Brandon Walsh2024-01-23T16:55:40+00:00http://walshbr.com/Brandon Walshwalsh@virginia.eduWhat I'm Reading - Winter 242024-01-17T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/what-im-reading-winter-24<p>My family moved house this winter, so I spent countless hours packing, unpacking, setting up, and driving. Audiobooks were a great companion for all that work. Here are the four relevant to DH and teaching that I got through in the past several weeks.</p>
<ul>
<li><em><a href="https://chrisemdin.com/product/ratchetdemic-reimagining-academic-success/">Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success</a></em> by Christopher Emdin. I adored this text that was recommended to me by Seanna Viechweg, one of our brilliant Praxis students this year. In it, Emdin advocates for bringing the authentic, lived experience of teachers and students into the classroom, especially when their identities depart from what might be considered academically acceptable. Emdin writes explicitly from his experiences teaching in urban classrooms, where he saw the conflict between teacherly norms that value whiteness and devalue disruptive, lived, or “ratchet” behaviors. The ratchetdemic bridges these divides by making the ratchet a tool of political and pedagogical protest.</li>
<li><em><a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674983687">Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching</a></em> by Jarvis R. Givens. I went straight from <em>Ratchetdemic</em> to <em>Fugitive Pedagogy</em>, in part because some of the reviews for Emdin’s work put his work in dialogue with Woodson. <em>Fugitive Pedagogy</em> is both a history of Woodson’s innovative leadership in Black education as well as the articulation of a concept that Givens sees as central to that work. Fugitive pedagogy as a pedagogical theory refers to the ways in which Black education has always seen teaching and learning as acts of rebellion, from literacy as a path to freedom for emancipated peoples to the careful ways in which Black teachers navigated the hostile pressure from white administrators while attempting to teach in the Jim Crow era.</li>
<li><em><a href="https://mt-anderson.com/books/feed">Feed</a></em> by M.T. Anderson. I’ve long been kicking around the idea of an introductory literature course on the novel in the age of the Internet. <em>Feed</em> was recommended to me by my wife, who did her dissertation on Victorian teen culture and knows more about young-adult fiction than I will ever forget. <em>Feed</em> is a dystopian text where a majority of American citizens have an internet feed implanted in their brains that gives a steady stream of chat, marketing, and statistical data. My spouse and I talked a lot about how much different this text must have read in 2002, when it came out, as opposed to the present day.</li>
<li><em><a href="https://theprofessorisin.com/buy-the-book/">The Professor is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD into a Job</a></em> by Karen Kelsky. I’ve been familiar with Kelsky’s work for some time, more by reputation than for any specifics. In a recent conversation about professional development, a student referenced <em>The Professor is In</em> in such a way that made me feel I couldn’t avoid reading it any longer. The book outlines an extremely detailed path through the academic job market, in all of its toxic, challenging, and unfair shapes. While I might disagree with some of the specific recommendations, the overall message of the book–that advisors have an ethical obligation to prepare students for what comes after the PhD–is an important one. And I think it’s vital reading for anyone in a position to advise students, if for no other reason to be literate in the conversation.</li>
</ul>
Teaching Statement in Thirteen Images2024-01-09T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/teaching-statement-in-thirteen-images<p>As part of the final unit in the Praxis curriculum each fall our students extensively discuss teaching and learning in digital humanities. As a way of putting these conversations into practice, they develop two outcomes: a speculative, minimal DH workshop related to their research and a teaching philosophy statement related to their newfound interests in digital pedagogy. It’s been years since I’ve put together a formal teaching statement (unless you count the various <a href="https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/student-programs-charter/">student charters</a> on the Scholars’ Lab website), so I had planned on joining the students in their writing process and producing a statement of my own to share with them. Things got away from me, though, as my wife and I just moved and are also preparing for our <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEStsLJZhzo">first baby</a>. I didn’t have the mental wherewithal to devote to this task, but I thought I’d spin up something quickly in the same spirit.</p>
<p>I’m sharing this post as a creative spin on the genre: my teaching statement in thirteen images (thirteen because that’s the Praxis cohort we’re currently running). Consider it a visual collage of how I approach working with students in and out of the classroom. I used <a href="https://unsplash.com/">unsplash</a>, a great source for open and free images, to search for keywords that were meaningful to my digital pedagogy. I won’t explain them beyond describing the pictures in alt-text. Instead, I think they’re useful to meditate on for yourself. When you teach, what do you see?</p>
<ol>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1622364859318-1d023226eda1?q=80&w=2670&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Water droplets on green leaves. Photo by Tahlia Doyle." /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1488866022504-f2584929ca5f?q=80&w=2662&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Mountain with trees under white stars at night. Photo by Nathan Anderson. " /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1637919649104-c292cbbbd97b?q=80&w=2574&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Rocks stacked on a rocky beach. Photo by Rob Wicks." /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1527236102507-6e5ac2692925?q=80&w=2670&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Girl playing guitar near wall. Photo by Felix Koutchinski" /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1526336024174-e58f5cdd8e13?q=80&w=2574&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="White