assistant or Associate Professor. In what follows, we intersperse inset text of our letters with short, bulleted lists of comments from the other person.

Brandon’s cover letter

Brandon’s cover letter, notes by Amanda

I am writing to apply for the position of Head of Graduate Programs in the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. As an alumnus of both the Praxis Program and the Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities, I have a deep appreciation for the Scholars’ Lab’s commitment to experimental forms of collaborative, project-based pedagogy.

If you have past experience or knowledge of what the place does, share that! You don’t have to have worked/learned at the place (as Brandon did at UVA) to speak to what specifically draws you there. E.g. maybe you’ve gotten a sense from their social media, a project or conference talk, or a blog post about what’s important to how the place works?
Brandon shows awareness and mutual commitment to some of the lab’s values here; he shares this in a way that lets the search committee learn something about him (that he digs experimentation, collaboration), rather than something more abstract like “I would be honored to work at such a great place” that doesn’t give the committee info but does take up some of your limited space.
Most of the cover letters I’ve seen use the first paragraph to deliver information that isn’t really new—this is my name, I’m not confused what position I’m applying for, I think I would be a good fit—so I like how he leads with a framing that does tell us more about him as a candidate.

I believe that my own extensive teaching record and my experiences as a digital humanities developer and project manager, all of which are shaped by my understanding of the Scholars’ Lab’s values, make me uniquely qualified for this position.

There’s limited space to tell the search committee about yourself, so rather than make his cover letter repeat his CV, Brandon connects up items in his past that could help him successfully fill this role’s goals. Rather than using himself as a reference (e.g. “I am very good at x” or “I am xyz adjectives”), Brandon points out that the past roles listed on his CV are connected as different approaches in DH, suggesting he’s both learned skills from being in a variety of different roles, and can probably work in an informed way with colleagues in those roles.
He again recognizes specifics about the lab—that through our staff charter, choices, etc. we try to be attentive to how our values shape our work. Some institutions make learning about how they do work difficult, unfortunately.

Student mentoring has been my first priority for the duration of my career.

Brandon shares who he is as a professional and community member: articulating what matters to him, showing he understands what matters to this job, and going on to explicitly demonstrate how the two overlap.

I have taught a number of digital humanities workshops and classes, but I am proudest of my recent work as co-administrator of the Undergraduate Digital Humanities Fellows program at Washington and Lee University, where I currently serve as Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow. This initiative attempts to adapt the principles of the Praxis Program to a liberal arts context by allowing undergraduates to engage in collaborative research projects of their own design. I serve in both supervisory and technical roles in this program, and my daily tasks range from scoping student projects to teaching technical lessons on GitHub or programming concepts in PHP. During the past year, I have worked with humanities students to design and implement digital archives, editions, and storytelling projects through a combination of hands-on training and mentoring.

The first half of this sentence (“I have taught a number of digital humanities workshops and classes”) could mean anything from teaching two small workshops ever, to multiple courses designed and taught himself—when hiring, readers may assume the lowest possible situation that your statement might mean, unless shown otherwise via specifics. Brandon helps us not need to guess—he doesn’t rehash his whole list of DHy skills here, but mentions a few in context in a way that suggests familiarity with other DH practices as well.
Specific examples, including names of methods, tech, approaches showing familiarity. A good way to demonstrate knowledge of an area is to describe what daily work practices look like—specific tools or methods, what your involvement in a project specifically looked like.

I recognize that the vitality of a program depends upon a student community that extends beyond the bounds of the fellowship years, so I have created an outreach plan that builds our student network by having fellows visit other courses and mentor others as digital experts.
This student community can – and should – contribute to life beyond the walls of the academy: this year I am piloting a program that sends our fellows to a local High School AP Computer Science class to collaborate on digital projects. Drawing on the lessons I learned during my own training, my efforts always aim to teach the person not the material. Helping students to find the confidence to speak, act, and sometimes fail productively in public in roles like these is as important to me as any temporary success afforded by a project.

Brandon states some of his values and goals, then immediately identifies how he acted on these. This both backs up claimed values in his letter, and demonstrates experience reflecting on and iterating one’s practices to bring them into line with what you identify as important.
There’s use in defining commonplace terms. Everyone knows what “teaching” means, right? But is this someone who cares about “filling young minds” and also mocks their current students on social media, vs. someone who sees students as colleagues, fellow scholars, humans? Brandon’s approach in this paragraph helps the reader see if we’re actually talking about the same thing when we say “teaching” (same for “research”, “scholarship”, “service”, etc.).

As a member of Washington and Lee’s digital humanities faculty committee, I have helped to develop the school’s digital humanities curriculum, which aims to provide students at all levels of expertise with an intellectual and practical understanding of innovative digital work. In particular, I have focused on collaborations that raise the skillsets of my colleagues as long-term investments in growing our resources. Working with Professor Sarah Horowitz and a student researcher on her interest in text analysis, for example, has led to both a co-taught class on digital history as well as a co-authored open access textbook.

The book is, foremost, a pedagogical exploration, an attempt to write an accessible introduction to digital text analysis for complete newcomers. The writing of this textbook was also, in itself, a teaching exercise: the writing process required Professor Horowitz to learn version control and Markdown in addition to a number of text analysis techniques. These experiences were part of a larger experiment that I spearheaded in collaborative writing and publishing that has led to invitations for presentations and workshops at DLF and Bucknell Digital Scholarship with our Digital Humanities Librarian.

As an experienced project manager and digital humanities developer, I also offer an advanced skillset to augment my teaching.

Brandon shows how he invests in people around him, making the place he works better for colleagues in different roles (here: student, staff, faculty).
When applying for a staff job from a doctoral and/or faculty background, it can be useful to demonstrate how those experiences don’t disadvantage you—i.e. you don’t understand what the staff position will be like. Brandon manages to both show the skills he learned from his past work experiences, while also aiming them at the kinds of work he’d be doing if hired.
Brandon notes skills that might not be in the job ad, but are critical: collaboration, managing projects, a broad understanding of tech.

I served for several years as the project manager of NINES, and I have given invited talks on project development at the University of Michigan, SUNY New Paltz, the University of Central Florida, and the Center for Networked Information. I have consistently worked to supplement this supervisory experience with the skills necessary to implement projects myself. During my time at Washington and Lee, I have deployed and maintained three Rails applications, supervised Omeka customizations, and designed text analyses in Python, in addition to carrying out my own research in machine learning and sound studies. These skills will allow me not only to lead workshops on the technical aspects of digital humanities research, but also to supplement the resources of the Scholars’ Lab by providing technical support to fellows myself.

It’s very good to share things you’re proud of! If you don’t highlight these, your search committee might never know about them. If you have trouble doing this, you might have friends or a supportive teacher who can help you remember experiences or decisions worth sharing here. Julia Evans has a good blog post about how to get comfortable talking about your strengths.
Brandon does a good job pitching his achievements for this staff role—sharing the things faculty hiring committees value, like invited talks, but coupling those with tech skills and his broader learning from those experiences. He comes across as someone who wants to be in a staff job that’s heavy on mentoring, collaborating, experimenting, rather than someone treating this job as an alternative to another career goal.

I know first-hand how transformative the right interventions can be in the lives of graduate students. The Scholars’ Lab’s commitment to equipping students at all levels for both the kinds of careers that they will find and the intellectual provocations they can make in the digital age has shaped my own thinking, and it continues to inform all of my work. I see this position in the Scholars’ Lab as the perfect opportunity for me to help others learn as I once did, and to use my skills and experiences to extend the excellent work of the Scholars’ Lab’s fellowship programs.

I look forward to discussing the great potential of the position with you.

I like the wording in the final sentence—”great potential” reminds me that I’ve gotten a sense from this letter that this is someone who’s thought hard about the strategy and tactics of student-focused DH, who is ready to do good in this role.

Amanda’s cover letter

Amanda’s cover letter, notes by Brandon

Dear Purdue University Libraries team,

I'm a digital humanist with an Information M.S. (University of Michigan), new Literature Ph.D. (University of Maryland), and over eight years as a professional DH web developer and public-focused DH scholar, working since 2009 in multiple staff roles at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). I write to apply for the Digital Humanities Specialist role.

The first thing I notice is how Amanda structured her letter differently than how I typically do so. I tend to treat cover letters like essays, where the structure of the thing to come will be laid out in the final sentence of the first paragraph. Amanda leads with her experience here, which is likely to make sure her cover letter gets past an initial quick read.
It’s perhaps also worth noting how wild and varied the paths often are for digital humanists. In this field maybe more than others it is not uncommon to tie together many seemingly disconnected life experiences into a narrative about yourself. The connections between library degrees, and PhD in English, and positions at a DH center all speak to each other in clear ways. But I can easily imagine a need to pull together a variety of different experiences that might not parse so easily for people. This seems fine to me. More on diverse life experiences below!
Another thing that stands out here is that Amanda does not just point out what she has done - she points out different experiences from very different contexts. Research experience as a graduate student, library experience, and hands-on experiences. It’s helpful to think in these terms when presenting yourself to a search committee. It’s not just about the work you’ve done. It’s also about the kinds of contexts and audiences to which this work exposes you.

As an example of my work, my recent dissertation project is InfiniteUlysses.com—an interface that brings scholars, teachers, and readers of all backgrounds together in annotating and discussing a challenging book, personalizing the annotations displayed to any given reader by their backgrounds, interests, and needs. Infinite Ulysses achieved sizable impact for a literature dissertation, with over 13,000 unique visitors during its first month of open beta. The challenge of helping everyone feel empowered to participate in the humanities drives my research and project design.

To underscore what Amanda says above - I usually tell people to make sure their letter is not an extension of their CV. When addressing things that appear in both, I usually try to make sure the things in the letter expand or provide context that you might not otherwise get in a CV. This text is great, because she expands on a project that might otherwise only get a line and not have the same impact.
I also like how she takes the work and expands upon it to describe what she learned from it. That sort of self-reflection is something I usually look for in cover letters and try to represent in my own.
Amanda’s accomplishments here and as articulated in the letter are impressive, but I often think it’s a matter of selling yourself regardless of whether or not you have done a lot, whether or not your blog has thousands of hits. Take the things you have done and use them as an opportunity to spin a story about yourself.

