Syllabus 2023-2024

Praxis Schedule 2023-2024

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.

Resources

Goals and Outcomes

Two tracks running simultaneously: PraxisGeneral and CodeLab

  1. PraxisGeneral contains three units: Communities of DH, DH Teaching and Learning, and DH Research and Administration.
  2. 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:

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:

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:

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

Fall - 16 weeks - August 22 - December 5

Our standard times together are generally going to be Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10-12, general sessions on Tuesdays and CodeLab sessions typically on Thursdays.

Unit 1: Communities of Digital Humanities

What constitutes a community in DH? How will we design one together? How do DHers articulate these practices in public? How do you publish on DH community? And how do you find your way into these communities as individuals just starting out? The cohort will explore these questions by way of a group charter and designing plans for self-study.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

Unit 2: DH Teaching and Learning

What does teaching and learning look like in Digital Humanities? What politics do we bring to DH pedagogy? What are our own pedagogies, and how can we inflect those in DH? What is a pedagogy anyway? What does publishing look like in DH pedagogy? The cohort will explore these questions in two ways: designing a plan for a DH workshop based around their own interests and drafting a statement of DH teaching and pedagogy.

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

Week 13

Week 14

Week 15

Week 16

Spring - 17 weeks - January 17 - April 30

Meeting times Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10-12 in new main Library space

Unit 3: Research and Administration in DH

How do you conduct research in DH? How do you design a successful project? What do we mean when we call something a digital project, and how do we define them with an ethos that is meaningful to us? How do infrastructure and administration in the field intersect with DH research, enabling or inhibiting it? How do these questions bring us back around to the beginning of the year, by developing communities and audiences for our work? The students will explore these through project management activities resulting in individual project proposals based on their work as well as speculative activities for DH events.

Main assignment will be a two-page proposal for a project that you would work on after praxis in the style of a grant application. Try to hit on the following categories (though it’s only two pages so each one will be pretty short!):

We will have in-session consults about each of your proposals, so they will be due by 9am on the Monday of the week you’ll be on deck, in weeks 9-11. A fuller description of the assignment is available here.

Unit 4: Next Steps for You

What has resonated for you this year? What will you pick up and take with you from what we’ve learned? What comes next for you? What will your DH look like? What conversations do you want to have? Each student in the cohort will design a session and lead the group in discussion about these questions.

Students’ two-page DH project proposals due by 9am Monday the week when they present. Full description of assignment here.

Unit 5: Hackathon

How can we put all this together? What does concentrated team work on a technical project in DH look like? This spring Hackathon will ask students to apply what they’ve learned to address a digital humanities challenge.