butterfly resting on cat's nose. Photo by Karina Vorozheeva" /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1542032489-6765cd412be0?q=80&w=2000&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Person touching body of water and creating ripples. Photo by Nick Moore." /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1598893182886-9ec56612e71f?q=80&w=2574&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Person in black jacket standing in front of aquarium with fishes. Photo by Sam Chang." /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1468421870903-4df1664ac249?q=80&w=2662&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt=""Together we create" graffiti on wall in black and white paint. Photo by user bamagal" /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1466784828399-9a9921e8bdfd?q=80&w=2670&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Assorted colored paint bottles on top of floor covered in splattered paint. Photo by Ricardo Viana" /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1575431330845-27b7771cc6c7?q=80&w=2574&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Person with hands extended. In one, mirror shards. In the other, a complete round mirror. Photo by Jeremy Yap." /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1594048023785-02c76ee32c10?q=80&w=2640&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Green grass and trees in the woods during daytime. A path runs through them. Photo by Clay Banks." /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1496516348160-24b35a31856f?q=80&w=2574&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D" alt="Various feet in shoes hanging over wall, photographed from bottom. Photo by James Baldwin." /></li>
<li><img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1604508723572-9d70e99300c4?q=80&w=2670&auto=format&fit=crop&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3DQ" alt="Black rabbit on green field under off-white sky during daytime. Photo by Julian Hanslmaier." /></li>
</ol>
What I'm Reading - Fall 232023-11-20T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/what-im-reading-fall-23<p>I’m going to start documenting the reading I’m doing on the blog here for a couple reasons. First, it will motivate me to keep at it! Second, it will give me some quick summary notes to look back on. I’m doing most of my reading these days by way of audiobooks, so it feels especially important to find some way of keeping what I’ve been exploring in my head. Hopefully this little public journal will do the trick! Here are some things I’ve been checking out lately, all available as audiobooks.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><em><a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/9781610395694/?lens=publicaffairs">The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power</a></em> by Shoshana Zuboff. There are a range of useful terms here: instrumentarian, big other, shadow text, behavioral surplus, and more. They all cricle around the titular term, which refer to the new economic systems pioneered by technology companies that profit on the use of private data, data which enables those companies to further target consumers more precisely and efficiently in a kind of feedback loop.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em><a href="https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/race-after-technology">Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code</a></em> by Ruha Benjamin. This is an essential text for anyone interested broadly in how race intersects with technology. The “New Jim Code” is a useful takeaway term, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_After_Technology#:~:text=In%20it%2C%20Benjamin%20develops%20her,replicate%20or%20worsen%20racial%20bias.">Wikipedia</a> has good summary definition: “In it, Benjamin develops her concept of the “New Jim Code,” which references Michelle Alexander’s work The New Jim Crow, to analyze how seemingly ‘neutral’ algorithms and applications can replicate or worsen racial bias.”</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em><a href="https://wvupressonline.com/node/804">Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers</a></em> by Jessamyn Neuhaus. The main takeaway I got from this text was that sometimes new teachers assume that their passion for their subject matter will make them effective in the classroom. But this enthusiasm is not enough. Instead, Neuhaus offers a range of reflections to help new teachers from a broad range of categories–Intellectuals, Introverts, Nerds, Geeks–more effectively and inclusively reach a range of student audiences.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em><a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo26049293.html">Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics</a></em> by Joli Jensen. This book contains a range of strategies and tactics for fitting writing into the cracks of the academic day. While I disagree with the way the book treats labor within academic structures–<em>really</em> no matter what?–I did find some helpful approaches to developing process-oriented methods for getting writing done.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>That’s all for now! More next time.</p>
Jekyll Crossposting with Rake2023-11-08T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/jekyll-crossposting-with-rake<p>If you’ve spent any time at all reading on my blog you’ve probably noticed that I crosspost virtually all my material to the <a href="https://scholarslab.org/">Scholars’ Lab</a> site. There are good reasons for this: almost everything I do in one space is relevant to the other, and it’s way to drive traffic between the two places. It’s a bit of a pain though. While both sites are built with Jekyll, they live in two different repositories, two different folders on my computer. They also each have slightly different frontmatter. So my old workflow looked something like this:</p>
<ol>
<li>Compose and edit in my blog repository.</li>
<li>Open a second window.</li>
<li>Carefully copy and past everything from my original post into the identical post in the other site folder.</li>
<li>Edit the front matter.</li>
<li>Publish.</li>
<li>Grumble the whole time.</li>
</ol>
<p>I use a rake task to automate the building of the initial post, which saves a little time by generating everything for my post templates.</p>
<p>That command looks like this:</p>
<div class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>desc "Begin a new post in #{posts_dir}"
