Syllabus 2024-2025
About
Praxis meets for four hours weekly during the academic year. Students are expected to put in roughly ten hours of work total each week.
Praxis follows the schedule of the academic calendar. So first meetings will be the first week of classes, we will observe holidays and reading days, and we’ll end each semester the last week of classes. We’ll aim to start out in the Scholars’ Lab common room but can move elsewhere if that’s not working.
Goals and Outcomes
Two tracks running simultaneously: PraxisGeneral and CodeLab
- PraxisGeneral contains three units: Communities of DH, DH Teaching and Learning, and DH Research and Administration.
- CodeLab runs yearlong a year and consists of an introduction to humanities programming fundamentals, design, and Python.
Each of these tracks contains a variety of deliverables:
- A group charter, a statement of values and practices we will adhere to as a community
- A personalized plan for self-study throughout the year meant to take advantage of the resources in the lab
- An individual teaching plan for a DH workshop based around the students’ interests
- A DH teaching statement
- A speculative personal project proposal for what comes next for them to be workshopped by the group
- Activities meant to exercise technical and design thinking as they relate to humanities problems
- Spring Hackathon as a group
- Final presentation to a local audience
- Two blog posts
These discussions and outcomes encompass a variety of different definitions of what it means to “do DH.” DH is capacious enough that it is quite difficult to design a program that can both introduce a broad range of approaches but also engage individual paths. Accordingly, the outcomes and units offer a mix of individual and group activities, but each student will need to supplement this work with self-study around their particular interests. We frame the year with twin sessions directed at this: in the fall, we spend time with each student design jamming their interests to help design a plan for the year and, in the spring, each student shares back where their interests have developed and next steps for them.
By the end of the year, students will have a portfolio of experiences and work directed towards the following goals. Students will:
- Practice DH in the following areas using appropriate technologies, methods, and activities:
- Community building
- Teaching
- Research and project design
- Administration
- Programming
- Design
- become capable of pursuing their own interests in the above areas moving forward;
- see digital humanities as a field and career path available to them regardless of their background;
- come to see themselves as experts in digital research with experiences worthy of sharing with others as scholars and teachers;
- and prepare themselves to pay it forward, early and often.
CodeLab and DesignLab
Description generated by GPT3:
In Codelab, you are a raccoon who is a master of digital humanities heists. You are tasked with stealing data and information from various sources in order to help your criminal organization. You must use your skills of hacking to bypass security measures and get your hands on the valuable data. Be careful though, as you are not the only one after the data. The police and other rival gangs will be hot on your tail. Can you outwit them all and become the ultimate digital humanist?
CodeLab is a semester-long introduction to the foundations programming and computational thinking for Digital Humanities. You will gain experience using a variety of technologies (Python, git/github) relevant to technical work in DH and exercise these new skills with some focused activities relevant to DH work.
DesignLab is a 10-week primer on critical approaches to design for Digital Humanities work, that includes conceptual and application work in the following areas:
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript;
- Information architecture/organization
- Graphic/Visual design elements and concepts
- Accessibility + Usability
- Scoping/Strategizing approaches for design projects;
By the end of this, students should have a better understanding of how to approach design for advocacy and intervention work in Digital Humanities.
Schedule
August 28, 2024 | Plan for the Year
First Hour
- Praxis and the plan for the year, Brandon
Second Hour
- Intro to Charters workshop, Ronda
Pre-Readings
- Scholars’ Lab charter
- Scholars’ Lab student program charter
- Praxis Program charter - (overlaps a lot with the previous one, so I’d just look for the different bits)
- A Digital Boot Camp for Grad Students in the Humanities by former SLab director Bethany Nowviskie
- The Shape of DH Work by Brandon Walsh
August 29, 2024 | CodeLab Fundamentals
CodeLab Fundamentals: Introduction
Pre-Readings
- Paul Ford, What is Code?
- Benjamin Schmidt, Do Digital Humanists Need to Understand Algorithms? - Don’t get caught up in the technical details; there’s absolutely no need to understand a Fourier Transform in any depth.
Homework to be completed before next CodeLab session
- Schedule a 1 on 1 with me in the next 2 weeks to talk about your dreams, your discontents, and your computer. We’ll also use this time to set up your development environment.