Successfully completing a non-monograph dissertation taught me how to champion others embarking on digital scholarship, both in educating their colleagues on their digital work, and in the practical aspects of project design, technical learning, and planning for the full life cycle of the project. I dealt with this last—DH long-term thinking and digital preservation—as MITH's Webmaster, auditing our two servers full of projects, files, and databases ranging back to 1999, and in my training and experience doing digital preservation work with MITH's early e-lit collection.

Another thing I often look for - the letter is a space to offer reflections on your experience. I like that Amanda takes the experience with the dissertation and goes a step further to show what it means in the broader narrative of how she approaches people and her work. In other words - it answers the “so what?” question. These moments of reflection can also be a chance to connect yourself to the values of the institution and position for which you are applying.
As a student, it can often feel like you have no experience. But you do! It’s just a matter of taking those experiences you do have and extrapolating to how they would apply to other circumstances. So in this case, Amanda does a great job of showing how working as a dissertation and webmaster apply to other circumstances and to the position for which she’s applying. I often tell students to think of it like roleplaying. If you were in the position, what experiences have you had that you could imagine helping you? Write about them. Sometimes trying to imagine yourself doing the work can help you think further about how to present yourself for the application.
Lastly I would note that it’s important to consider the practical skills you gain from doing digital work as distinct from the research aspects of that work. To be sure, they’re both tightly joined in practice. But it’s all too easy to get to the end of a digital project on Victorian archives and think, “this has given me experience with Victorian research and digital archives.” But there is also a whole range of other “soft skills” that such work gives you experience in - project management, software development, project promotion, etc. These are all things you can have experience in and they are also things you can discuss critically! Reflections on these parts of the process are often of immense use to other scholar practitioners. Think of them as experiences but also as potential objects of scholarly inquiry.

My work has always been interdisciplinary in both topic and methodology. A few of my diverse past DH projects include:

* Co-organizing the first digital humanities and games unconference (THATCamp Games)  
* Developer on the "Making DH More Open" team's Braille Wordpress plugin  
* Data visualization and topic modeling of Digital Humanities Quarterly to explore DH citation networks (recipient of the inaugural ACH Microgrant)  
* Team teaching and design of a DH course for UMD's Digital Cultures and Creativity undergrads  
* Librarian-aimed user testing and documentation for BitCurator's archival digital forensics tools  

I offer excellent communication, teaching, and presentation skills, and am especially deft at research use of social media (over 2,000 Twitter followers) and blogging (over 22,000 unique blog visitors to date). I’ve worked in a number of pertinent roles: as a librarian and digital archivist, university teacher and student, web developer, and DH center staff, as well as alongside others in these roles. This background gives me inside experience of the different needs and values of these important scholarly constituents. After working on interdisciplinary teams for six years at one of the world's top digital humanities research centers, I'm a skilled translator between tech and non-tech colleagues, and my research best thrives through collaboration.

I think the reference to social media work here is useful. When I was hired at the Lab, they specifically cited my blogging and presence on Twitter as assets. You might not think about that kind of public outreach as tangible work, but it is! It’s often helpful to think about the value you bring to the institution beyond your research and teaching. This framing can be especially useful for positions beyond the tenure track in libraries or otherwise.
One thing I notice about Amanda’s letter is that it really speaks to the diverse experiences she had when she applied to the position. That’s great! In academia I think we are sometimes challenged to think of ourselves as this coherent narrative where all roads lead to a single path. But, in practice, we have all sorts of experiences. And that broad background can be part of your narrative. We don’t all fit into neat boxes.

I'd love to discuss how my background in digital humanities service, training, research, and building would complement the Purdue University Libraries' learner-centered mission! Thank you for your time and consideration.

Small point, but it’s often quite clear when a single cover letter has been sent out to multiple institutions with the name of one simply subbed for another. There are small ways to flag that you actually are applying for this specific position at this specific place, and this is an example of them. That’s to say, I like that Amanda doesn’t just say she is a good fit, she connects her experience to the mission of the institution in this last moment. It can be difficult to figure out what that mission is (in the Scholars’ Lab we have an explicit statement about our values), but you could get clues from events, projects, research, and similar initiatives undertaken by the institution. If they’re committing time and energy to it, they care about it.
In terms of thinking about how to find out the character of an institution, specific events or projects can help. But there are often large, general questions you could ask about a place that could help you think about their mission. Is it a small liberal arts college or an R1 institution? Is this a DH center you would be hired into or a single position apart from a larger network of support? Is the position part of a library? Is the position hired for a particular grant or is it sourced on hard money? Are we talking about an institution of teaching? higher education? cultural heritage? What sort of audience / public does the institution tend to cater to? There are a number of large buckets like these that institutions tend to fall into. While each organization is unique, thinking about large categories like these can help provide clues to what this particular one is about.

Endnotes

The coiner of the word “meritocracy” intended it to ridicule the very ideas folks now use the term to convey. ↩
I remember seeing a tweet recently where someone connected the infamous image of the bullet hole locations on the surviving planes to listening to some kind of job advice selectively—maybe listening to folks who got hired about what not to ask during interviews? If you know who tweeted this and wouldn’t mind, please let me know so I can cite them (@literature_geek on Twitter/visconti@virginia.edu). It’s important to record where ideas came from, even in smaller things like this post. ↩
Brandon’s title has been expanded over the course of his work here; at the time of hiring, it was “Head of Graduate Programs”. ↩
We thought this be more broadly useful to students than the cover letter for her current job, as that fits leaving a faculty role to direct a lab, rather than locating one’s first post-PhD job. ↩

Call For Applicants: DHSI 2020 Tuition Fellowships

2019-10-04T00:00:00-04:00

Want to learn more about digital humanities skills, methods, and inquiry? The Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria has a tradition of transformative training.

The University of Virginia, as a sponsoring institution of DHSI, provides 10 tuition-free fellowships to attend a Digital Humanities Summer Institute course or workshop during the summer of 2020. Students, staff, non-TT faculty, and those without access to research travel funds are especially encouraged to apply.

The fellowships entirely cover the cost of course tuition for one course, using a code at the time of registration (rather than reimbursement afterward). These fellowships do not cover travel (to Victoria, B.C.), meals, or lodging, so applicants should be prepared to fund these out of pocket or by locating additional funding sources on your own.

Visit dhsi.org for descriptions of the available courses. Applications are due ASAP. Selection, organized by the Scholars’ Lab, will begin on November 10th and continue on a rolling basis.

To apply, please email dhsi-fellowships@virginia.edu with the following:

UVA affiliation & status (e.g. 3rd year PhD in art history, staff job title in Library/department)
Availability for June 1-5 (courses), June 8-12 (courses), and/or June 7 (workshops)
The course/workshop you’d like to take (and 1-2 other courses of interest, in case a course cap is reached)
A short, specific statement (300-500 words) about your background, professional/academic interests, and why you would like to attend DHSI
Whether you’ve identified funding (personal or from another funding source) to cover travel, lodging, and meal costs.

Questions and applications can be sent to dhsi-fellowships@virginia.edu.

Online Resources for 3D Content in VR/AR

2019-09-30T00:00:00-04:00

In the digital humanities, it is sometimes easier to acquire 3D content from external sources rather than making it, especially when under a time constraint or limited in knowledge of 3D modeling. Fortunately, people in situations like these have access to many resources, such as repositories of 3D content submitted by amateur users within the 3D-design community or by professional creators working at design studios.

Some of the resources below have content suitable for 3D printing (.stl file format), while others might only be used for digital implementation (.obj or similar file format). Additionally, even though most of the listed resources are free, some might require registration for an account or a small payment to access the content. Remember to obey the licensing terms listed for each site and individual model, since some creators may not allow the use of their content for commercial purposes.

Online Resources:

Google Poly

In Google Poly, users can find 3D content files in the form of low-polygon, geometric constructions made in Blocks, artistic sketches made in Tilt Brush, or tours of global sites made in Tour Creator. These are available in .stl, .obj, and other 3D file formats that can be downloaded and used as desired.

SketchFab

In SketchFab, users can browse, upload, or download 3D content files submitted by other users in the SketchFab community. Though most are premium models that require a purchase, some are free to download. This site also focuses on digital 3D content for export in .obj formats or for manipulation in 3D design programs like SketchUp, Blender, or Unity. However, there are .stl files available for 3D printing as well.

TurboSquid

TurboSquid contains professional-grade 3D content files that range from tens to hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Most of these are for use in digital 3D content platforms, such as 3ds Max, Maya, and Autodesk FBX. This site does have some free 3D models and files in .stl and .obj formats, but users don’t generally come to this site for those types of files.

Unity Asset Store

The Unity Asset Store has 2D and 3D assets to use for content development, which includes files, textures, animations, visual effects, and user interfaces. Obviously, these are all meant for use in Unity’s program only, and there are both paid and free content packages available.

SketchUp 3D Warehouse

The SketchUp 3D Warehouse from Trimble is a website from the owners of SketchUp that collects 3D content submissions from SketchUp users, both amateur and professional. The content, likely meant for digital manipulation purposes only, is free and can only be imported into the SketchUp program. However, after making any necessary adjustments, SketchUp can export into other common 3D file types.

Thingiverse

Thingiverse is a site from MakerBot dedicated to creating a community for 3D printing objects for all purposes and facilitating creative discussions between the users. The website contains free 3D model files (in .stl format) generally for 3D-printing purposes, but these .stl files can be converted to 3D design files when needed for alteration or customization purposes.

UVA Dataverse

The UVA Library Dataverse’s Cultural Heritage section is a free source for 3D content produced by Will Rourk, 3D Data and Content Specialist at the UVA Scholars’ Lab. Here, 3D data is available in both digitally viewable and 3D printable formats so that people can import them for use in virtual reality or for physical manipulation. Additionally, some objects have the raw point cloud data available, which can be used to create the 3D models from scratch.

