Brandon Walsh

Writing Together

2026-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Brandon

What does it mean to write? Who do I write for? Who do you write for? How do we write together? How has the impact of generative AI changed all of these answers? Perhaps most importantly, what can it be? What can it be for you, for me? What can we write together? How can writing push back against these questions and create new worlds, new shapes for ourselves and our community, both public and in private?

I’m really excited to share a new project that I’m working on with Katina Rogers, my longtime friend, mentor, collaborator, and colleague, who’s taught me so much about writing. The way this project came about is Katina and I have often shared writing and discussed the subject informally. To take just one example, we were on a panel at MLA together about writing for the margins that Katina put together about how writing has changed for us since we’ve entered into interstitial in the academy. Recently, Katina came to me with a new writing project she was working on and asked if I wanted to hear about it. We started discussing her new project on writing. It was incredible, as is everything that Katina works on. At a certain point, I sheepishly threw into the room that, I would love to talk about collaborating on the subject if she ever thought it could be a possibility. We went back and forth about this for days, offering each other an out if we didn’t want to continue with on. Eventually, I posted about it on social media and forced the issue. We both decided to commit.

What we settled on was a project that we would together, about writing, in a way that mixed public and private. The format that we settled on was to physically send a journal back and forth to each other in which we would carry on a regular conversation. Each time we get the journal, we have three days to write an entry to the other person in response to their previous one. And we’ll end each of our entries with a prompt or question to the other person that they will then respond with. We’ll go where it goes, but as we initially framed things we will reflect on writing, what it means for us and for each other, how writing intersects with for our jobs, how it enriches our lives for our lives, and more. We’ll then send the thing back in the mail to the other person again. So this document will unfold over time, growing with each new handwritten note to the other person. Our plan is to follow up by regularly transcribing the entries and sharing portions of them publicly with a few contextual reflections. The result should be a blending of public and private, outcome and process.

Interestingly, what I saw in our first entries together is we each share different kinds of anxieties related to the project. For me, I have a lot of concerns about taking Katina’s time and attention away from the projects that she was already interested in. I always feel very happy and fortunate to be included in conversation with her at all. Katina’s work is endlessly inspirational, and I am excited to collaborate with her. We also both express similar instincts about where we wanted the project to start, if not similar anxieties and questions about where we wanted to go. Both of us immediately drew in our environments. Katina talks about writing on the floor, while I talked about writing outside. We both talked about our children, their lives, and ways that I think neatly blend the personal and the private. We also both discussed how the physical act of writing and how it felt a certain way that would not have come across online. I will end here and give Katina space to share her own thoughts in the process. I’m excited to see where this goes. I think you’ll find reflected in the documents that we’re going to share the sense that the destination will be good no matter where we might wind up. We’re excited to be stepping out into this unknown journey together.

Katina

Brandon and I have been crossing professional paths since 2012, and in that time I’ve admired the ways he weaves so many strands of work and life—scholarly writing, music, pedagogy, video games, administration, parenting. I’ve edited his writing, and he’s given feedback on mine, so we know one another’s work quite well. While chatting on slack, we both found that we wanted to write about writing—or maybe, to think about writing and what it means at this particular moment in time, and for both of us, one of the best ways we think is through writing. So here we are: writing to each other (and to the internet) to understand what makes writing important and human and worth doing.

I often dislike collaborative writing, if I’m being honest. Writing is a little bit like running for me—something I need to do, crave doing, but cannot stand doing with someone else. A lot of it, in both cases, is fear of judgment. I’ll be too slow as a running partner; my writing will be vapid and pointless. But part of it is also control and agency. Both running and writing are spaces that are profoundly mine, where I don’t have to worry about anyone’s feelings but my own. But when Brandon proposed this exploratory project, it felt right. Maybe it’s because it’s an indeterminate project. We don’t have a clear sightline on what we’re aiming for; we’re writing this way to see what happens. Everything about the approach is experimental and relational, which—in a moment when we’re all getting bombarded with flat, AI-generated writing—feels worth trying.

We’ve been taking a yes-and approach, letting each other’s ideas take hold and building on them as we go. We decided to write back and forth, by hand, in a physical journal—so that we have to wait to receive the other’s thoughts before jumping in with our own. It makes each entry both time-bound and ephemeral, connected to the moments that pen touched paper. What was the weather that day, what were our kids doing, how were we feeling? Writing by hand is embodied in a way that makes the process feel much more vulnerable than that rapid-fire chatting we tend to do over slack or bluesky.