task :new_post, :title do |t, args|
if args.title
title = args.title
end
clean_title = title.downcase.gsub(/\s/,'-')
title_slug =clean_title.downcase.gsub(' ', '-').gsub(/[^\w-]/, '')
filename = "#{posts_dir}/#{Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}-#{clean_title}.#{new_post_ext}"
if File.exist?(filename)
abort("rake aborted!") if ask("#{filename} already exists. Do you want to overwrite?", ['y', 'n']) == 'n'
end
puts "Creating new post: #{filename}"
open(filename, 'w') do |post|
post.puts "---"
post.puts "layout: post"
post.puts "title: \"#{title.gsub(/&/,'&amp;')}\""
post.puts "date: #{Time.now.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}"
post.puts "tags: [digital-humanities]"
post.puts "crosspost:
- title: #{crosspost_title}
url: #{crosspost_url}#{title_slug}"
post.puts "---"
end
end
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>A lot of the core code here was adapted from <a href="http://octopress.org/">Octopress</a>, a blogging framework I haven’t used per se in several years. There are some useful rake tasks that have persisted as my blog changed though. There’s a lot of Ruby above, but the upshot is that, when I go to blog, I give a command in this form from the terminal:</p>
<ul>
<li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">$ rake new_post["Flashy title here"]</code></li>
</ul>
<p>The rake task will create a new post in my _drafts folder with 2023-10-23-flashy-title-here.md that looks like this:</p>
<div class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>---
layout: post
title: "Flashy title here"
date: 2023-10-23
tags: [digital-humanities]
crosspost:
- title: the Scholars' Lab blog
url: https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/flasy-title-here
---
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>I’ll then fill in the content of the post below the triple dashes. After years of manually crossposting things, I decided to make another rake task that would mirror this one, a terminal command that I could run from my blog folder like so:</p>
<ul>
<li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">$ rake crosspost['2023-10-23-flashy-title-here.md','True']</code></li>
</ul>
<p>This command would copy my completed post file to the other project folder for the Scholars’ Lab site, spin up the necessary metadata, and copy over any images that are necessary for the post.</p>
<p>Here’s what that rake command looks like:</p>
<div class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>desc "Makes a crossposted file in the slab folder"
task :crosspost, [:file_name, :images] do |t, args|
if args.file_name
file_name = args.file_name
end
puts file_name
old_file = "_posts/#{file_name}"
new_file = "#{slab_dir}/#{file_name}"
puts new_file
parsed = FrontMatterParser::Parser.parse_file(old_file, loader: FrontMatterParser::Loader::Yaml.new(allowlist_classes: [Date]))
title_slug = parsed.front_matter['title'].downcase.gsub(' ', '-').gsub(/[^\w-]/, '')
if File.exists?(new_file)
File.delete(new_file)
end
File.open(new_file, 'w'){|f|
f.puts("---
author: brandon-walsh
date: #{parsed.front_matter['date']}
layout: post
slug: #{title_slug}
title: #{parsed.front_matter['title']}
categories:
- Digital Humanities
tags:
- Digital humanities
crosspost:
- title: #{blog_title}
url: #{blog_url}/#{title_slug}
---
#{parsed.content}
")
}
puts "Crossposted file created at #{new_file}"
post_image_folder = blog_image_dir + '/' + title_slug
crosspost_image_folder = slab_image_dir + '/' + title_slug
if args.images
if File.exists?(crosspost_image_folder)
FileUtils.rm_rf(crosspost_image_folder)
Dir.mkdir(crosspost_image_folder)
end
FileUtils.cp_r(post_image_folder + '/.', crosspost_image_folder)
end
end
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>This lets me pass the name of the post file and whether or not it contains images to a new crosspost rake task, which will then handle everything else for me. Now my workflow is <em>much</em> more streamlined. If you’re interested in setting this for on your crossposting needs, you can follow these steps.</p>
<p>Assumptions:</p>
<ul>
<li>File structure
<ul>
<li>You have two jekyll blogging folders on your computer.</li>
<li>Each of these blogging folders has a regularized system for image handling, where you store the images for your post in project-folder/assets/sluggified-name-of-post</li>
<li>I’ve included at the top of the Rakefile a series of variables that you can update for the particulars of your file structure</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Each blog post has the crossposting code as a part of _layouts/post.html</li>
<li>You will update the Rakefile to account for your own metadata, as well as any differences between metadata in the two blogs.</li>
</ul>
<p>To implement on your own, then, do the following:</p>
<ol>
<li>Create a Rakefile in the root of your main jekyll blog folder.</li>
<li>Paste into it the <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/walshbr/walshbr.github.io/source/Rakefile">contents of this Rakefile</a></li>
<li>You’ll need to install one gem - front_matter_parser - by running this command from your main blogging folder:
<ul>
<li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">$ gem install front_matter_parser</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>In each Jekyll blog folder, add the following code to your post layout to actually use the crossposting metadata. Both folders have this in their _layouts/post.html file:</li>
</ol>
<div class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code>{% if page.crosspost %}
<div class="post_crosspost">
{% if page.crosspost.size == 1 %}
Crossposted to <a href="{{ page.crosspost[0].url }}">{{ page.crosspost[0].title }}</a>.
{% else %}
{% capture crosspostings %}
{% for target in page.crosspost %}
<a href="{{ target.url }}">{{ target.title }}</a>,
{% endfor %}
{% endcapture %}
{% assign crosspostarray = crosspostings | strip | split: "," %}
Crossposted to {{ crosspostarray | array_to_sentence_string }}.
{% endif %}
<br><br>
</div>
{% endif %}
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>Now you should be able to do something like the following as your workflow.</p>
<ol>
<li>Make my new post
<ul>
<li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">$ rake new_post["Title of Blog post"]</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Draft and finalize post</li>
<li>Crosspost it by passing a filename and True if there are images to crosspost.