- Afterward, complete Ian Milligan and James Baker, “Introduction to the Bash Command Line,” The Programming Historian 3 (2014). This is an introduction to the Bash shell, which will serve well enough as an introduction to other shells like Zsh as well.
- For Windows users, skip the “Windows Only: Installing Git Bash” section. Instead, use the VSCode Terminal or Windows Terminal, as recommended in the Code Lab environment setup.
- Set up an account at Github and post your username on the Slack praxis channel so I can add you to our organization.
- Hopefully I’ll have passed out copies of Julia Evans’s lovely So You Want to be a Wizard zine. That’s something written for someone who is already a programmer, but it’ll be useful for you to skim through now to gleen some meta-strategies for navigating tech. Review it again once you have a few for loops under your belt.
- For a bit of counter-programming, Miriam Posner’s “Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code” is good to think about (and perhaps even to critique).
September 04, 2024 | Conversations About Praxis Collaboration and Community
First Hour
- Discussion facilitated by Oriane and Gramond
- Brandon, Ronda, and Amanda present as discussants
Second Hour
- Facilitated by a Kristin, Emmy, Amna
- Brandon, Ronda, and Amanda present as discussants
Pre-Readings Pt 1
- Miriam Posner, Here and There: Creating DH Community
- Bethany Nowviskie, Capacity Through Care
- Roopika Risam, Navigating the Global Digital Humanities: Insights from Black Feminism
- Colored Convention Project Principles (might be helpful to poke around the site to see what the project is as well, since the principles don’t explicitly state as much)
- Brandon and Amanda, Building Community And Generosity In The Context Of Graduate Education - Also be sure to check out and peruse the three readings/tools linked in the “practices section”
Pre-Readings pt 2
- Other Praxis cohort charters, available on the Praxis site - http://praxis.scholarslab.org/charter/. Explore to your heart’s content, but they repeat each other a fair amount. So no need to go overboard - I might pick one or two.
- And then, if you have time, you might check out one or two of the resources here - http://praxis.scholarslab.org/resources/toward-a-project-charter/. Those are all related to charter development and very worthwhile. Explore at your interest, but the Collaborators’ Bill of Rights and Bethany’s piece are probably the most widely cited.
- DevDH- there is a ton there, no need to look at everything. You might just take a look at one or two things and only do a deeper dive if you’re interested.
- Praxis Alum Blog posts. Make sure you read them in order, as they respond to one another. There was also some discussion in the comments that got lost when we shifted platforms, but you’ll get the idea.
- ”…but I don’t like programming,” Claire Maiers
- “Gendering Praxis,” Cecilia Márquez
- “Gender and computing ctd,” Shane Lin
September 05, 2024 | Code Lab Fundamentals
Code Lab Fundamentals: Introduction to Data
Homework to be completed before next CodeLab session
Do:
- Write out in plain English an algorithm to sort a deck of cards.
- Write out in plain English an algorithm for a cashier to find exact change.
Read:
- Posner, Miriam (2015), Humanities Data, a Necessary Contradiction
- Horgan, John (2017), Profile of Claude Shannon, Inventor of Information Theory
September 11, 2024 | Lightning Talks on DH Method
First Hour
- Lightning Round 1 - Archives (Jeremy - Confirmed), Texts (Alison - Confirmed)
Second Hour
- Design jam student interests
- Presenter - Emmy
- Respondent - Oriane
- Presenter - Kristin
- Respondent - Gramond
Pre-work
- Draft a first blog post; consider introducing yourself or take any other topic you wish.
- If you want to take the route of pitching/submitting a formal piece of writing to an outlet this year let Brandon know and make a time to talk about plans.
- Come prepared to talk about your research interests for 10-15 minutes (if you have DH areas that interest you that’s great but the point will be to guide you towards things to follow up on throughout the year)
September 12, 2024 | CodeLab Fundamentals
CodeLab Fundamentals: Structured Data
Homework to do before the next CodeLab session
-
Do or review the Programming Historian command line tutorial because we’ll be doing a lot of stuff in the command line next week!
-
Let’s continue to practice algorithmic thinking. Write out in plain English an algorithm to guess whether a text represents English, French, Portugese, Urdu, Simplified Chinese, or “other”.