Maybe because of those distinctions, Brandon and I keep nervous-laughing about how much anxiety we both feel about this. Will my handwriting be legible? Will I have anything worthwhile to say? What if I forget all my ideas when I have the journal in hand? Right now these worries are front-of-mind, but as we spend time in the project I’m imagining that they will soften into something interesting. Why do we both have such a strong affective response to this approach? How will it change the way we write?

Our plan for the time being is to share parts of our writing as we go, with a slight lag to allow us to read the other’s response and transcribe our preceding entry. We’ll likely play around with constraints (Brandon pulled an Oblique Strategies card to launch our first entries, for instance). We’ll definitely think about time and friction and audience. And if we’re lucky, something will take shape that could only happen in conversation.

Embedded Pedagogies Cover

2026-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Embedded Pedagogies has a cover!

I liked this image of the ones that were shared for mockups because it shows someone reading a large music score alone in a rows of auditorium-style seating. The room is structured for a certain kind of interaction and a poor fit for what he is trying to do. If he wanted to work with musicians, he would have to get up and walk across the room or yell out. He might be in a better position to experience the performance as an audience member, but he is in a poor place to teach. That is to say - the room structures particular kind of interactions.

The book is all about how institutions structure certain kinds of teaching and how we push back. And it opens and closes with discussions of a similar teaching space at UVA. Fixed rooms and how to unbolt them.

More info on the Open Book Publishers site. So much gratitude to Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal for the cover design! And the cover image comes to us by way of Philippe Bout (2018), https://unsplash.com/photos/person-reading-in-empty-lecture-hall-93W0xn4961g.

Sounds of Emergency with Gamers with Glasses

2026-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve got a new essay out with Gamers with Glasses that discusses the way Amberspire’s soundtrack does—or doesn’t—evoke the sounds of natural disaster. Check out The Sounds of Emergency in Amberspire. Many thanks to Nate Schmidt for providing wonderful editorial comments!

Developing a Sustainable Summer Writing Practice

2026-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

On June 2nd I’ll be giving a workshop for the PHD+ program here on how to develop a sustainable summer writing practice. This session will be one of the opening discussions for a daylong event that asks PhD students to take their research topic and transform it across a range of different formats: podcasts, websites, and zines. The goal for my part is to collect a number of different writing activities to show examples for how one might experiment with writing practice. For me, sustainable writing can be found through regular work, joy, and playing with constraints. To get there, I suggest students do the following:

Experiment with different formats for writing. For this I discuss otter.ai.
Distinguish between the different phases of the writing process and sit down with a clear goal in mind.
Scale up to a daily practice rather than experimenting to start with tons of words each day.
Incorporate free writing (hat tip to Sean Michael Morris here for his beautiful approach to the craft).
Incorporate stochastic practice as a means to jolt your creativity. I’ll use Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies deck here.

I then close with a short activity that asks students to brainstorm the different components for a practice of their own: format, location, frequency, amount, and method. After jotting a few ideas each for each category, I’ll guide them through a discussion of how to remix these components into something that works for them. Slides follow below. The particular deck theme I used was food themed, which felt appropriate.

Task Lists - Physical to Digital

2026-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

A quick one today on how I manage my task list each day and the tools I use for doing so.

For years I have used Slack to manage my working life. If you click a single message you can select “remind me later” and select a date and time. I use this religiously, scheduling out reminders for particular times and dates. If I need to follow up on a thing, it gets a date. If I need more time to reply to a message, it gets a date. You can also schedule reminders for yourself separate from messages. So, if I have an overarching task, it gets a date and reminder. It’s not uncommon for me to open slack and get 10 notifications at 9:00 AM that tell me what I am supposed to be doing for the day. Here’s a glimpse at my reminders for today:

This system has worked well for years. I rarely let anything slip, because I just file everything away as a reminder and snooze if necessary. But Slack recently changed how their reminders work. DISASTER. I can’t fully grasp how to reset the way it manages this system, but now it seems to be giving me double alerts for these notifications in a way that collapses them with DMs. It’s deeply irritating. While I’m sure I could figure a workaround, I decided it was time to disentangle this particular tool from my daily task management.