<ul>
<li><code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">$ rake crosspost["year-month-day-sluggified-title.md","True"]</code></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Hope that helps! I tried to abstract things so that this could be usable by others with slightly different setups than mine, but let me know if you try to use it and run into problems.</p>
Free Writing About Pedagogy2023-10-31T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/free-writing-about-pedagogy<p>We’re in the thick of our unit on teaching and learning in <a href="https://praxis.scholarslab.org/curriculum/2023-2024/">Praxis</a>, where students discuss a range of teaching topics including buttonology, minimalist pedagogy, and critical digital pedagogy. As outcomes for the conversation we ask the students to produce two things:</p>
<ul>
<li>a minimalist, speculative digital humanities workshop on a topic of interest to them as a teach-to-learn activity</li>
<li>a teaching statement that might intersect with their new thinking on digital pedagogy</li>
</ul>
<p>The context for the two assignments is that <a href="https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/dh-is-teaching/">all DH involves teaching at some level</a>. Graduate students rarely receive adequate training in teaching, and they often teach under very specific departmental constraints. The two activities are meant to give them experience thinking about a range of teaching possibilities that they might not otherwise get to experience. I would wager further that most departments don’t offer much training in writing <em>about</em> teaching, either in formalized teaching statements or otherwise. Ashley Hosbach-Wallman, UVA’s Education and Social Research Librarian, gives our students a wonderful introduction to writing about teaching. I pair Ashley’s workshop with a free-writing activity to help the students move past fears they might have about writing correctly on the topic. The only way to begin is by beginning, after all.<sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> I couldn’t actually be there in person to run this activity for the students, so I’m sharing these slides and the context for them in the hopes that they will run it at home.</p>
<h2 id="free-writing-about-pedagogy">Free Writing About Pedagogy</h2>
<p>The spirit of this activity is heavily inspired by a workshop that <a href="https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/">Sean Michael Morris</a> ran at Digital Pedagogy Lab on writing about teaching. All the good here comes from Sean - I merely adapted it for my own particular context. The gist is that the activity gives students a topic, a set amount of time to free write on it, and some rules to guide the process. The rules Sean gave for that writing process are mostly about self-criticism:</p>
<ul>
<li>Don’t judge what you write.</li>
<li>Feel free to use first person.</li>
<li>Keep writing.</li>
<li>Be honest. Don’t write for someone else.</li>
</ul>
<p>Keep writing, and don’t let your own internal voice get in the way of putting words down on the page. With those guidelines in mind, students move through a set of curated topics you give them. As facilitator, my job is mostly to encourage them to use the whole time saying things like “if you think you’re done keep going because you’ll go somewhere unexpected.” Mostly I just watch the timer. The activity is quite flexible and can be adapted to any circumstance: just change the prompts. In my experience, graduate students find it quite transformative and request the workshop a second time later in the year. The first time I ran it one of the students exclaimed, “I wrote 2000 words in an hour! My dissertation feels like it will be no problem!” For students accustomed to working towards perfection, free writing offers a radical reorientation towards what the writing process can feel like.</p>
<p>I start the workshop with a slide of my cat on a piece of paper just because I can. I usually offer some point of entry to the effect of…Pepper loves boxes. But they can also be scary? And what can make you feel more boxed in than a blank sheet of paper? Here is Pepper surrounded by frightening sheets. Free writing can help us get past the fear of the page and just put words down. But this has also just been an excuse to share photos of my beloved cat.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/post-media/free-writing-about-pedagogy/1.png" alt="my cat Pepper just because" /></p>
<p>Moving on to the first free writing exercise. At this point in the curriculum, our students have done a mind mapping exercise that encourages them to free associate different linked concepts related to teaching and learning. I haven’t written up that activity just yet (I will!), but you can find the <a href="https://praxis.scholarslab.org/assets/mind-mapping-your-pedagogy.pptx">slide deck on the Praxis site</a> if you wanted to run it on your own. To get started with our free writing:</p>
<p>What are the most important values that you bring to teaching? To digital pedagogy? Write for eight minutes on this.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/post-media/free-writing-about-pedagogy/2.png" alt="Free write 1 that connects to mind mapping" /></p>
<p>When designing your speculative DH workshop, how might you craft it in such a way that it reflects the values you just wrote about? How will you teach digital methods in a way that honors the things you care about? Write for eight minutes.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/post-media/free-writing-about-pedagogy/3.png" alt="Free write 2 about connecting pedagogy to their workshops" /></p>
<p>What activity are you planning for your workshop? What are the actual nuts and bolts of what you might do in the room? If you’re struggling to come up with an idea for the workshop, how might you explain the concept you’re interested in to a third grader? Write for eight minutes.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/post-media/free-writing-about-pedagogy/4.png" alt="Free write 3 about generating workshop ideas" /></p>
<p>What sorts of anxieties do you have about teaching and learning? What fears do you have about digital pedagogy? What sort of things can you do to mitigate those concerns? Eight minutes again.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/post-media/free-writing-about-pedagogy/5.png" alt="Free write 4 about anxieties" /></p>
<p>I usually close the workshop with another photo of Pepper. Now, having written, he is happily asleep and at peace. He’s moved past the box.</p>
<p><img src="/assets/post-media/free-writing-about-pedagogy/6.png" alt="A closing picture of my cat again, just because I can" /></p>
<p>And that’s it! The activity is very flexible–add topics or take them away. Add time or subtract depending on the amount of time you have. Run the activities for yourself or others. If this approach to writing feels completely anathema to the way you work, you might find yourself pushed in new directions. If this all feels familiar, maybe the slides will help give you more material for what you’re already doing. I’m really grateful to Sean for the workshop that got me going in this direction. His workshop on writing about teaching really taught me a lot about both.</p>