-
Manually write out an XML document that contains the data in your CV.
-
Watch “Git Explained in 100 Seconds” without paying too close attention for now to all the commands that get brought up. We’re going to do way more Git stuff next week, so don’t worry about the details for now!
September 18, 2024 | Lightning Talks, Design Jams
First Hour
- Design jam student interests;
- Presenter - Oriane
- Respondent - Amna
- Presenter - Gramond
- Respondent - Kristin
Second Hour
- Lightning Round 2 - Makerspaces (Ammon - Confirmed); Maps (Chris/Drew - Drew and Chris Confirmed but need to go second)
Pre-Work
- Convert your blog post to MarkDown: Blogging documentation.
September 19, 2024 | Code Lab Fundamentals
CodeLab Fundamentals: Version Control
Homework to do before the next CodeLab session
- Add an icebreaker question (or questions) to the icebreaker git practice document and check back on it every few days to answer all the previous, unanswered questions.
September 25, 2024 | Lightning Talks, Design Jams
2:00-3:30 - attend Victoria Szabo talk in the lab.
Pre-Work
- Draft a second blog post
- Come prepared to talk about your research interests for 10-15 minutes (if you have DH areas that interest you that’s great but the point will be to guide you towards things to follow up on throughout the year)
September 26, 2024 | Design Lab: Design Elements + Principles
Part One Introduction to DesignLab; Design Elements + Principles;
Reading
- Frank Chimero, Shape of Design
Part Two
Tinkering with the tools of web development. We’ll each make a copy of this CodePen snippet titled ”Introduction to the Web Stack”.
October 02, 2024 | Charter Discussion and Review
First Hour
- Discuss charters
- Facilitated by Oriane and Amna
Second Hour
- Discussion of readings and charter
- Facilitated by Kristin, Emmy, Gramond
Pre-Work
- Charter due
- Convert your second post into MarkDown: Blogging documentation.
Pre-Readings
- I need to write a blog post, Drew MacQueen
- Project Reviews, Alex Gil
- Owning Up the Praxis Program, Alex Gil
- Giving Thanks, Alex Gil
- Progamming for Prism, Joanna Swafford
- The Pleasures of Programming, Lindsay O’Connor
- Preliminary Praxis Charter Ideas, Ed Triplett
- Processing Praxis, Brooke Lestock
- A Disclaimer and a Declaration, Sarah Storti
- Done is the Engine of More., Sarah Storti
- The Beautiful Truth about Praxis, Sarah Storti
October 03, 2024 | Design Lab: The Elements of UX
Part One
Adapting and aligning the elements of user experience for Digital Humanities work;
Reading
- Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience
Part Two
Typography and layout; Using Visual Studio Code for web development.
October 09, 2024 | Blog Posts
- Design Jam Student Interests
- Presenter - Amna
- Respondent - Emm
- Presenter - Emmy
- Respondent - Oriane
Time remaining:
- Students present their blog posts to each other and we discuss
Pre-work
- Finalize one of your posts and send to Brandon to publish Monday before
October 10, 2024 | Design Lab: Narratives and Storytelling
Reading
- Ursula K. Le Guin, “Mazes”
- Frank Chimero, Shape of Design
October 16, 2024 | Hackathon Conversation
Full session
- Shane will also share a small bit about what a hackathon is, what our goals are for you, etc.
- Discuss hackathon ideas
Pre-work
- Get together as a group to compare your interests. Can you find a common place where they overlap? Not thinking objects of study or materials at this point - those will come later. Just subjects/topics. We’ll discuss and help narrow as a group. We’ll open with students presenting to the staff on their shared interests. Try to come with ten points of intersection and commonality if you can, organized by how passionate you are about them.
October 17, 2024 | Design Lab: Collections and Archives
Reading
- Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
- Library of Babel
- Mitchell Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9:1 (2015).
October 23, 2024 | Workshop on Workshops
First Hour
- Workshop on workshops (Brandon); Framing of Workshop assignment.
Second Hour
- Facilitated discussion by Amna and Oriane on critical digital pedagogy
Pre-work
- Send Brandon 3-4 sentences from a text related to your research by Tuesday of this week’s session.