There are many other sites for this sort of data, but finding the exact 3D model that you need may take some time to search multiple sites, especially if it is an obscure or highly detailed model. It isn’t too difficult to create the 3D content needed, as long as the right tools are acquired. However, for some people, it may be easier to use an existing 3D model to speed up the development schedule.

Photogrammetry Workflow using a DSLR Camera

2019-09-24T00:00:00-04:00

What is Photogrammetry? Photogrammetry is a photographic process that generates 3D data (measurements) from 2D images (photographs) to create a 3D model with accurate color and texture. Basically, you take a bunch of pictures at different angles of an object, run all the photos through a computer program called Metashape, and you end up with a very cool digital 3D object at the end! The Smithsonian 3D Digitization has a whole collection of 3D models online you can browse from artifacts to structures to in-situ burials.

Light is critical to this process and therefore there are certain objects that are difficult, if not impossible, to model using photogrammetry: objects with reflective or shiny surfaces, clear/transparent objects like glass, very thin objects like tree leaves, very furry or hairy things, things that move (e.g. your pet hamster or your best friend’s head).

In this blog posting I go through the workflow to create a high quality, scaled model using our photogrammetry station in the Robertson Media Center on the third floor of Clemons Library and computer software called Agisoft Metashape (previously Photoscan). If you want to create a quick and less accurate model or you are working in the field or with a collection where you can’t bring the physical object to Clemons, check out my posting on photogrammetry in the field with your smart phone.

Step 1: Equipment choice and setting up your photo station

Equipment

Photogrammetry, at its core, is a photographic project. The goal is to have a set of the clearest photos possible, which means using a camera and lens that have a manual mode where you can adjust the camera’s aperture, focus, white balance, and ISO to fit your lighting environment. This doesn’t mean you can’t do photogrammetry with a point-and-shoot or your phone’s camera, but the quality will be that much better if you use a good DSLR camera. If you plan to use photogrammetry to record quantitative data, a DSLR camera is required. Lenses are measured based on focal length (the number before the mm on your lens). The wider a lens (lower mm number), the more you are able to capture in a photo, however with a 24 mm lens or lower you’ll start to see distortion around at the edges of your frame. Do not use fisheye or wide-angle lenses because they cause too much distortion. Higher numbered lenses have less distortion but are also much more expensive. Prime lenses have a fixed focal length: you cannot zoom. They can produce very high quality photographs because they minimize noise and distortion, resulting in an extra sharp image. If you have a good prime fixed-zoom lens within 24-70mm range, use it! A polarized lens cover will also help to reduce glare if your object has a shiny surface.

DSLR Camera
Tripod
Level
Color and White Balance cards
Painter’s tape
Remote release
Optional: lint roller (to clean the black backdrop if necessary)

Environment

White Light box: this will diffuse the light so you don’t get harsh shadows
Black background and base (ideally photographers black drop cloth, or felt if necessary)
Turntable
Lighting: we like photographers LED lights on tripods that you can move around, add light filters etc.
Scales / Ruler
Optional: black pedestal for your object

Computers & Software

We will be processing the photos using a program called Agisoft Metashape Pro.

Step 2: Get to know the settings on your camera

For high quality results, you want to take every photo with exactly the same camera settings so the photographs are consistent when you start working with them in Metashape. This means both taking photos of the object from the same position every time (you’ll change the height of the camera at least three times to take 3 circuits of photos) so that the object is consistently framed in the photograph and adjusting the settings on your camera so that the color, focus, capture settings are the same for every photo. It is important to have a general understanding of how different settings on your DSLR camera can impact your photographs. The following steps will help you set up your camera to produce the crispest image possible with accurate color representation.

Basic Camera Settings

All cameras

Set your camera to shoot in RAW.
Turn OFF auto-rotate
Set mode to Manual or (For beginners, try using Aperture priority—AV on a Canon or A on a Nikon)
Set to never turn off

Some Cameras

Turn off GPS (you can take some photos with the GPS later if desired)
Turn off sensor cleaning on power down (if the camera shakes the sensor to remove dust on power down)
If using zoom lens set the focal distance to one end of the other of the focal length and tape it down with painters’ tape.
If the lens has ‘image stabilization’ or ‘vibration reduction’ turn it OFF (usually a switch on the lens itself.)

Optional Adjustments

Set camera from live view to grid view
Turn off AF beep when using live view (on Canon)
Set back button for focus (functionality of half shutter press is transferred to back button)
Set the camera to not shoot if no SD or CF card is present.

Part II: Position your Camera.

It is important to position your camera in the exact environment where you plan on taking photos before you change any of the following settings.

We suggest starting with your camera and tripod positioned on the same horizontal plane as your object- e.g. your camera should be aligned directly with the center of your object. You’ll move it up and down later. Use a tripod that has an adjustable central pole so that you don’t have to move the feet of the tripod, but just the camera up or down. Make sure you position the central pole in the middle of its height range so that you are able to adjust up or down later.
Check to make sure your camera base is level.
Place your object in the center of the turntable and position your camera tripod such that the entire object is visible. Make sure that when you rotate the object it doesn’t move out of the frame! If possible, avoid including the edges of the lightbox or edge of your black background in the photo frame; this will make masking much easier later on.
Lighting: You want your object to be illuminated with diffused light to minimize shadows. LED lights with tripods and filters are available to check out. Position lights to shine towards the front of the object but still behind the white-box sides.

Camera Adjustments.

There are four critical settings on a DSLR you want to be aware of: ISO, white balance, aperture (f/stop), and shutter speed. All cameras are different and the target numbers will depend on the environment in which you are shooting. All four of these settings are inter-related. It is important to have a sense of how changing one setting will impact the others.

Focus and Zoom. Zoom: Set your lens to properly frame the subject and use painters tape to tape down the setting. (If you have a prime lens you can skip this step.) DO NOT ZOOM your lens while shooting the subject. Zoom to one setting and lock it down!

Focus: Set the camera to manual focus OR use auto focus to set the focus distance then switch the camera to manual focus. Tape the focus lens with painter’s tape after setting the focus.

Keeping the same focus and zoom will ensure your photos are consistent. You may need to adjust the focus when you move your camera to different heights. Just make sure you don’t change any of the other settings!
ISO. Set your camera to within the 100-200 ISO range.

The ISO setting on your camera allows you to control its sensitivity to light. Typically, you set the ISO based on how bright your setting is-the brighter the environment, the lower the ISO. However, a higher ISO, i.e. more light-sensitive, the more noise you introduce into your photo. For Photogrammetry we want to reduce noise by setting a low ISO. (Note that this will increase exposure time which is OK since the camera is on a tripod.)
White Balance. Set your white balance.

This setting helps you balance the quality of light and color. Setting white balance helps whites actually render white in your photo. The light in your environment exists on a spectrum between warmer light (toward the red end of the spectrum) and cooler (towards the blue spectrum). To adjust your white balance you’ll measure the temperature of the light on a gray card (measured in degrees Kelvin) and adjust your camera accordingly. Note that on cheaper DSLR cameras you can’t control for the white balance, but if capturing an accurate representation of the surface color of your object is important to you, then you should find a camera that has this adjustement.
Aperture. Set your camera to a low f/stop around f8 to f11.

Aperture, also called f/stop, controls the opening of the lens on your camera. The lower the aperture number, the wider the opening in the lens, which provides less depth-of-field i.e. a blurrier background. The higher the aperture number, the smaller the opening in the lens and therefore the greater the depth of field, and the sharper the background will be. We want to ensure that the entire object is fully within the depth of field. (Note there is an inverse relationship between shutter speed and aperture.)
Shutter speed. If you are working in aperture priority (A or AV) mode skip this step! The camera will adjust the shutter speed accordingly. Most likely, you’ll be setting your camera to a 1/80 shutter speed or higher depending on the light quality.

The shutter speed is the amount of time the shutter on your camera is open. Shutter speed is measured in fractions of seconds, so you’ll see on your camera screen a fraction 1/1000 to 1/8 (shown as 0“etc. Since we’re using a tripod here, we avoid some issues with stability and slow shutter speeds resulting in blurry photos. With the tripod we want to set the shutter speed very slow (higher number) to allow for the low amount of light coming in due to the smaller apertures (high fstop) and low ISO settings. Use a quick release while taking photos so as not to shake the camera during shutter release.

Test out your settings!

Take a few sample photos and check them on the view screen.

Are they in focus?
Is the depth of field deep enough?
Is there too much noise? (check for anomalous color patches on the object)
Check your lighting: Is the object casting any dark shadows?
Is the lighting creating halos or flares?
Does the color on the object look accurate? Not too warm (orangey-reddish) not to cool (bluish)?
Is the image too dark or too light? If too dark, try to slow down the shutter speed (e.g. increase from a 1/3” shutter speed to ½”). If the object is washed out, or details in the background are too visible, try to speed up the shutter speed.
Is your camera tripod positioned such that the entire object is visible, and the edges of the lightbox aren’t visible in the frame?
Is the object centered on the turntable so that when you rotate it, it will stay centered in your frame?
Is there dust or debris on the black background? If so, use the lint roller to get rid of it!
Write down your ISO, F/stop and shutter speed settings for the first round of photos in case something happens with the settings when you move your camera to a new angle and change the focus.

You’re ready to start shooting!

Step 3: Taking Photos

For the photogrammetry software to work you need redundant subject capture, which mean you want to make sure you have overlapping data of your object. This means following a 2/3rds rule of overlapping images: 2/3rds of the previous image should be visible in each subsequent photo as you rotate the object. The same 2/3rds principle applies to the vertical axis of the object. Take three rows of overlapping images at three different heights.