<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1" role="doc-endnote">
<p>Ashley’s workshop also incorporates free writing as well! She does a great job linking formal and informal ways of writing about teaching. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
One Concept: Ten Ways to Teach2023-10-25T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/one-concept-ten-ways-to-teach<p>Praxis is in the middle of our unit on digital humanities teaching and learning. As a part of this section of the year, our students’ task is to design a lightweight, speculative workshop that introduces a DH concept of interest to them. The activity is a teach-to-learn one with some constraints: in an effort to move <a href="https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/16833/18427">beyond buttonology</a> approaches to teaching technical topics, the students are meant to think through how pencil and paper, low-tech, or otherwise minimal ways of teaching might empower themselves and their students to learn material that might otherwise feel beyond them.</p>
<p>At this point in the semester the fellows have just begun their thinking. I asked them to run an <a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/finding-a-way-in/">activity</a> related to <em><a href="https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/">Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities</a></em> as a means of finding the areas within digital pedagogy that speak to them. And then from there we did some mind mapping work meant to encourage the students to think broadly about how teaching intersected with their interests in the field. So the fellows all have a general sense of what their workshop topic will be but no specifics just yet. Yesterday when discussing their ideas, a number of the students expressed difficulty moving from these large topics to actual, teachable activities. How do you get from a focus on network analysis to an activity using string and rope? Do you just wait for inspiration to strike?</p>
<p>I’ll be sharing a few posts in the coming weeks with exercises that our current fellows might use to help facilitate the brainstorming process. In this first piece, I’ll touch on ways to bring iterative design into the development of lesson plans to open them up as spaces of possibility. I’ll call it “One Concept: Ten Ways to Teach.”</p>
<h2 id="one-concept-ten-ways-to-teach">One Concept: Ten Ways to Teach</h2>
<p>I would wager when most people lesson plan that they try to do so as quickly as possible. Working under the constraints of limited time and resources, we probably take the first or second good idea that we have for approaching our material. Rarely do we dwell in the possibilities that the learning experience might contain, but a quick speculative exercise can help us do so when we have the luxury of more time to think. If we iteratively take on several different approaches with intentional constraints we can explore the myriad ways we might approach teaching a particular topic.</p>
<p>The title and approach here shamelessly adapt (rip off) <em>Wired</em>’s <a href="https://www.wired.com/video/series/5-levels">5 Levels</a> series. In the 5 Levels videos, an expert teaches a single concept to five different audiences and with varying levels of complexity: “first to a child, then a teenager, then an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a grad student and, finally, a colleague.” In the video I’m most familiar with, music phenom Jacob Collier explains the definition of harmony to a child (harmony makes a melody less lonely and helps us change how it feels) all the way to jazz legend Herbie Hancock (what even is harmony anyway?).</p>
<p>The series orients itself around a kind of idealistic approach to teaching and learning: a complex idea can explained to anyone given the right approach. While that is a useful lesson in itself, the approach can also be used as a generative exercise in iterative design. Forcing ourselves to explain the same concept with varying levels of complexity and constraints can help us push past our usual teaching models. Here’s how we might apply it to a DH context.</p>
<p>Take one minute to think of the DH topic or method you want to focus on. Write it down.</p>
<p>You’ll now practice different ways of teaching the same idea. For each one, take one to two minutes to think and then three minutes to write before moving on to the next one. In each case, it is probably more important to capture the general approach you would take than to focus on writing an actual, new explanation. For each new way, consider these questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>How will you need to explain things differently?</li>
<li>How will the genre of the teaching change?</li>
<li>What will you (or they) likely have trouble with (can you ignore that thing entirely)?</li>
<li>What will you need? What can you let go of?</li>
</ul>
<p>Here are the ways:</p>
<ol>
<li>Teach the idea to an academic not in your field.</li>
<li>Teach the idea to a very well read, bookish friend who is not an academia.</li>
<li>Teach the idea to a child.</li>
<li>Teach the idea using something in your home as a prop.</li>
<li>Teach the idea using a metaphor.</li>
<li>Teach the idea using a lecture.</li>
<li>Teach the idea where you don’t speak and the students come to the realization on their own.</li>
<li>Teach the idea using no technology.</li>
<li>Teach the idea in the worst way.</li>
<li>Teach the idea in three words.</li>
</ol>
<p>Etc. etc. You might come up with your own! The number of ways is arbitrary, but the important takeaway is simply that the ways are numerous. Success in the activity does not come from finding the one perfect approach. It comes from trying on new things. And then another. And another. When all is done, you might take a look at how your thinking has changed over the course of the exercise. What was especially challenging? What seems like it would be the most fun to teach? What will be your way?</p>
Praxis Hackathon Scaffolding2023-10-09T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/praxis-hackathon-scaffolding<p>The current formulation for Praxis has the students carrying out a small-scale hackathon in the spring as a way of practicing the various <a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/connecting-community/">intersecting pieces of the curriculum</a> they’ve learned throughout the year. The segment is meant to draw together lessons in project development, humanities programming, and critical approaches to design. We have a few moments in the year to scaffold the process leading to the hackathon and help the students come to a shared sense of their goals and activities for that time before the event itself. In describing how the process will work for the students, I proposed that we start with a working definition for digital projects. After all, groups always struggle to define parameters for their work. Shared definitions and milestones can help make that process easier.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a digital project = a digital method applied to a particular object of study</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And, for the purposes of the hackathon, we’re describing an object of study as a contextualized set of materials that serves as a point of intervention for a broader range of interests. Given this, we have a few components to sort out before we start: the group’s shared interests, an object of study that reflects them, and a digital method to apply to that object. Given these three components, we’ve set a few conversations throughout the year to develop them together.</p>
