Projects

Each year, the Praxis Program fellows take on a particular project to exercise what they have learned throughout the year. Some projects have spanned cohorts, while others were executed in the span of a single. Some projects explored extant vaporware projects in the Lab, while others were inspired by experiments with a more freeform prompt. Explore the list below, presented in chronological order, for more information about each project. Each cohort blogs their progress on the Scholars' Lab blog, where you can find more writings about the projects as they have developed. Further publications, writings, or awards are so noted.

Prism

Prism is a tool for collaborative interpretation of texts. Imagined as the digital instantiation of a vaporware game that was played in the Scholars' Lab and SpecLab, the site allows users to upload documents for a group to interpret along various interpretive axes. The tool has seen significant use in K-12 classrooms. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2011-2012
  • Alex Gil
  • Brooke Lestock
  • Lindsay O'Connor
  • Sarah Storti
  • Annie Swafford
  • Ed Triplett
2012-2013
  • Shane Lin
  • Claire Maiers
  • Cecilia Márquez
  • Gwen Nally
  • Chris Peck
  • Brandon Walsh
Publications
  • Crowdsourcing Individual Interpretations: Between Microtasking and Macrotasking,” Brandon Walsh; Claire Maiers; Gwen Nally; Jeremy Boggs; Literary and Linguistic Computing 2014; doi: 10.1093/llc/fqu030.
  • “Prism,” under the “Poetry” keyword in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments.
  • Walsh, Brandon, 'Prism and Reading's Shape,' in Pataphysics Then & Now, (under submission, Penn State UP).

Ivanhoe

Expanding on an old SpecLab activity, Ivanhoe offers a space to create gaming environments for collaborative interpretation. Built as a WordPress theme, the tool asks users to contibute a text, adopt different roles, and then collectively reinvent that document by writing alternative narratives. Think of it as collaborative fan fiction meets exegesis - by playing out the roles of characters in new ways, Ivanhoe asks users to make interventions. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2013-2014
  • Scott Bailey
  • Elizabeth Fox
  • Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati
  • Stephanie Kingsley
  • Zachary Stone
  • Francesca Tripodi
2014-2015
  • Amy Boyd
  • Swati Chawla
  • Andrew Ferguson
  • Joris Gjata
  • Jennifer Grayburn
  • Steven Lewis
Publications
  • Playing in The Classroom With The Ivanhoe Game, guest post on Prof Hacker

ClockWork

This year's cohort was asked simply to think about time in some way, and the result is ClockWork, an experiment in how temporal data might be turned into sonic artifacts, or sonified. The site offers several different sonifications of its own, serves as a platform for teaching sonification to others, and focuses on the programming language SuperCollider. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2015-2016
  • James Ascher
  • Bremen Donovan
  • Ethan Reed
  • Gillet Rosenblith
  • Rachel Devorah
  • Lydia Warren
Publications
  • This team experimented used the Praxis site as a blog and memo site. You can find their notes here.

Dash-Amerikan

Like the previous cohort, this year's group took the concept of time as their provocation, but they took it in a wildly different direction. Reflecting broadly on how the Kardashian family pervades our present moment, Dash-Amerikan uses variety of digital humanities methodologies to interrogate their social media ecologies. Assembling and topic modeling a vast archive of twitter data and episode transcripts, the cohort produced a lengthy digital essay that sits at the intersections of media studies, digital humanities, and public humanities. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2016-2017
  • Jordan Buysse
  • Alicia Caticha
  • Alyssa Collins
  • Justin Greenlee
  • Sarah McEleney
  • Joseph Thompson
Awards
  • First place, GSAS Huskey Research Exhibition, UVA, 2017.
  • Forthcoming publication in American Quarterly

Augmenting the University

UVA Reveal: Augmenting the University, uses Unity and augmented reality (AR) applications to layer 3D models and other media on images that will enable the viewer to experience the virtual layering of time upon objects. More specifically, Augmenting the University integrates documents from UVA’s special collections library with physical spaces around grounds. Ultimately, we hope to use AR to allow users to experience these limited-access spaces and objects in new ways that prompt critical reflection on the structure, culture, mission, and history of the university. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2017-2018
  • Monica Blair
  • Ankita Chakrabarti
  • Victoria Clark
  • Tanner Greene
  • Christian Howard
  • Spyros Simotas
Awards
  • First place in poster session, GSAS Huskey Research Exhibition, UVA, 2018
  • Accepted to present at ADHO 2018 conference in Mexico City

Unclosure

In observation of the expansion of the public domain in 2019, Unclosure: An Act for the Encouragement of Learning examines how U.S. copyright law interacts with digital research and pedagogy. Working with Robert Frost’s New Hampshire (1923), the project presents a series of tutorials that demonstrate how to use a public domain work in order to empower our audience to understand, transform, and intervene in the range of material now available online. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2018-2019
  • Catherine Addington
  • Zhiqiu Jiang
  • Emily Mellen
  • Eleanore Neumann
  • Mathilda Shepard
  • Chris Whitehead
Awards
  • Accepted to present at at the Decolonizing Digital Humanities Symposium at UVA, 2019

Land and Legacy

Land and Legacy investigates the University of Virginia’s and UVA Foundation’s land development and expansion throughout Charlottesville and Albemarle County since the 1980s. In light of UVA’s 2030 plan to be "Great and Good," Land and Legacy examines how these developments have affected local communities, and place these impacts in dialogue with UVA’s public narratives. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2019-2020
  • Chloe Downe Wells
  • Janet S. Dunkelbarger
  • Connor Kenaston
  • Natasha Roth-Rowland
  • Lauren Van Nest