Central Position. Rotate the turntable on 10 degree increments, taking 36 photos total.
Lower Position. lower the central pole of the camera on the tripod to change the camera perspective. Do not move the feet. Adjust the angle of the camera to point slightly upwards so your object is still in the center of your frame. Adjust your focus if necessary. Do not change any other settings on your camera. Rotate the turntable on 10 degree increments, taking 36 photos total.
Upper Position. Raise the camera on the tripod and adjust the angle of the camera to point downwards so your object is still in the center of your frame. Adjust your focus if necessary. Do not change any other settings on your camera. Rotate the turntable on 10 degree increments, taking 36 photos total.
Take photos with Scale bars.
Take photos with color bar and/or gray card
Take a photo of the turntable without the object
Optional: turn the object upside-down and follow steps 1-3.

You’re ready to process your photographs!

Step 4: Using Agisoft Metashape Professional

Once you have completed your photos you’re ready to process the data. This workflow was written for Agisoft Metashape Professional, but the same general workflow process applies to earlier versions of Agisoft Photoscan.

Preparing Your Photos

Import your first circuit of images in Metashape by either dragging and dropping them into the Workspace or click the add photos icon, and navigate to your photo library. The photos will automatically be added to a new “Chunk.”
You want to keep each circuit of photos separate. Click on the arrow to the left of your Chunk 1 to expand the file. Right click on Cameras file and click Add Camera Group. Add each of your image circuits to a new camera group. *rename the groups to keep track! Don’t create new Chunks for each circuit. Use only one Chunk with multiple Camera Groups nested within.

Mask Photos. If your background has dust, bits of tape, or isn’t otherwise perfectly uniform, you’ll need to mask out the background. If you forgot to take a photo of your empty background you can either

Create a black background by going in to photoshop and rubberstamping the object out of your photo. Proceed with the following steps.
Skip down to Step 7: OPTIONAL and experiment by masking manually on a few of your photos using the magic wand tool

Using a Background Photo

In your Workspace, expand the file with the photos in your first circuit folder so you can see the filenames. Select one of your cleanest images so that it appears in the Model pane.
Right-click on one of the photos and under Masks click Import Masks… and enter the following parameters in the pop-up box: Method: From Background Operation: Replacement Filename template: leave the default {filename}_mask.jpg Apply to: Selected cameras
Start with the default tolerance (10) and click OK. A window will pop up where you can navigate to your background photo.
If enough of the background isn’t masked out, you’ll need to adjust the tolerance accordingly. Try to strike a balance between having the entire background masked out and cutting too far into your object. You want the number to be as low as possible with all or at least most of the background masked out. The higher the tolerance, the more it will eat into your object.
Once you’re satisfied with the mask you’re ready to mask the group. In the Workspace select the entire folder and camera group. Right click on the group folder and under Masks click Import Masks… and keep the same parameters you used on the single file except:
```
     Filename template : file name must match exactly that of your background photo.
```
Copy and paste the name from your folder into the file name template box. Make sure the filename extension is the same also. When you click OK a window will pop-up. Select the FOLDER where the background image file is located.
You can check the masks by double clicking on photos in the Photos Pane.
OPTIONAL: If you still aren’t satisfied with the automatic masking and there are just a handful of unmasked areas in the photos you can do some touch-ups by hand. If you happened to start with an image with any extra objects, the program will continue to mask that area even if it disappears in other images in the circuit. You might want to go back and use a cleaner image to start the process again.

On your toolbar select the dotted rectangle icon tool. Right-click on the photo in the Model Pane. Use the Magic Wand or Rectangle Selection to select area you want to mask, right click again and select Add Selection. If there are parts of your object that are masked that shouldn’t be, you can also select them and click Subtract Selection.
Repeat the previous masking steps for every circuit

Build and Optimize Your Sparse Point Cloud

From this point forward you’ll primarily be working down the Workflow menu, with some optimization steps between. It is worth saving a new back-up project file or a duplicate chunk within the same project, since most of these tasks cannot be undone or reset. This will allow you to play with some of settings.

Go to the Workflow menu and click on Align Photos. In the pop-up window select the following:
```
   General Accuracy : High
   Select √ Generic Preselection

   Advanced Key point limit:  40,000 to 80,000 (points of interest)
   Tie point limit:   0
     (This is the number of key points that are matched on 2 or more photos. If there are too many points with 0, pick a range between 20,000 and 40,000.)
   Apply masks to:  Key Points
   Uncheck Adaptive camera model fitting
```
This process will take some time depending on how many photos you’ve added. When complete, click on the Tie Points at the bottom of your workspace and you will see your object made of points. Check two things:
1. Zoom out and make sure your photos are all positioned correctly. If you completed each circuit evenly, you should see your object encircled by your photos.
2. Look at your Workspace and see that all photos are aligned. If there are some that didn’t align you can either:
  1. Redo the alignment with a different Tie point limit, making sure that you Select √ Reset current alignment.
  2. In Workspace select the photos that didn’t align, right-click and choose Align Selected Photos.
  3. If a large number of photos didn’t align, create a new Camera Group in your work space and drag and drop the unaligned photos there. Align the photos in the new Camera Group. Then align all Camera Groups.
Optimize. Next step is to optimize the photo alignment, removing the worst points in sparse cloud. The goal is to remove error from the project and have a set of very accurate tie points, high quality camera calibration, and image positioning. The goal is NOT to have a huge number of tie points, so do not panic if you see your points quickly disappearing through the optimization process or you need to delete a bunch of photos! Technically, you’re optimizing to achieve a low RMSE value (root mean square error… just some statistics) for the project and have a minimum of 150-200 tie points on each image. As you go through the following steps, check how your photos are doing by switching from the Workspace Pane to the Reference pane. In the top window, sort by projections, (you’ll probably need to expand the window and drag both Projections column and Error column to the left). If any photo goes below 150 you can’t use that photo. You can check that photo by double clicking on it in the Reference pane. If it is blurry, delete it from the project. If there are duplicates, delete one from the project.
1. Go to the Tools menu and click on Optimize Cameras. Click OK with default settings.
2. Go to Model menu and click on Gradual Selection and make the following selections: Criterion: Reconstruction uncertainty Level: 10
This will select several points. Go to Edit menu and click Delete Selection. (It might look like A LOT of points are selected. That is OK).
Go to the Tools menu and click on Optimize Cameras. Click OK with default settings. Check your projections in the Reference pane.
Go to Model menu and click on Gradual Selection and make the following selections:
```
 Criterion: Projection accuracy
 Level:  2.5 (between 2 and 3)
```
This will select points. Go to Edit menu and click Delete Selection. (Again, it might look like A LOT of points are selected. That is OK). Check your Projections numbers in the Reference pane, remembering to re-sort them. Delete any blurry or duplicate images.
Go to the Tools menu and click on Optimize Cameras. Click OK with default settings. Check your projections in the Reference pane again.
Repeat the Projection accuracy one more time for a total of 2 times. OPTIONAL: If you’re using scales, at this point you can set the scale bar accuracy. On the Reference pane, click the , to pull up the Reference pane settings menu.
Go to Model menu and click on Gradual Selection and make the following selections:
```
 Criterion : Reconstruction uncertainty
 Level:  10
```
Go to Edit menu and click Delete Selection.
Go to the Tools menu and click on Optimize Cameras. Select all of the boxes in General. Don’t worry if some are grayed out.
At this point, in your Reference pane you want to check your projections and take a look at the Error (pix) column—the root mean square reprojection error. You can also check the overall RMS reprojection error for your project by right-clicking on the chunk and choosing show info. You want the RMS reprojection error to be about 0.1 If any of the Errors are greater than .3, repeat the previous 3 steps—Reconstruction uncertainty and Optimize Cameras—until all pixels above .3 have been removed. These error measure uncertainty, and whether you’re able to hit these low numbers will depend on the quality of your images, camera angles etc.

Build Dense Cloud, Mesh, and Texture

The next three steps typically take a very long time, so it is best to start this process when and where you can leave your computer work unattended, possibly for several hours. One way to streamline the process is to use the Batch Process tool in Workflow, add each of the following three steps to your Process and let it run to completion overnight.

Go to the Workflow menu and click on Build Dense Cloud. In the pop-up window select the following:
```
 Quality:  High
 Depth Filtering: Aggressive
```
When this is done processing, check out your dense cloud (double click on it in Workspace to get it to appear in your Model pane.
Go to the Workflow menu and click on Build Mesh. In the pop-up window select the following:
```
 Source data: Dense cloud
 Surface type: Arbitrary (3D)
 Quality:  High
 Face count:  High
```
Note: The previous parameters may change depend on what you’re planning on doing with your model. For example, if you want to use it in VR, use a lower face count. These values also influence processing time, so plan accordingly. You can always duplicate your chunk and test out different parameters.
Go to the Workflow menu and click on Build Texture. You can accept the defaults for building the texture, but they should be as follows:
```
 Mapping mode: Generic
 Blending mode: Mosaic
 Texture size/count: 4096 x 1
```

Export your model and enjoy!

Agisoft Metashape will export to most 3D formats that are usable in other 3D modeling software. OBJ is a standard format that is commonly used. STL is a format that most 3D printers use though keep in mind it will not include any texture information.

If you are interested in printing your new 3D object please check out the Scholars’ Lab Makerspace! Check out Abhishek’s series of postings on other ways to create 3D content for VR and AR and how to add them to a Steam VR environment.

A Very Good Place to Start

2019-09-24T00:00:00-04:00

The last few weeks we (the 2019-20 Praxis Fellows) have started learning to code. Our first assignment (as Connor already mentioned) was to write code that turned a word into Pig Latin. I’m sure it was a technically-simple exercise, but as I (we) have learned, coding is challenging and is like learning a new language. Not even “like” learning a new language – it is learning a new language. We have to learn how to configure various elements (variables, functions, arguments, etc.) to work together in a series, using the appropriate “punctuation,” to convey information and produce a desired outcome. Any missing or misplaced ( ) or “ ” throws off the entire process. It is like writing a good sentence or crafting a good essay. If you don’t follow the grammatical and syntaxial rules, you don’t get your point across to the reader.