<ol>
<li>In October the group will meet to define their shared set of interests. The staff will provide context for hackathons as a genre and help to poke these interests in directions that feel feasible. This is how the pre-work for the session is described on the curriculum:
<ul>
<li>“Get together as a group to find a broad shared topic/interest that will be the subject of the hackathon. 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.”</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>In late November the group proposes a few objects of study with that reflect those interests (thinking datasets, collections of materials, etc.). The staff will workshop these with the students to find materials that feel workable within the timeframe. This is how we described the pre-work on the curriculum:
<ul>
<li>Given your shared interests, come to the session with some sense of what your object of study will be to explore them during the hackathon. What will your materials be? They have to live on the web somewhere. Could come with 1-3 things as options and we help narrow. You will come out of the session with the data source that you’ll then play around with over the winter in preparation for first steps in the spring.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>In January, the group proposes 2-3 particular digital methods to explore that object of study. Again, the staff help push and shape in the direction of what feels possible. This will give us some time to supplement our general humanities programming instruction with a few sessions geared to their specific interests. The curriculum again:
<ul>
<li>“Given your proposed objects of study, come up with 2-3 approaches to them that interest you. We will try to get them to narrow to some methodological constraints, but we’ll try to keep this data or Python oriented. This will allow Shane to structure the CodeLab instruction a little more.”</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>And, finally, the hackathon takes place over the course of four weeks in April. In making it that long, we’re stretching the typical bounds of the genre. But the longer period allows us to jettison some of the toxic working conditions of the format and hopefully find a happier balance between marathon and sprint.</li>
</ol>
<p>Of course, this definition of DH projects is limiting–other contexts might define them differently. I don’t think every digital project needs a method associated with it, for example, so I’m not sure I would even subscribe to this particular working definition in most of my work. Think of this formulation as an enabling fiction with the goal of drawing out certain kinds of DH work–we’ll discuss others at different points throughout the year. Hopefully, though, the hackathon process helps students new to project design, DH collaboration, and hackathons get some orientation to the process.</p>
Connecting Community2023-09-18T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/connecting-community<p>Praxis is wrapping up its unit on community building within digital humanities. The opening segment of the year is meant to welcome the students into the lab, get them thinking about how this space might be different than what they’re used to, and illustrate how alternative spaces like these enable different kinds of work to take place. This section of the year has the following activating questions:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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? how do you find your way into these communities as individuals just starting out?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And this cohort specifically engaged in the following questions:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Who are we? who are we not? who is in the room? who is not? what assumptions does the room make? what is the nature of our community? how will we build and maintain and generous and equitable environment? what are our hopes and dreams? our daily practices? how do I intersect with the group as an individual? how does the group intersect with the world outside? how do I? how are communities formed and reformed? how can we create a community mindful of our own biases and the systems of power in which we swim?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The cohort explored these topics by writing a group charter (a statement of values that they want to put into practice together) and designing plans for self-study based on various presentations from the lab community. The goal is for them to examine how the various communities within the lab and the field more generally intersect and how they might find their own particular way of intervening.</p>
<p>We’re about to move on to a new unit on teaching and learning, but I wanted to offer a few words on how things all fit together. We cover a variety of topics throughout the year:</p>
<ul>
<li>Communities</li>
<li>Teaching and learning</li>
<li>Research infrastructure</li>
<li>Practice (under which I’m broadly including our technical curriculum)</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course, it’s impossible to separate any one of these segments from the others. We might visualize their interconnectedness like this (pardon my handwriting).</p>
<p><img src="/assets/post-media/connecting-community/diagram.png" alt="diagram showing the topics communities, teaching and learning, infrastructure in a triangle, with practice in the middle of it. Arrows shows how all of the topics are interconnected." /></p>
<p>So, as we shift out of focusing on community and towards the other units this year I wanted to offer a few questions one might ask to help activate community considerations in the other forthcoming topics.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Teaching and learning</p>
<p>What assumptions do our pedagogies make about who is in the room? how do our physical learning spaces include or exclude? what are small community-building practices we can implement each day to create the collective we want? how might we draft community agreements like charters with our students? do our syllabi fulfill the same purpose? if not, why is that? what are the thousand small acts of teaching and learning that we engage in everyday, and how do those invite or push away students and collaborators?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Research infrastructure</p>