So, I’m experimenting with a physical notebook for the first time in at least a decade. Here’s my daily notebook for today:

I’ve tried such things in the past but never stuck with them for long, but this run seems to be sticking. In part, I think this is because of how I’ve made working with the notebook part of a daily ritual. Each day’s page is broken into three segments: must do, can do, and waiting. I start each day by looking at the previous day by looking at the previous page to see what needs to be moved over. I’ll then check my inbox and shuffle things around based on how answering email goes. This process gives me a sense of things that are urgent and those tasks that require actions from other people. I typically close out each work day by referring to the page once more and updating things. This process is helped along by the fact that I have found a particular set of pens that are deeply, unironically joyful to use. Working with them provides a meditative tactile sensation that grounds my start and end to each day.

Sharing all this is a tad embarrassing. I have discovered writing in a journal! I have terrible handwriting! Pens are nice! But I can’t emphasize enough what a shift this has been for my working life. It’s brought an embodied ritual to each day that I didn’t have before, and I’ve found it surprising how much energy can come from shifting this foundational part of my working rhythm. So, if you’re feeling stuck, it’s never too late to change. Your process can always find new shape if you give it new tools.

Book Revision Workflow

2026-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

I recently got word that my manuscript for Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change was accepted for publication with Open Book Publishers. As exciting as this is, there is still much work to do. I could not have asked for more thoughtful and generous peer reviewers, but even thoughtful and generous feedback still takes time to incorporate. One reader’s report especially requires a kind of work that used to give me a lot of difficulty when I was a graduate student. The substance of the report was that there were two critical conversations with which I needed to engage more deeply. The reader suggested thoughtfully that I needed to incorporate those conversations that critique the field of librarianship (#critlib especially) if I wanted to claim librarian as an identity. The other critique: my writing on artificial intelligence felt a little thin and needed to be built out. Also very fair. I hadn’t actually anticipated writing about AI, but it does feel more and more urgent the more time passes. Despite my own reluctance I found myself needing to read much more about generative AI.

So, here I have two areas in which I need to read more deeply. Such critiques can feel very overwhelming and abstract, and it is helpful to find ways to make them smaller and actionable. Experience has helped me towards a system that works for me, so I thought I would share a few thoughts here on my workflow for this research and revision process. While each step below does build on the others, I typically think of each phase as a separate component. I try to stick to a single goal when I sit down at my desk (or stand at my treadmill—more on that below).

Gathering

First, I gather a list of citations to explore. I might drop a bunch of links in a word doc, open a range of tabs, or print a stack of texts. The anonymous reviewer above suggested the #critlib Zotero library, which turned out to be an extraordinary resource. Reading through a collection of articles here took me to the Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook. Exploring that resource took me to the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. And working through that material took me on a deep dive into In the Library with the Lead Pipe. In each case, I started by skimming titles and abstracts just to get a sense of what could be relevant.

Reading

I read 2-3 articles per day from the stack created during the gathering phase (after all, one can only take in so much per day). As I go, I typically underline some things, underline and star others, and then underline and star and write CITE in capital letters next to others. At the end, I’ll make a few notes at the top of the article about whether or not the thing seems useful and about where I see the material fitting into the book. I typically do this work on the treadmill, which I mention for no other reason than to note how important it is for me to associate particular kinds of work with particular spaces and practices. In this way, my “to read” pile gradually morphs into a “read but needs to be transcribed” pile.

Lifting and Transcribing

At this point, I shift back to my computer. I have three folders there: “to transcribe,” “to integrate,” and “done.” For each article that I have read, I create a blank word document titled with the name of the author. I transcribe that article’s quotations with page numbers into its corresponding holding document, and I also assemble the actual, formatted citation for my references list. As this point, I am typically done with the actual, full text of the article. It exists for me only as a series of quotations, a citation, and a few notes to the effect of “mention in Chapter Three when you talk about the interview” or “more of an explanatory footnote than an actual citation to Chapter Four.”

Integrating

Only now do I actually open the manuscript itself. Given that is revision work for an actual, already extant manuscript, I typically have a pretty good idea of where things are likely to fit in and be useful. This phase involves integrating the new material into my text, stitching things together, and rewriting whatever components were complicated by the new references. Sometimes, this process is fairly seamless. Other times, this process involves substantial rewriting in light of the way the citations change my thinking about particular ideas. After the initial pass at integration, I make a note about the page numbers where I have revised new material. That way, I have a better sense of which pages to focus on during later editing.

Proofing

In this final phase, I make sure to return to things with fresh eyes. I will read more broadly than just the sections I have surgically edited, and I’ll hope to see where things fit, where they don’t, and what other edits might be needed to make things flow together. But the pages listed in the previous phase help me know where to focus.

