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

1. Do or review the Programming Historian command line tutorial because we’ll be doing a lot of stuff in the command line next week!

2. 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”.

3. Manually write out an XML document that contains the data in your CV.

4. 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

1. 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
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: How and Why
  • Chapter 4: Form and Magic
  • Chapter 10: Gifts and Giving

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
  • Chapter 02
  • Elements Diagram

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
  • Chapter 4: Stories and Voids

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; It’s behind a paywall but UVA has access to the journal if you go through virgo and login.

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.
  • About
  • Individuality and Solidarity
  • Design Ethos
• 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

Pre-Work

• Discuss the current state of your workshops with each other:
  • what are your goals?
  • what are you excited to teach?
  • what low-tech ways do you have for meeting those goals?
• Make time with someone on staff to talk about your teaching ideas - Brandon works, but also could make sense to talk to people who work on the kind of method you’re interested in!

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

Note that we’ll be online the whole day! Feel free to come in if you’re on campus and want to zoom together though.

First Hour

• Talk with Mackenzie Brooks at W&L on pedagogy in liberal arts context; Confirmed
• Bring a question to ask Mackenzie based on the readings below

Second Hour

• Discuss statements/workshops

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”
• Pick one of the twin assignments to focus on in our second hour. Keeping in mind that you will be teaching the workshop in the spring either way, either
  • Narrow to a specific workshop idea and start making plans for how you’d teach it.
  • Combine the kinds of thinking and writing that you did with Ashley into something approaching a more formal teaching statement.
  • Pre-discuss in pairs or as a group.

November 14, 2024 | Design Lab: Open Lab

November 20, 2024 | Hackathon Pre-Discussion

Full Session

• Discuss hackathon interests
• Iterative design activity with praxathon interests

Pre-Work

• Our plan is going to be to continue to work towards an idea for what you will work on together. I would suggest you each come up with three potential mini-projects each for the first three topics on your ranked list. Keep in mind:
  • Limitations of the month. Aiming for a poster.
  • Keep it small, but with the hope that they could grow later.
  • What will your materials be? Are they accessible?
  • How will it intersect with what you are learning (the spring will be a lot of python for data analysis)?
• Your collective list will be big (rough back of the envelope math would be 335!), so embrace the iterative chaos. Discuss and rank the top three among your group. These are what you will share with the staff.
• Make appointments with each other and/or staff 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

December 05, 2024 | Design Lab