Reflecting on the acquisition of this new language, I am reminded of the last time I learned a new language. Also at UVa, I took the Summer Language Institute’s intensive German course before entering the PhD program here. As a graduate student in Art History, we have certain foreign language requirements. It’s considered necessary that we know how to at least read multiple languages to do effective research. Although still in the early stages of the Praxis Program, I already recognize that digital or technical languages (like Python) are also important to our development as scholars because they ultimately teach you how to gain access to information, process that information, and disseminate it to others.

However regimented aspects of coding need to be, there is flexibility and creativity in how to approach solving a problem and writing the code to do it. For example, when we (and I say “we” because this was a collaborative effort with Connor and Shane) started thinking about how to transform words into Pig Latin using code, we started at the end to come up with a linear equation (hello 8th grade algebra) that would get us there. Pig Latin, for those who don’t know, is a language produced by taking the first letter of a word and putting it at the end of the word, and then adding “-ay.” So, COLLABORATION would be OLLABORATION-C-AY: OLLABORATIONCAY.

Having just learned about slices, I wrote (on paper) the equation I thought would produce a word in Pig Latin. If I set the variable a to equal the word I wanted transformed, and set the variable b to be the suffix -ay, then my formula would be: a[1: ] + a[0] + b. Python3 needs a command or call, however, to actually put all those elements together and spit out a word, so the final equation was: print(a[1: ] + a[0] + b).

But this wasn’t enough for our Code Lab Overlord, Shane. He wanted us to use an input function. This was a truly baffling monkey wrench to me. I thought I had already cracked the code. At the time, it felt like an unnecessary step to add this input function. I was especially confused why the input function was better than my initial solution because, to me, either you have to change the value or meaning of a each time, or you have to answer the input question (which itself defines a variable) each time. Each one requires a step of definition. Connor was calmer, braver, and more confident than I, however, so he led the charge to write the code using the input function.

To gain some clarity, instead of a, we chose orgword as our variable. So: orgword=input(“What word do you want to put into Pig Latin?”). We still needed a variable b to equal the suffix “ay” and the above equation (a[1: ] + a[0] + b) was still valid. Part of my initial resistance to the input function was because I found it difficult to understand that when the input function was run, I had to provide the answer to the question, which then became the meaning or value of a variable. What I understand now is that the input function is more efficient because you can run the code continuously without having to change the value of the a variable within the code block. So, after much discussion, we figured it out and had a blast putting all sorts of words into Pig Latin. It felt like quite a ICTORYVAY.

The point of this recollection of our first coding adventure is to emphasize that learning to code has already taught me how to think differently. It’s taught me to open my mind and loosen up how I think about and process information. By following the computer’s or Python3’s linguistic rules, I have learned how to put information together in particular ways to instruct the computer to process information. I wonder if this means I’m starting to think like a computer—what does that mean?! In any case, this outcome is a good one. The entire point of the Praxis Program is to think differently, creatively, and collaboratively about questions and problems. Learning to code is a very good place to start.

JS Pagination

2019-09-23T10:03:52-04:00

JS pagination

Sometimes the seemingly long way round is actually the quickest way. I recently had a project at work that returned a bunch of results from a Solr database. The results are processed by Javascript and written to the page. The original page I was recreating had paginated results (10 results to a page). I thought it would be too much work to get that written into the page, and wanted to just let the JavaScript write all the results to the page. Unfortunately, this meant some queries took up to a full 30 seconds to load! That’s an eternity for the web!

After playing with the settings and different ways of writing the results to the page I finally decided to just implement pagination. I thought it would take forever. It took a few hours…

The trick is to complete the process in two steps.

Step 1) create a function that returns an array of page numbers based on the number of results, the desired number of results per page, and the current page being viewed.

Step 2) create a function that turns the array from the previous function into a bunch of links.

Here is the result:

See the Pen JS Pagination by Ammon Shepherd (@ammonshepherd) on CodePen.

The GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/ammonshepherd/js-pagination

There are two functions, pagination() and buildPagination().

pagination()

pagination() returns an array of page numbers between one (1) and a given end number, returning a maximum of 10 numbers, with missing ranges replaced with elipses (which are included in the maximum return count). A ‘current page’ is supplied, and the current page number is surrounded by the two sequential numbers before and after.

The number of numbers to return is determined by the total number of results to expect divided by the number of results to display per page. This is further affected by the current page displayed. Possible outcomes of the function could look like so:

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, '...', 44, 45]        // 1-7 is the current page
[1, 2, 3, '...', 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]       // 2 is the current page
[1, 2, '...', 10, 11, 12, '...', 44, 45]    // 8-39 is the current page
[1, 2, '...', 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39]   // 33-39 is the current page

The function takes three parameters:

total_results (Required: The total number of results to expect, the end number.)
start_number (Required: The value/start number of the page currently displayed.)
results_page (Optional: The number of results to show for each page. Defaults to 10.)

The function returns an array containing the range numbers that can be turned into links..

This code is modified from this FreeCodeCamp article.

buildPagination()

buildPagination() takes in a number (the total number of results returned from what ever search query you ran), and builds the HTML for the page numbers and links using the pagination() function.

Usage

To use these functions, call the buildPagination() function on page load, and put a script tag calling this file at the bottom of the HTML page. In the code below, “200” is where you can put the total number of results returned from the search query.

  <html>
  <body onload="buildPagination(200);">
  ...
  <script src="pagination.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  </body>
  </html>

You can change three variables in the pagination.js file (located at the top of the file):

RESULTS_PER_PAGE = how many results per page you want to show. The default is ten (10).
SEARCH_RESULTS = the ID of the HTML element to use for displaying the search results. This is only used to display text when zero is passed to the buildPagination() function. You should probably have something in place to deal with zero results from a search query before you use this function.
PAGINATE = the ID of the HTML element to use for displaying the pagination HTML.

Call For Digital Humanities Fellows Applications - 2020-2021

2019-09-23T06:02:40-04:00

We are now accepting applications for the 2020-2021 Digital Humanities Fellowship Cohort.

The application deadline for fellowships to be held during the 2020-2021 academic year is Monday, November 25th, 2019 at 11:59 PM. We will do our best to render decisions by late December.

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, make use of our dedicated grad office, 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.

The award provides living support in the amount of $20,000 for the academic year, as well as full remission of tuition and University fees and the student health insurance premium for single-person coverage. Living support includes wages for a half-time graduate teaching assistantship in each semester. A graduate instructorship, particularly one with a digital humanities inflection, may be substituted for the GTA appointment based on availability within the fellow’s department. Applicants interested in such an option should indicate as such in their application and discuss the possibility in advance with Brandon Walsh. The call for applicants is issued annually in August.

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

Applicants must be ABD, having completed all course requirements and been admitted to candidacy for the doctorate in the humanities, social sciences or the arts at the University of Virginia.
The fellowship is provided to students who have exhausted the financial support offered to them upon admission. As such, students will typically apply during their fifth year of study or beyond for a sixth year of support.¹
Applicants are expected to have digital humanities experience, though this background could take a variety of forms. Experience can include formal fellowships like the Praxis Program, but it could also include work on a collaborative digital project, comfort with programing and code management, public scholarship, or critical engagement with digital tools.
Applicants must be enrolled full time in the year for which they are applying.
A faculty advisor must review and approve the scholarly content of the proposal.

How to Apply

A complete application package will include the following materials, all of which should be emailed directly to Brandon Walsh:

a cover letter (roughly 2 pages single-spaced), addressed to the selection committee, containing:
- a summary of the applicant’s plan for use of digital technologies in his or her dissertation research;
- a summary of the applicant’s experience with digital projects;
- a description of Scholars’ Lab and UVa library digital resources (content or expertise) that are relevant to the proposed project;
- and a description of how the fellowship would be transformative for your work and your career.
a Graduate Fellowship Application Form;
a dissertation abstract;
2-3 letters of nomination and support, at least one being from the applicant’s dissertation director who can attest to the project’s scholarly rigor and integration within the dissertation;
and your availability for a 30-minute interview slot sometime on Monday, December 9th from 9:00AM-10:00AM, 11:00AM-12:00PM, or 1:30PM-4:00PM. This can be communicated by email or in the cover letter. We’re aiming for a quicker process this year by announcing those interview times in advance, though we can work out alternatives if scheduling difficulties arise. If you are unavailable then, please suggest other times on or around the 9th of December.

Questions about Grad Fellowships and the application process should be directed to Brandon Walsh. Applicants concerned about their eligibility, for whatever reason, are strongly encouraged to write as well.

Please note that, per University policy, a student who has undertaken affiliate status and ceased to enroll full time is not eligible to resume full-time enrollment or hold a graduate teaching assistantship. Because GTA appointments are a component of the DH Fellowship, students who have already undertaken affiliate status are not eligible to be considered for this award. ↩

Getting from Here To There

2019-09-19T11:06:10-04:00

A few weeks ago, I visited Emory University in conjunction with the launch of their new graduate fellowship for students aiming to incorporate digital projects in their dissertations. This is the first of two posts sharing materials from the two events I took part in while there. I was asked to give a workshop on project development for graduate students as well as an open talk on digital humanities pedagogy. The text of what follows pertains to the workshop for students, where I was asked to give a broad overview of how to approach project planning and some activities for helping them think through their work for the year. I essentially tried to condense the greatest hits of the Praxis Program into 90 minutes. I was asked to give a 30 minute talk and 60 minute workshop, but I’ll get into how we shifted things around below.

First, a few caveats. For one, I write a talk for situations like these, but I try to avoid straight-up reading the text (more info on how I approach public speaking in DH available here). So what you’ll see below is more like a roadmap of the general gist of what we talked about. I don’t remember consulting the text too much in the moment, and I know for a fact that the last few paragraphs were dramatically different in person. Second, and related - since this was meant to be a workshop and not a lecture I planned on a fair amount of discussion with the really thoughtful and engaged students.