Pre-Readings Pt. 1
- Sentiment Analysis Passages
- A Way In: Digital Pedagogy Training with Speculative, Low-Tech Workshops
Pre-Readings Pt. 2
- Reading: Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition;
- Beyond Buttonology: Digital Humanities, Digital Pedagogy, and the ACRL Framework;
- Jentery Sayers on Low-Tech Approaches to Digital Research;
- Brandon Walsh, Frustration is a Feature
October 24, 2024 | Design Lab: Workshops and Syllabi
October 30, 2024 | Mind Mapping and Design Jams
First Hour
- Mind mapping and DH pedagogy
Second Hour
- Design jam workshop concepts
Pre-Readings
- “What’s a pedagogy and how do I find mine?” - Brandon Walsh
- “DH is Teaching” - Brandon Walsh
- Past outcomes for the unit might also be helpful for getting ideas (just pick what seems interesting to you - no need to read all of them):
- “To be out in the world, to be free!” Janet Dunkelbarger
- “String Theory, or: Let’s Explore Social Networks with String,” Chris Whitehead
- “Thinking about [Art] Collections as Data”, Chloe Downe Welles
- “Unmaking and Remaking the Archive”, Natasha Roth-Rowland
- “Mapping Alone, Together”, Crystal Luo
- “Content Moderation Workshop”, Grace Alvino
Pre-Work
- Explore 2-3 things in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments
- Come in with one or two ideas/topics for a workshop you might run. To prep, Explore Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities or talk to Brandon. Come in with one or two topics for a workshop you might run to introduce yourself or others to a flavor of DH you are interested in. We’ll discuss in smaller groups.
October 31, 2024 | Design Lab: Personal Portfolios
Reading
- Your Name Here, 2021-2022 Praxis Fellows.
- Kathleen Blake Yancy, “ePortfolios”, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, 2016.
November 06, 2024 | Teaching Statement Workshop
Workshop Teaching Statement with Ashley Hosbach Confirmed
If Time Allows
- Timed writing prompts on DH pedagogy
Pre-Readings
- Sean Michael Morris, Technology is not Pedagogy, Say No to Best Practices, On Silence: Humanising Digital Pedagogy - Sean talks mostly in the context of online learning in these pieces, so abstract them a tad to be applicable to digital methods and teaching more generally.
- One Concept: Ten Ways to Teach
November 07, 2024 | Design Lab: Accessibility + Inclusivity
Reading
- Introduction to Web Accessibility
- Constructing a POUR Website
- George H. Williams, “Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities”, Debates in Digital Humanities 2012.
November 13, 2024 | Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts
First Hour
- Talk with Mackenzie Brooks at W&L on pedagogy in liberal arts context; Confirmed
- Facilitated by Emmy, Oriane, Gramond
Second Hour
- Teaching Statement and Workshop Discussions
- Feedback on where you’re at; discussion of questions
Pre-Readings
- “Launching the Digital Humanities Movement at Washington and Lee University: A Case Study”; “Minor in Digital Culture and Information” (in particular the linked PDF at the top of this post is useful context)
Pre-Work
- Reading/exercise to work through on your own time: “Free Writing About Pedagogy”
November 14, 2024 | Design Lab: Open Lab
November 20, 2024 | Hackathon Pre-Discussion
Full Session
- Discuss hackathon interests
Pre-Work
- Given your shared interests, come to the session with some sense of what your object of study will be to explore it during the hackathon. What will your materials be? Are they accessible? What decisions can you make to help have a more concrete idea of what you’ll work on? Could come with 1-3 things as options–things to study, to share, to remix, to work on–and we help narrow. You will come out of the session with a data source, object of study, or thing of interest that you’ll then play around with over the winter in preparation for first steps in the spring.
- Make appointments with each other to peer review your workshops or statements.
November 21, 2024 | Design Lab
2-4pm
December 04, 2024 | Teaching Statement and Workshops
Full Session
- Discuss teaching statements and workshops
- We’ll do a jigsaw activity to discuss them in small groups before coming back to the whole.
- Reflections and next steps
Pre-Work
- Teaching statements and workshops due
- Prep one to be published on the blog