Projects and Activities

Praxis training takes a variety of shapes meant to reflect the full-range of DH work. As a part of their training with us, student cohorts regularly publish a range of values statements describing the intentional communities they want to build together. They also design and teach digital humanities workshops based on their own interests as a means to exercise minimalist pedagogical approaches to DH. Students design speculative projects and events that might go on to be implemented by the Lab. They also participate in a range of technical and design activities meant to reflect the range of digital practices they will encounter in their research. At times, Praxis teams have developed and launched specific, named projects. Links to some of these materials can be found below.

Charters

One of the first activities each cohort undertakes is to define the nature of their group identity. Who are they? What are their values? How will they work together? The students engage in a series of discussions around these topics with staff and articulate them in a charter, a shared document about their collective identity and practices.

DH Workshops

As a part of our unit on digital pedagogy, Praxis design (and sometimes deliver) their own lightweight introductions to digital humanities methods. The result is a teach-to-learn activity where they develop creative new ways to deliver digital humanities instruction while reflecting on the pedagogies they employ. The following blog posts represent a sampling of the teaching done by students during the unit.

Named Projects

Sometimes, Praxis cohorts develop and release fully fledged digital projects. 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. 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

Connection Established

Connection Established examines university teaching, life, and governance during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interactive digital story, it asks users to make choices that engage issues of equity, accessibility, and mental health. And in an accompanying manifesto it urges a whole-person approach to teaching, learning, and labor. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2020-2021
  • Grace Alvino
  • Emma Dove
  • Elise Foote
  • Crystal Luo
  • Savanna Morrison
  • Aaron M. Thompson

Your Name Here

{Your Name Here} empowers graduate students and humanities academics with the coding skills and the confidence to create a personal website that reflects who they are and what they value to the public. More information can be found at the project's homepage.
2021-2022
  • Susan Abraham
  • Joseph Foley
  • Cherrie Kwok
  • Jennifer Marine
  • Jacqui Sahagian
  • Tarushi Sonthalia