All of this is to say that I planned on deviating from my plan, and I tried to represent that below. In the text that follows you’ll find the actual running text of a talk and workshop plan along with notes to you, the reader, marked with [sidebar: brackets] describing how I modified things in the moment to adapt to the group and the conversation as it unfolded. You’ll get a mix of both the script for the presentation and some notes on how I managed things as it diverted from expectations. It might get a little confusing, but I imagine it could be interesting to see how things got restructured and shifted around in the moment.

Planning for a span of time as long as 90 minutes is difficult, so I deliberately planned far more than I could cover in the allotted time just in case. I went into it knowing I’d need to be flexible. If I had to offer any suggestions for workshops in general it would be this - plan more than you need but do not try to rush to make it through your material. Let the conversation and the discussion shape the pace of your teaching, not a need to cover a particular amount of content. I always find it more helpful to do more with less. In this case, it meant that I was watching the clock from the beginning and looking for milestones along the way where, if needed, I could wrap things up.

[Sidebar: we’re in talk land now. What follows is the rough script of the talk and discussion that Anandi Silva Knuppel, Sarah McKee, and I fielded together.]

Getting from Here to There

Hey friends! How is it going? I’m Brandon Walsh, the Head of Student Programs in the Scholars’ Lab in the UVA Library. The Scholars’ Lab is a center for experimental scholarship informed by digital humanities, spatial technologies, and cultural heritage thinking. For the purposes of our conversation today, my work with students is probably most relevant. I facilitate a number of different fellowship programs and student opportunities in the lab, where I’m in charge of everything from mundane administrative tasks to more abstract things like constructing our pedagogical mission. And I collaborate with a range of people in the Lab and the Library to carry out different kinds of teaching for our community. I work with students from a range of disciplines, which means I have a fair amount of experience helping people plan, scope, and execute projects. I’ve titled this workshop “Getting from Here to There.”

[First sidebar: Anandi Silva Knuppel was the one who invited me to speak at Emory, and she gave a general orientation to their fellowship program before I started my piece. She included several photos of her children and family in the talk, and I quickly realized that the tone of my section would feel like a weird shift from hers. So, while she was presenting, I threw in a bunch of photos of the cat my partner and I recently adopted. This is Pepper, and he makes numerous appearances in what follows.]

Before we get started, I wanted to offer some resources and gratitude. If you need the text or slides of this talk for any reason, you can find them at the first link here. The second link will take you to a Zotero collection for this talk, so you don’t necessarily need to rapidly write down the links to things as we’re going. I’ve collected them for you. I wanted to credit my colleagues at the Scholars’ Lab, whose work I’ll discuss in what follows. Amanda Visconti, Ronda Grizzle, Jeremy Boggs, Laura Miller, and Shane Lin especially show up in the following slides. And, finally, I wanted to thank Sarah McKee, Lisa Flowers, Anandi Silva Knuppel, and everyone at ECDS and the Fox Center for the Humanities for the invitation to talk here. I’m truly flattered and grateful.

In terms of what we’ll cover today, I’m planning on taking you through a series of questions related to DH project planning roughly organized around questions pertaining to the how, what, who, and why of digital projects. This is my roadmap through the topic, and I’m happy to just lecture at you. But it’d be great to have questions and discussion as relevant and necessary. So please do interrupt. The conversation will be better for your contributions and better for your ideas. Ultimately this is about making it useful for you. So tell me what you need, and I’m happy to go where you want. I won’t necessarily have all the answers, but I’m happy to talk together.

[Sidebar: I had planned on running some icebreakers to get to know the students and their work, but Sarah and Anandi actually did this during their opening orientation for the program. So the slide I had planned on getting to know each other became wholly irrelevant. Instead, I realized that I should share a little bit about my own background as it pertained to the topic at hand. So during Anandi’s orientation I inserted a couple slides about the Lab and myself.]

So I’ve learned a little about you, but who am I? I work in digital humanities now, but I didn’t actually start doing anything with DH until I was a graduate student myself. I didn’t even know of it as a term until I became interested in the fellowships that my friends were doing in the Scholars’ Lab. It took a few years of finding my feet, but the digital project I worked on for my dissertation had to with Virginia Woolf and machine learning, and it was a project that taught me a lot about myself, my work, and what I wanted out of life. So believe me when I say that you are all far more advanced than I was at the same point in my career. You’re doing great! And you are well prepared for the projects you’re working on.

[Sidebar: During Anandi’s orientation, one of the fellows asked a question about how their own program at Emory compared to the larger landscape of digital humanities graduate programs. Was it unique? How did it compare to other fellowships? So I called another audible and inserted the following slide about the Scholars’ Lab programs so that the students could get context for how things might be structured differently. It’s different aesthetically because, well, it’s from a different talk! I copied and pasted it in quickly from the talk I’d be giving at Emory later that evening.]

Based on your question about other graduate programs in DH, I thought it might be worth pausing for just a moment to share what our students do with us in the Scholars’ Lab. At the Lab, we have two year-long fellowship programs. The Praxis Program is something of a soup to nuts introduction to digital humanities for students early in their graduate career. These students typically come in without much experience in digital technologies, but the goal for us over the course of a year is to get them in a position for them to launch their own collaborative digital project. The second fellowship listed here is our year-long Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities, a program for people with more experience and who are working to tie DH to their dissertation projects in some way. These students work with a point of contact on our R&D team for the year to develop their project, and students in both programs give public presentations by the end of the year. If you’re interested in learning more, I’m happy to talk at greater length about our individual programs. The Praxis Network might also be a useful resource - it’s a website that archives snapshots of several like-minded programs at one point in time, so on that project you get glimpses at several different approaches to graduate education.

Let’s get started. I titled this talk “Getting from here to there” because, to me, that’s the most difficult thing about planning any project. And this is particularly true for a student digital humanities project. I like this image because the alt text for it, the text meant to describe its contents for accessibility purposes, is “man standing in hallway.” It showed up when I did a search on Unsplash for “future.” I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time seeing a person in that photo. And when you’re starting out with any kind of digital project that’s part of the challenge. How do you get from point A to point B? How do you get your project from here to there? And how do you place yourself within it?

Now I’m just trying to show you snazzy images, but starting a digital project often puts me in this position. I feel like I’m learning to walk for the first time, and each step seems insurmountable. Each step brings new anxieties, and I’d like to know more about yours. I learned a little about your work, but I’d like to know a little more about your questions. What is the single biggest question you have right now about getting started? What is your single biggest anxiety about the year to come?

[Sidebar: I had budgeted a little time to have the students discuss concerns, but we wound up talking for longer than I anticipated (it turns out I really wanted to help them work through things). At this point, because we had started the workshop a tad late after lunch, I was already becoming aware that we were going to run out of time. We were only about 15 minutes into the 90-minute session, but I had already changed my sense of the timeline for the talk. The questions the students asked were very good. So good, that it seemed as though they were plants. They talked broadly about concerns that they might not have meaningful contributions to make to the field more broadly at this stage in their work, anxieties about finding their way into the DH community, questions about professionalization, and more. Sarah and I fielded them together. The questions worked well as a transition, because I correctly anticipated that some of them would feel like imposters.]

Those are all excellent questions. And part of the message I want you to take away today is that questions like that are all normal. It is normal not to know the answers. Behind all of your questions I heard implied another, particular anxiety.

[Sidebar: insert joke about Pepper looking stressed while working.]

Behind your concerns, really at their core, I heard questions about imposterdom. When am I going to be exposed for the fraud that I am? I have no idea what I’m doing – when am I going to be found out? I am here to tell you today that almost everyone feels this way. And if you don’t – you’re a Dunning-Kruger, as this chart explains. This feeling – imposter syndrome – is something we live with all through our lives. I’m feeling it right now! And I think it shows that you’re a good, thoughtful, reflective, well-meaning person. This article by Tanya X. Short has some excellent strategies for working through your feelings of imposterdom. I recommend it. But I also recommend you take a deep breath, close your eyes, and recognize that you belong here. You can do this project, and you have a community of people here to help you. I’m also happy to help in any way I can if you want to reach out after this event. But more practically, there are some helpful resources and methods I can share with you for how you can get started. Because one way you can address imposter syndrome is by doing what you always do as academics. Do research. Prepare. Use the resources available to you. The process for digital work does have key differences that I can help you think through. But it is not so wholly alien and different as it might seem at first glance. I have a series of questions that I usually talk through with newcomers to digital projects as they’re thinking for the first time about this kind of work, and I’ll be giving you a version of that conversation today.

Reminder: interrupt me at any time. To begin.

How will you go about your work? On a day-to-day basis, what is the process by which you will carry out your work? You might be getting to the point where you have good, personal project management styles that work for you as you’re writing your dissertation. If you don’t, now is a good time to develop them. But it can always be helpful to hear about other strategies. Know thyself in the first instance – find what works for you and stick to it. But don’t be afraid to try out something new.

Who here has heard of Trello? We don’t explicitly use this tool in the Scholars’ Lab as a whole staff, but we use it on the technical board for one of the journals I’m involved with – the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. It’s pretty simple - the idea is that each task gets a card associated with it that you can comment on and move around. Nothing too earth shattering here, but these task management systems become increasingly important as your projects grow in complexity and as you begin to work with collaborators. They’re especially good for humanities projects, in particular, because we’re not used to thinking in terms like this. How do you take a complicated humanities problem and break it into smaller, completable steps? Doing this with technical work can help keep you from burning out and help you feel that you’re moving forward. It can make the whole process of getting from here to there feel doable. You’ll likely be bad at it at first and have trouble with task managing. That’s OK! It’s a skill you can develop like anything else.

If you’ve ever talked to anyone else about the way that they work, you’ve probably realized that everyone takes on projects in different ways. Even writing. When I was writing my dissertation, I would use the “add comment” feature in Microsoft Word to leave myself tasks on the document itself. Any page would have hundreds of comments that I would sort through when I sat down to write and was looking for where to begin for the day. I would be shocked if anyone else used this weird, idiosyncratic system of mine.