<p>Take any given solo-authored research activity–what is the large, unstated community of collaborators behind that work? how might we most generously credit all those involved in digital projects? how does the institutional position of digital work affect its nature and who is allowed to participate in it? what audience do we imagine for our work? how might any given research activity cultivate a specific community that will live beyond it? what kinds of values documents–MOUs, charters, etc.–can we offer to help intentionally shape our research practices?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Practice</p>
<p>How do the technical choices we make reinforce or undercut systemic power imbalances? how can we make our technical practice as inclusive as possible? what daily practices might we implement to turn solitary activities into collective ones (paired programming, code review, etc.)? how do our past histories with digital methods inform, strengthen, or frustrate our efforts to put them into practice today? how are those past histories shaped by politics, systemic power imbalances, identity, and more? how can we pay forward our successes to others and learn from our failures?</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>All parts of our work are informed by the communities at the center–or periphery–of them. And that community-building is not a one-off activity–it is the result of hundreds of small practices. Questions like these can help us to center and intentionally cultivate group identity and the audiences for our work.</p>
<p>Much more to say, but I’ll leave it there since each of these topics will get their own post later on.</p>
Listening at Length2023-09-06T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/listening-at-length<p>I posted this summer about how I’ve been doing more DH listening–podcasts, lectures, workshop recordings–as a way of keeping up with the field in the cracks of the day. In <a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/resources-for-the-digital-humanist-on-the-go/">that post</a> I started a running list of things I’ve been checking out, and I just added a few DH-relevant audiobooks to that post as their own section. While they’re not as easy to come by free, you can still find a fair number of DH-y audiobooks included as part of subscriptions to other services or provided by your local library.</p>
<p>I’ve just finished three audiobooks and started a fourth:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/antisocial-media-9780190841164">Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy</a> by Siva Vaidhyanathan</li>
<li><a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/Mindfulness-for-teachers/">Mindfulness for Teachers: Simple Skills for Peace and Productivity in the Classroom</a> by Patricia A. Jennings</li>
<li><a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/lower-ed">Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy</a> by Tressie McMillan Cottom</li>
<li><a href="https://bogost.com/books/play-anything/">Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games</a> by Ian Bogost</li>
</ul>
<p>All very doable in this format, and all related in some way to the work that I do.</p>
<p>Interestingly, even though each of these texts comes from a very different domain, they all share a common concern with systems and the ways individuals engage with them. Vaidhyanathan writes at great length about the ways Facebook sets up dialogic structures that are antithetical to democratic practices of deliberation and debate. McMillan Cottom’s work concerns the ways in which the conditions of credential creep in the labor market create an environment ripe for exploitation by for-profit colleges and leave students paying the price. Jennings describes mindfulness practices as a means for refocusing classroom practices towards attention, wellbeing, and emotional work, both a pedagogical and individual response to difficult professional circumstances. And Bogost’s book asks us to consider the creative navigation of systems of limitations–and the pleasure it affords–as something we can direct to all parts of life.</p>
<p>I’ve been enjoying this new phase of my listening a lot. Historically I never really got to read long-form texts unless I had a specific research reason for them. I was much more likely to read blogs or articles to keep up with the field. But I have found myself much more likely to take in large works as audio in bits and pieces.</p>
<p>Consider this a plea to the world for more academic audiobooks.</p>
Blogging Summer 2023 in Review2023-08-21T00:00:00+00:00http://walshbr.com/blog/blogging-summer-2023-in-review<p>I used to blog regularly, but that publishing schedule happened roughly whenever I felt like it. During the pandemic I experienced a series of personal and professional challenges that caused me to slow things down considerably across the board. The result was that my writing schedule ceased–I simply did not have the energy to blog on top of other things. This past summer I set a goal for myself to post once per week as a means of trying to force myself back into a blogging mindset.</p>
<p>I managed to stick to that rough schedule, partially due to a concentrated sprint early in the summer that gave me a backlog of posts I could use downstream. Now, at the end, I am surprised to find that things cohere more than expected. As a means of putting a button on the experience, I’ll close with this post, meant to conclude the sprint but also to serve as a persistent introduction to the collection of work. In what follows I’ll introduce the collection, reflect on the process a little bit, and reorganize the various posts into a set of thematic groupings. Consider this a table of contents, introduction, and conclusion all at once.</p>
<p>Publishing weekly was, of course, too much. Anyone could have told me this. I even would have advised myself against it. I usually tell my students to aim for regular posts to blogs or social media on a sustainable basis, a steady trickle rather than an intermittent flood. But the crunch of this writing push was quite intentional. I’m a very process-oriented person, relying on regular daily practices as opposed to big sprints on things. I live my work life out in Pomodoros. I wrote most of my dissertation at 5:00 AM in 750-word-a-day chunks (<a href="https://writtenkitten.co/">using an online system that rewarded me with kitten photos with each milestone</a>). This probably goes back to an old adage I heard learning music growing up: it’s better to practice every day for an hour than for seven hours once a week. My hope was that a weekly posting schedule would force me into a daily writing practice of some shape. This worked to a degree, though of course with the needs of daily life such a schedule is unsustainable. I settled into a regular practice of returning to writing in a few inconsistent and intermittent sessions per week. Perhaps most importantly, I started to divide those sessions between writing, proofing, prepping, and publishing in ways that worked well for me. I’m an endless tinkerer, and it’s easier for me to hold myself back if I know I’m not supposed to be adding new content when I sit down.</p>