Each of these phases feeds the others, so I am constantly moving forward. I feel as though I am making progress, and I also feel as though the big abstract task of reworking my argument to fit more closely into a particular critical conversation is more manageable and more doable. Importantly, each of these segments requires a different kind of work in ways that I appreciate. Transcribing and creating a citation require far less mental energy for me than reading or integrating. I welcome these variations.

Hopefully this is useful for seeing how I go about the revision process. Keep an eye out for Embedded Pedagogies, the text of which will be available print on demand and freely online. I am so grateful for the particular anonymous reader I describe above. It’s been enjoyable to dig into broad areas that overlap with my work but that were not top of my mind. I’ve learned a lot, and I think my work is much stronger for it.

Retro Gaming with Unwinnable

2026-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve got a piece out with Unwinnable that discusses retro gaming, memory loss, and Breath of Fire 2. Check out Gaming to Remember. Many thanks to Levi and the crew there for taking it on.

Nine things for nine years

2026-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

I blinked and realized that Amanda Wyatt Visconti and I have been at the Scholars’ Lab for nine years as of April 24, 2026. Time flies. We typically celebrate by eating or drinking something sweet in the Lab (I’m still vibrating from the cream soda we had half a decade ago). We weren’t able to do so this year, so I thought I would share a quick post to mark the last nine years.

Nine things I’ve learned

Drink a glass of water and put both feet on the ground.
Don’t over-engineer things.
Slow down and appreciate.
Some things get easier. Some will not.
Write it down. It will be helpful for someone. That someone might be you.
Snacks always help.
Be explicit about what you need and what you don’t.
There are limits.
Structures give shape. Structures can be changed.

Nine memories to hold onto

Amanda biting into a lemon after eating miraculin.
The moment when each student steps into their own expertise.
Shane saying, “agenda item: be better friends.”
When I cried at the Afton overlook because I wouldn’t have to commute for work anymore.
Biscuit baking lessons on zoom with Jeremy and Amanda.
The support each colleague gave when I needed it.
The satisfaction that comes from seeing a student graduate as a DH practitioner, especially when you met them as a prospective student.
Those who are gone. Ryan. Leigh. Scott. Rebecca. Effie. Stéfan. So many others for different reasons.
All the unjust things. All the people working to make it better.

Nine things I’m grateful for

Our students. They’re the best.
Our colleagues. They keep me coming back.
To still be here, doing this.
Everyone who has taught me.
Those who are still here.
Those who made space for me when I burnt out.
Eliza, Ben, Ava.
That I was given a chance.
Every accident that brought me here.

It’s not lost on me that so many others deserve to be in stable employment who are not. I’m very lucky to have a job in this world on fire. So, I will close with gratitude and a determination to pay it forward to the next folks in line.

Teaching with the DH Awards

2026-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

It’s that time of the year when the DH Awards goes public with the results of their annual cycle. The process is, of course, only a snapshot of the field and limited in all those expected ways. But I am astonished each year, chronically online as I am, to find that there are so many projects out there that are new to me. Each season is a delight as I page through the many different links offering new work, unknown-to-me scholars, and fresh ideas. Reading this year, I thought that the list could make for a useful way of constructing a DH teaching activity. Here are a few ideas for how you might use the DH Awards to teach your students:

Take five; pick one. Students pick five projects to examine in detail, using a rubric you provide in advance. In session, they each quickly present on one topic to the group. You follow up with a general discussion to which the students can bring all five pieces they examined.
Dig into a year. It’s not uncommon for scholars to designate particular years as uniquely important for their fields of study. In this activity, students pick one year and examine the projects showcased in the DH Awards closely. What was distinctive about this year? What trends do they see? What seems curious?
Look over time. Ask students to consider how representation of the field has changed over time as articulated in the DH Awards. Probably easiest to narrow their focus to a single category for this one. Does anything rise up? Fall away? Remain steady?
Consider what’s left out. Invite students to look critically at the awards process. Can they think of any topics or kinds of scholars who are consistently left out?
Design your own. Encourage students to speculate on their own award cycle. What kind of work would they want to promote? What do they value? How could they design a shoestring award process to help facilitate that every year? What kind of collaborators would they need to implement it? How much labor would it entail?

For extra flavor, I might offer analogous or contrasting exercises with Reviews in DH or Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. Maybe that’s a future post. Endless thanks to those who provide volunteer labor to keep DH Awards going. I always appreciate the project as a service to the community. I always learn something each awards season, and hopefully the above activities give some ideas for how they can teach your students as well.