Digital work is no different - we all have different ways of going about it. But it’s helpful to get everyone working from the same book if not exactly on the same page. In a corporate context, it can save time, money, and energy if your team has a shared philosophy towards your workflow and project management. This can be true of humanities and DH work as well. In the Scholars’ Lab, we use an approach to project management called Agile Development. The basics of it are before you in this diagram. The general idea is that you work in two-week sprints (at least in the way that I implement it with our students). At the end of each sprint you reflect on where you’re at, what you need help with, and what you need for next steps. A scrum is a term taken from rugby, and it is a set of tools and methodologies for conducting these of check-ins, whether they happen daily or at the end of your sprints. In our staff scrums, for example, we go around the room and ask for two-minute updates (max) describing what you are currently working on, what is next for you, and what you are not working on. But for your purposes here today, you can just think of it as a two-week sprint followed by a meeting to touch base. And then you repeat. We do this with our fellows, who have biweekly scrums with their R&D points of contact.

That explains the center of the diagram. The left side of it refers, I believe, to the idea that you should break your larger project down into smaller tasks that you can accomplish in two-week sprints. That way you have a good sense of progress. In a student project situation, this might be as simple as “I’m going to work through this chapter from this programming book and come to you with the progress I’ve made and the questions I have.” And if a task can’t be accomplished in two weeks it’s probably actually several smaller tasks lumped into one. Break your tasks down until you find something you can do in that window of time. One last thing here – notice the emphasis on circular shapes and the word “potentially.” One of the core concepts of agile development is the idea that iteration is good. It actually saves you time, energy, and, in the corporate world, money to produce something early that might be half baked and get feedback on it. This allows you to learn from your mistakes and iterate on your materials. It requires a certain amount of humility to work like this, and it’s radically different from what we’re used to in academia. Produce something for other eyes? Before it’s perfect? Perish the thought.

But truly – I’m here to tell you that perfectionism, while often encouraged in academia, can be a significant barrier to getting things done (and hint – also a cause of imposter syndrome). The Cult of Done Manifesto is a document I adore that gets at this point. “Accept that everything is a draft,” it reads. Your project is a draft. You’re a draft! It helps to think about ourselves as works in progress. The Cult of Done Manifesto isn’t a text that necessarily comes from the agile community per se, but they have overlapping concerns. Iteration is a part of our practice. It’s how we learn.

It’s worth considering that not everyone is equally able to iterate or develop in public – women, people of color, and other marginalized communities have different experiences of the world and of digital life. And the internet, the public audience for much digital work, is toxic. But it’s worth at least thinking about how you can push yourself to rethink the practices with which you’re comfortable in spaces that allow you to do so. I’m not really talking about a binary, where, on the one hand, things are kept fully private until they are absolutely perfect and, on the other, you’re publishing every piece of half-finished work for all to see. Find what makes sense to you. Consider how you can take small steps that work for you in the direction of being more comfortable with your work in progress as something worth sharing.

One last note on agile. The agile community released a series of principles that are worth pausing over. I’ll read them. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan. Keep in mind that these come from the software world. Let’s take a moment to think about them. What do you notice about them? How might these apply to your own work as a humanities student? As a DH student? What are they missing?

[Sidebar: At this point I paused for discussion and questions. My goal was to get the students to think about questions of communication, self-reflection, and iteration as they might pertain to their own work. The students had great thoughts and questions about how to apply agile thinking to digital projects and dissertations. One that stuck out to me - how could you apply these sorts of ideas to a project where you were, really, the sole person working on the project? I suggested in response that, first, you could project manage yourself in the same way you would a team and that, second, projects were almost always the product of many hands, even if they might appear to be the work of a solo individual. Think deeply about the help you might be overlooking and how you can better structure those relationships.]

Lists of principles like this are often helpful, so here is my own spin on the conversation. If I had to offer four principles for DH project planning, I might offer these. Give yourself permission to keep it small. Work iteratively. Credit generously. Connect it to you. There could be many others, and I might give you a different list depending on the day of the week. But they’re a start. We’ll talk more about what some of these points mean shortly.

Everything we’ve talked about so far could be filed under the question of how you’ll do your work. But, at this early stage, you’re probably also thinking about - obsessing about - the what. What exactly do I want to do with this project? One project management tip: this can be a dangerous question. For humanities students and faculty, it’s all too common to want your idea to go deeper, further, more complex. You’re trained to deconstruct and push ideas. This is great when writing a book or teaching a class. But in a digital project each of these potential ideas represents time and energy on your part. Digital projects aren’t developed at the speed of an idea or the speed of writing. They take time to implement. And each new idea takes more time.

Instead, I want to suggest you think about a related question as enlivening.

Instead of asking, “what do I want to do?” you might ask, “what don’t I want to do?” It’s a powerful question. But it is very, very hard to ask it of yourself. And it’s a question whose value only becomes clear with experience. You learn the value of it the hard way. Put another way - check out this image.

Feature creep refers to a tendency for projects to creep along, growing in size, way beyond their original intention. And at a certain point, like this tool here, a project becomes unwieldy and useless. You can’t even pick it up without stabbing yourself. We’ve all worked with tools or interfaces like this – so many options that you can’t do anything at all. When you continue to layer more and more ideas, more and more features, onto a project, things can quickly spin out of control.

This is an especially difficult problem for students of digital humanities because they’re often coming to these questions for the first time. So you don’t know if an idea is a reasonable one or totally impossible. Spoiler alert - this a problem even among professionals. We’re all dealing with this all the time. So I wanted to give you a few ways to think about scoping out features.

[Sidebar: I believe I made a joke here about Pepper’s reaction to feature creep.]

I wanted to share two quotes from a conversation we had about project scoping during my time as a student in the Scholars’ Lab. Apologies if I don’t get the exact wording right - this was a decade ago after all. Here is Wayne Graham, former Head of R&D in the Scholars’ Lab, discussing how he plans out work on a project. He takes any estimate his staff gives him and multiplies by pi, because things always take longer than anticipated, even for professionals.

Now, here is a quote from Bethany Nowviskie, former Head of the Scholars’ Lab and Wayne’s boss.

“I take whatever estimate Wayne gives me and double it.” It was a conversation that really stuck with me. Multiply any estimate for how long a project or task will take by two pi. That’s a lot longer than expected!

How, then, can you decide what’s worth doing? In the face of these kinds of difficulties, it’s helpful to have some sort of a system in place for determining the value of what you’re thinking about doing. This is especially helpful in humanities work, where sometimes the features we’re talking about directly build upon our own ideas about things we care about. It can all feel very personal. It can be helpful to try to make things objective. Here’s one way to do so.

Here’s a checklist for you as you go about your work. Is this feature hard? And is it important? These questions are difficult to answer when starting out, so it can be good to ask for help as you think through them. But it’s also a skill that you can develop with experience. So take the time to try to break your large project into as many components as possible.

Let’s practice together. Take the idea of a digital archive. That’s a big thing. But you could poke at a lot of pieces of it. Say…you were going to make an archive of American protest. What are some decisions you would have to make about it? What would some features be?

[Sidebar: had we more time, at this point I would have paused to actually run the speculative exercise for designing a digital archive, something I’ve done in courses before. I was watching the clock, though, and felt I needed to just give a few conceptual takeaways before moving on. I asked the students to consider a range of different questions that would impact the features and scale of such an archive. Will the archive be private or public? Will it index everything about the topic from all countries in all years? Maybe just one year? Maybe just one country? All types of media? Maybe just text? Will people be able to add to it? If they can add to it, will you have to moderate their contributions? The answers to all of these questions will affect the scale of a project and the time it will take to implement.]

You quickly begin to see that there are many different ways you can slice up a big idea. And any one of these decisions could potentially blow your project up and make it unwieldy. Start small, and, remember – a project that is all things for all people is probably nothing for no one.

That checklist I gave you before is actually a pretty common one, and this visualization probably seems like common sense. But I still think it’s powerful to see laid out like this. Take a moment to look at it. [Sidebar: pause for a moment] Where do you think you want to live? [Sidebar: the answer is top left] Where do you want to avoid? [Sidebar: the answer is bottom right.] And of course you will probably spend most of your time in the top right. Not too difficult to tell that because this visualization gives you helpful names for each category.

This sort of task-oriented thinking isn’t something we’re used to doing. But it’s helpful to think about your work this way. Even something as abstract as writing can benefit from this! In my own situation – I’m a full-time, 12-month, 40-hour staff person, but I still try to write, publish, and (as you can see) give talks. Trying to finish writing projects when you have the regular standing commitments of a job is difficult. I only have so many hours in the workweek. Methods like these help me to figure out how long I have to write, what I can accomplish, and what I can’t.

[Sidebar: I want to give huge credit to Ronda Grizzle here for everything she does for the Lab related to project management. Everything I know about it I learned from her. Anandi also had wonderful thoughts on project management during this portion of the workshop, and she shared them with the students.]

One last quote on this that I want to leave you with. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Saying no is a super power. Truly. I’ve said in the Scholars’ Lab before that the best projects – the best features – are the ones you don’t implement. Because saying no to something in the short-term means that, in the long-term, you can say yes to something you really want to do.

[Sidebar: I set aside time here, again, for any questions or discussion that might come up.]

The next question is a big one for students. What kind of support do you have? It’s one thing to talk about the difficulties of project development in theory, but it’s another to come up against the actual realities of project development. You all have lives. You have programs you’re trying to do. This is hard. But the good news is that you’re not alone.

[Sidebar: Pepper being supported, cats, etc. etc. It was also about this time that Sarah and I agreed we would not get to the follow-up activities I had planned. Instead, the new plan was to finish out the talk portion, discuss with the students, and describe the kinds of activities we would have done with more time so that they could follow up with them on their own later. This revised plan meant that I didn’t feel the need to rush through the material - I could instead allow the students space for discussion as they wished.]