<p>Another side effect of the sprint was that I found myself writing different kinds of things than had been my habit in recent years. I wanted to use the summer to push myself towards different scales in part to prove to myself that not everything needs to be a big Statement™. This experiment was largely successful–I found myself posting on tool tips, resources I was putting together, one-off teaching exercises, and generally just documenting a lot of approaches I take to conversations 1:1 with students. New topics also brought new lengths. I was pleased to see an estimated reading time of one minute on one post. I have always loved this about blogging–that the genre is what you make of it–but it was a lesson I had started to forget over the years. I also found myself more likely to bring in my other interests–music most often–that might otherwise get left out of DH pieces. In short, the need to publish pulled me along the path to innovation. I used to write blog posts one at a time, but I developed a habit this summer of having several posts in various stages of publication at once. Some of my writing time was spent just brainstorming a list of topics and titles for future posts, which I found useful for providing a well I could return to periodically for new ideas. This process was very different from my old approach to developing new posts, where I waited to feel like I had a complete statement before writing.</p>
<p>Multiple people across platforms commented on my ongoing writing with some version of “I’m enjoying this series!” Comments like that were, of course, appreciated. But they were also a little surprising. Was this a series? The conversations got me thinking about the point at which a collection coheres, when parts become a whole. I’ve had the goal of blogging my way towards a book proposal for a while, and some of the things I wrote about were in that direction. But, in other ways, the posts I wrote this summer felt like a pretty loosely associated set of topics only connected by my own interests. Does it matter if your writing coheres across pieces? Does it do so simply by virtue of occurring in the same space in a compressed span of time? Is a snapshot of writing at a particular point in time useful on its own? I took a step back and was surprised at the degree to which they <em>do</em> actually cohere, particularly when reorganized thematically rather than chronologically.</p>
<p>I’m certainly not the only one still blogging, but it’s common to hear that the field has mostly moved on from the practice, at least in the way in which the early 2010’s saw not just a network of DH blogs but also consistent engagement happening in the comments. Given this context, why do some of us still blog? Counting this piece, this summer I wrote 15 posts totaling about 17,250 words. Through it all, I found that the pieces share a core set of interests. I’ve always felt that controlling my own publishing process was a way to control my own professional narrative, to write the work into existence the way I wanted, separately from an external academic publishing pipeline. And the core goal of my work in this space, now more than ever, remains sharing as a virtue in itself. I like to think of blogging, in its purest form, as a letter to myself in the past. What do I know now that I wish I had known five years ago? What practices might I want to share back? I covered a broad array of topics here: video game writing, music, teaching, technology. But there are no descriptions of domain-specific research in progress in my posts this summer. What you find, instead, are reflections on teaching and program administration in the hope others might benefit, resources for professional development aimed towards students and early-career professionals, and more. Across the board, the aim has been to share things that might be useful to others. I found that they can be organized into four rough groupings: Meta-DH, Resources and Documentation, Professional Development, and Reflections on Writing.</p>
<p>I’ll be slowing down considerably after today–the weekly pace was never intended to be an ongoing thing, though I might return to it next summer given the rhythms of my work life. I’ll be hoping to find regular intervals that keep the writing alive that won’t burn me out. In the future I’m going to downgrade to probably biweekly posts at most, monthly posting more likely. I’ll be continuing to blog in the direction of larger and longer writing projects. And I’ll keep experimenting with scale and form. But this was an interesting experiment in sustained writing activity over a span of time. I’ll probably return to this format again in the future. If you’ve made it this far thanks for reading! If you’re finding your way to this little collection of work for the first time I hope there’s something in it that you will find useful.</p>
<h2 id="blogging-summer-2023-in-review">Blogging Summer 2023 in Review</h2>
<ul>
<li>Writing Reflections
<ul>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/blogging-summer-2023-in-review">Blogging Summer 2023 in Review</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/from-gaming-to-writing/">From Gaming to Writing</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/finding-the-community-after-twitter">Finding the Community after Twitter</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Meta-DH
<ul>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/dh-is-teaching/">DH is Teaching</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/digital-humanities-and-the-ellington-effect/">Digital Humanities and the Ellington Effect</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/the-shape-of-dh-work/">The Shape of DH Work</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Professional Development
<ul>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/origin-story/">Origin Story</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/questions-to-ask-when-applying/">Questions to Ask When Applying</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/finding-a-way-in/">Finding a Way In</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/breadth-and-depth-in-dh-professional-development/">Breadth and Depth in DH Professional Development</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Resources and Documentation
<ul>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/a-meeting-toolkit-for-new-facilitators/">A Meeting Toolkit for New Facilitators</a>, with Ronda Grizzle</li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/resources-for-the-digital-humanist-on-the-go/">Resources for the Digital Humanist on the Go</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/a-workflow-for-remote-music-recording/">A Workflow for Music Recording</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/jekyll-tag-clouds/">Jekyll Tag Clouds</a></li>
<li><a href="https://walshbr.com/blog/counting-to-seven/">Counting to Seven</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>