Breath in DH

2026-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Winnie E. Pérez Martínez’s post on the Scholars’ Lab blog this week got me thinking. In “Breadth and Depth, a Self-Centered Dialectic,” she revisits how we discuss breadth and depth as two approaches to digital humanities professional development. In this framing, one that I have put forward myself, we can think of careers in DH as operating on two axes. On the one, we are expected to know a little about a lot of things. On the other, we are directed more towards narrow, specialist-level knowledge about a smaller subset of methods. Breadth vs. depth. Few careers really ask us to go entirely in both directions. More practically, we tend to specialize in a couple areas within DH and develop passing familiarity with many more.

For me, the dichotomy between breadth and depth was a way to help students map their career plans onto the different skills they might acquire. I thought of it as a way to free yourself from the need to be expert in everything. In her post, Pérez Martínez expertly shows how breadth and depth actually inform and lead to one another. There can be no one right way in. If you start deep, you might find yourself broadening, and starting wide can help you to focus in. What most resonated about Pérez Martínez’s post, though, was the way in which you can see an exceptional scholar and practitioner wrestling over whether they are enough, over whether they could ever develop the necessary skills they need to feel complete. Those anxieties never really go away. I feel them too. I recognized myself in Pérez Martínez’s post, and I couldn’t help but sense that the breadth against depth framing seemed to be having the opposite effect I would want, heightening anxiety rather than mitigating it.

Pérez Martínez proposes a broadening of the axes I had envisioned. Breadth and depth move beyond just X and Y, curling in upon themselves until they start to push outwards. The moment reminded me of the age-old dichotomy of “hack” vs. “yack” in DH work and how Laura Braunstein offered “stack” as an important third term. In addition to coding and technological critique as key parts of DH work, Braunstein’s intervention elevates “the often invisible technological, social, and physical structures within which scholarship is produced and disseminated.” For Braunstein, DH work is more than just the sum of what we do, it also consists of the structures we put in place to enable that work. In the same spirit and inspired by Pérez Martínez, I have been wondering what breadth and depth leave out, what they gesture towards within and beyond the teaching that we do.

Put another way, what is education if not just content? One point of comparison here is L. Dee Fink, whose Taxonomy of Significant Learning illuminates the various components of teaching.

Caption: L. Dee Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning as shared on Florida International University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Fink’s Taxonomy usefully illustrates all the things that lie beyond the subject matter in the courses we teach. Learning is more than consuming books, articles, or topics. Teaching is more than passing along skills and methods. If we think of DH merely as skill building, we live too much in the upper right of the circle. We leave out the rest of what makes DH experiences—and DH learning—significant for so many of us. We ignore the transformative mentoring that shows a variety of career options. We miss the collaborative practices that can change how we view our work in dialogue with others. We do not account for how true interdisciplinarity changes our perspectives on our own research processes. We need a new term to trouble the dichotomy between breadth and depth that can capture a more capacious view of what it means to practice digital research and teaching, one that goes beyond subject matter, methods, and skills.

I find this particularly urgent in the age of generative AI, a complicated set of technologies that threatens to instrumentalize education beyond recognition. What counts as methodological training if you can vibe code your way to a launched digital project? What counts as digital pedagogy if our students are secretly using chatbots as study partners? How do we make room for conversations about professional development that do not reduce people to a tidy axis of skill acquisitions?

What lies beyond the breadth and depth of what it means to be a digital humanist?

I would introduce a third term for DH professional development: “breath.” Breadth and depth ask us to think about what we can and cannot do, about the subject matter and methods of DH work. The terms ask us to think about the limits of our knowledge and our inability to pursue universal expertise. Breath asks us to reframe the conversation entirely. It is an invitation to pause and re-embed our work in the body. How do we feel about our labor? Who are the working souls in DH and how do we engage with them? How do we work or overwork our own body to the point of breathlessness? What is the lived experience of our labor that transcends the skills or methods? What are the affects—the joys, frustrations, traumas, triumphs—of DH work that cannot be captured by thinking in terms of skill acquisition? How do our energies map onto a living, breathing community of thinkers and doers beyond the work on the table in front of us? Where do we fit in?

Breadth and depth ask students to think about where they could be, professional development by way of spatial orientation. Breath invites students to consider where they are, to think of themselves as real people with real needs that need attending.