For one, I wanted to point you a blog post put out by the MLA Committee on Information Technology on how to begin thinking about putting together a digital dissertation. There are a number of good resources linked here that I would encourage you to check out. Guidelines for evaluating digital work. Models of work that has already been done. Any difficulties you might face from the standpoints of project development, of getting buy-in from your committee, or of dealing with the university have probably been faced by others before you. It is highly unlikely you are the first ones to have these issues. So look for evidence, help, support, and resources from the larger community. I’m happy to help you find things as well. Feel free to reach out.

I’m also certain there are people locally – students, staff, librarians, and faculty – who are in your corner. Sarah has already told me about some of them, and you already mentioned others in your introductions. Accept their help - you don’t have to do this alone. But be careful you don’t take exploit their goodwill.

Instead, I would encourage you to think of this work as an opportunity to start to develop a space more like what you would want the academy to be. This is an image of the Collaborators Bill of Rights. Digital work takes many hands. Consider that labor. Share generously. Credit liberally. Make sure that everyone all the way down is acknowledged in your project, in as many places as you can. Consider how you can make these people your true collaborators if they are up for it – ask them how they want to be cited. If their voice and work are important to you and your project, ask them if they want to co-present or co-author with you. These things might seem weird, trained as we are in the humanities to think of authorship as something done by sole individuals, but that doesn’t have to be the norm. And I can assure you that these conversations mean the world to people in libraries.

This conversation is not just about projects. It’s about people. And you can use this space to begin to help shape a more expansive, generous, and humane way of doing digital work. In the Scholars’ Lab, for example, we push for real collaborations. We do work with – not for – as much as we can. So begin to think about how your project, in some small way, can begin to flatten the hierarchies at work in the academy. If you were interested in a related document about rights you should expect of collaborations as a student, I’d also point you to the Student Collaborators Bill of Rights from UCLA.

[Sidebar: I paused again for questions.]

One tool we use in the Scholars’ Lab to help structure relationships in positive, ethical ways is called a charter. The charter is the last concept that I wanted to introduce to you all. It’s a pretty simple idea – a charter is a document that reflects your shared values and principles. What you expect of each other, how you’re going to work together. What you hope to get out of the thing. Think of it like a personal and collective mission statement.

A charter is something that a group can return to later when questions come up. Articulating values like this can be really useful because when the rubber hits the road you can ask of any new feature, project, or idea - does this connect with the things I care about? Is it advancing our mission, or at least our mission as we want to see it? In front of you is the charter for our first Praxis cohort. We’ve had students on this collaborative fellowship put a charter together every year, and we have several for the lab as well – one for the lab in general and another for how we approach student programs.

The reason I end with the charter is that it connects to what I might offer as a last principle for project planning.

A project is only as good as it connects to you. But you have to decide what that connection looks like.

We encourage our students to think about charters as an opportunity to articulate their project goals and also their goals for their own portion of the project. Their goals for themselves. What do they hope to gain? How do they hope to grow? What do they acknowledge as their own limitations? A project should, in some way, help you in your life. It’s going to get you to a place you want to be, be that professionally, spiritually, intellectually, or ethically. I thought of my dissertation as a story that I wanted to sit with and a story I wanted to tell for a few years. This is similar to how my colleague Jeremy Boggs describes digital archives and digital projects more generally. To him, projects tell stories. Put another way, how is your project going to help you tell yours? Or more specifically – what kind of person do you want to be? How can the telling of your project’s story help you to bring that person into reality? One answer might be as simple as “this content is important to me.” Another could be “I want to become closely connected with the librarians I work with and learn about their lives.” It could mean that you’re aware of the climate of the academic job market, and you’re using this as an opportunity to develop skills and expertise that can help you in a wide variety of careers.

A project is more than just the stuff - the disciplinary material - in it. It’s a statement about how you view your work and the world and how you think each should be. That’s why there’s a blank line at the end here. You have to decide what that last line is for yourself.

To tip my own hand a little bit, I wanted to speak just for a moment about how I see my pedagogical work and the project underlying it. I had this quote by Paulo Freire in mind as I was writing this talk. “As beings programmed for learning and who need tomorrow as fish need water, men and women become robbed beings if they are denied their conditions of participants in the production of tomorrow.” Sean Michael Morris shared this quote with us at Digital Pedagogy Lab a few weeks ago, and it’s been on my mind ever since. There is a lot there, but Freire is getting at a few things. For Freire, education should always be a radical act of revolution. Students should always be thoroughly engaged in the process of shaping their own learning experiences, and it is the job of the progressive educator to help them overturn traditional modes of education and allow them to act as teachers themselves. The quote is about what does or does not help students produce their own tomorrows, but it’s also about producing the tomorrows of education and society.

I try to approach all the projects I work on – and really the students are the projects – with a sense of this animating philosophy in mind. I always want to ask, “how is what I’m doing here empowering students to reshape the structures that are holding them back?” There can and should be a reason for everything that I do, and I’m constantly thinking about what that reason is.

That’s where I’m coming from. That’s how I fill in that empty line. And I want you to think about that why question for yourselves. It’s not just a why for the content. But also about the why behind all the steps of project planning. How can your work help engineer the tomorrow you want to see?

So I want to end today by helping each of you engage in some soul searching. With the time we have remaining, we’re going to run a series of exercises and discussions about the kinds of goals and assumptions you’re bringing to this. And we’ll talk things out – I’m happy to spend more time addressing specific questions as well. We can go anywhere you want. Let’s get started.

[Sidebar: as I mentioned above, we didn’t actually have time to run the workshop proper, and we instead used the remaining moments for more discussion. I shared the slides with the folks who invited me, because they thought they might make for useful follow-up activities throughout the year. So even though we didn’t get to them, I thought I’d share the materials below with a few quick notes on what I had in mind. I’ll quit with the brackets, as the talk proper has ended. What follows is all just framing for the extra material I had prepared.]

Workshop Activities to Get You There

The preceding talk and discussion aimed to get the students thinking about their projects from a number of different angles - practical, logistical, collaborative, and theoretical. But I ended with values because, to me, they’re the most important. They can also be the most difficult to think about. It takes practice to learn how to articulate your values and goals in relation to a project, a measure of self-reflection that we aren’t necessarily taught how to do in graduate school. The following activities are meant to build on each other and guide participants towards a firmer sense of themselves in relation to their projects.

I also want to explicitly note the importance of the work of two people to the shape of these activities. Ronda Grizzle is the expert in the Lab on project management, charters, and life design, and I adapted the mind mapping activity, in particular, from work she has had us do internally. Secondly, I attended Digital Pedagogy Lab over the summer, and Sean Michael Morris’s breakout session on writing about teaching was instrumental in changing how I thought about in-class writing activities. I learned the four rules for writing from him in that session.

There are three activities I had planned. Given the title of the talk, I suppose I might call them “three activities to get you there”:

Charter discussion
Mind mapping
Timed writing on values

I’ll contextualize each activity briefly and share the slides that I had prepped. Hopefully that will give a sense of how I’d run them if others are interested.

Charter Discussion

Charters can be somewhat difficult to wrap your head around without models. So I planned to begin by offering the students some examples drawn from past years of the Praxis program. I shared the link for praxis.scholarslab.org/charter with the students, and from there I planned on doing a pretty typical think-pair-share activity. None of the charters are especially long, and it’s not necessary to read through one in its entirety to get the flavor of the piece. I anticipated having each student pick a charter to spend five minutes reading and thinking about. After the initial thinking time, they would spend five minutes discussing with their neighbor before we came back for a general discussion for ten minutes or so. The goal was to give the students models and to show them the kinds of categories that might go into such a document. Hopefully from there they would start thinking about personal, professional, and technical values they might have alongside their goals for the year.

The relevant slide:

Mind Mapping

After looking at charters from other groups, the students are ready to start thinking more deeply about their own views on things. For that, I turn to mind mapping.

Mind mapping is an activity that asks people to free associate words related to a particular topic in in the service of opening up a free, non-judgmental space for brainstorming. The first challenge with mind mapping, I find, is that people don’t necessarily know what it is. So several of the following slides focus on setting up the concept for participants.

The definition and example mind map I offer here come from a book Ronda Grizzle shared with me called Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. After offering a definition, I describe the general process, which involves a starting word, mapping out associations to that word, and then mapping out further secondary associations from there.

Images help to explain this better, I think, so I offer a picture of an example mind map from Designing Your Life, where someone is trying to brainstorm a potential career from things that interest them.

Next I suggest some reasons for mind mapping. By getting all of your ideas on the table, the process allows you to reflect more fully about which pieces are important to you. At the end of the mapping process, circling four or five of the words most important for you will help clarify which elements could be the basis for a good charter.

The starting word in the center of the map is important, as it generates the other associations for you. So I planned on reiterating the questions that we discussed in the course of discussion to help the students get started and to help generate other associations.

From there, the mind mapping activity involves the following:

Placing your starting word.
Mapping outwards for five minutes.
Reflecting on the resultant map for five minutes and circling important concepts.
Discussing with their neighbor for five minutes.

I’ve done a version of this activity for helping people develop a sense of their DH pedagogy, and I’ve found that mind mapping is great for helping participants engage in deeper forms of self-reflection about their everyday practices.

Timed Writing on Values

Now that the students have seen some examples and discussed them, it’s time for them to write. They’ll be in a decent place to do so, hopefully, because the mind mapping activity already asked them to think about large topics that were meaningful to them. As writing about values can sometimes feel frightening, I drew in Sean Michael Morris’s great rules for timed writing prompts here to help encourage the participants. I chose eight minutes, but you could give a longer amount of time - anything would be useful. After writing, I could imagine having a productive conversation about the results. The students need not feel pressured to share their exact wording, but a general discussion of the process, the issues, and things that they gravitated towards would be useful.

That’s it for the workshop and accompanying materials! Happy to talk with anyone who might be interested in working with them. The trip to Emory was very invigorating and provocative, and I was endlessly impressed, especially, by the students at ECDS. They’re a great crew. Keep an eye out for them - they’re already doing important work, and you’ll be hearing from them soon.