Brandon Walsh

Teaching Back to the University

2026-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

It is an enormously challenging time to teach. It can be easy to feel helpless, as a broad web of forces influences what teachers and learners can and cannot do together.

Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change offers a roadmap for university workers caught between the powers that shape the work that they do and the teaching that they hope to see in the world. The book argues that administrative norms, policies, and procedures push our teaching in directions instructors might not desire, acting as embedded pedagogies that structure the possibilities available for teaching and learning. Speaking from the standpoint of a digital humanities practitioner working in a university library, Embedded Pedagogies examines the intersections between teaching and administration with a view to shedding light on how they influence each other. We might use budgets as teaching objects to facilitate conversation about the political economy of the university and how we can more fully center students in our work. We might design classroom assignments that aim to help students define and empower their communities. Or we might engage students directly in the project of designing the future of the university. We all teach, and we all have something to give.

Each chapter of the book focuses on the stories that universities tell about themselves, how these narratives impact our work as teachers and administrators, and how readers can teach their way to better circumstances. Universities claim to be knowable, but this understanding is limited by design and obscures their inner workings from their teachers and learners. They offer statements of aspirational neutrality when confronted with political challenges, leaving the door open for hostile actors to undermine the very foundations of education. They frame themselves as rigorous and intellectual at the cost of the bodies and workers in their midst. And they position themselves as preparing students for the world of tomorrow while they structure those possibilities around conservative, pre-determined visions only available to a few. In contrast, Embedded Pedagogies argues for teaching that is transparent rather than opaque, committed rather than neutral, embodied and collective rather than individuated and intellectual, and that generates possibilities rather than pre-determined futures. Far from helpless, Embedded Pedagogies encourages educators to see themselves as the infrastructure of change that they want to see as they teach their way toward a brighter tomorrow.

Embedded Pedagogies is freely available through the Open Book Publishers website, where you can also purchase a variety of print and digital versions.

Writing Together on Life

2026-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

The following co-authored post refers to an ongoing writing project I am undertaking with Katina Rogers in which we mail a journal back and forth to each other over an extended period of time. In those pages, we engage in an extended dialogue about writing, reading, and life. Posts here are a space to share excerpts as well as to reflect on the process.

Brandon:

This week we had one of those check-ins that’s useful for any collaborative project, but especially so for a long-form project like the one Katina and I are embarking upon. Katina and I had a quick pulse check where we asked the other person how they’re feeling, made sure that any anxieties were addressed, and made sure that the enthusiasm for the project was still there. Happily, we agreed that we were both still interested and excited about the project. I apologized profusely as a part of that discussion for being slow to respond to the journal. We had initially set a deadline for how long we would hold the journal before sending it out again, but I had some childcare difficulties and obligations this last month that took priority. And Katina, in the same conversation, described her own anxiety: she feels as though her contributions need to be more serious or deeper in some way.

First off, I don’t think that’s true. I think everything Katina has to say about work and writing is very interesting and useful. But I think the concern also points to something that I found profound and moving about this project: it’s impossible to separate the life outside the page from what goes on inside of it. In part, the format we chose demands this: the writing is quite literally moving through physical space, handled by hands that are not our own, bodies that are not our own. But we’re also very honest about the temporality of writing, the scene of composition. One of the earliest moments in the journal that I found interesting was when Katina talked about how her hand was starting to hurt from physically writing, so she sat on the floor to get a different kind of perspective on the work. It’s not often that when we’re writing that we physically talk about the body at the laptop or at the page. The moment reminded me of the scene from the beginning of Pale Fire when the fictional editor Kinbote speaks about how he can hear a noisy amusement park outside his window interrupting his thinking as he writes. You get a real sense of the person at the desk, fictional or not. One of the great tricks that Pale Fire plays is that this person at the desk is both fictional and likely spinning a massive web of lies about his own life embedded in the notes to the text.

So much of what Katina and I have been writing about-so much of what has been bleeding into the page-is deeply personal and very real. We talk about our kids, we talk about our families, and we talk about our hobbies. These can’t help but inform the work that we do, even as we’re talking about topics entirely different. And I think Katina’s anxiety about whether or not this work feels serious enough has a lot to do with institutions of power that determine what professionalism means, with the ways in which professionalism forces us to feel like parts of our life are not relevant to the work that we do. In fact, so many of the most important contributions are inseparable from our lives. I wrote recently about how our toddler is just on the cusp of beginning to learn what literacy is. He only knows three letters, and it’s so fascinating to watch someone slowly discover the code on the page and how it can convey the stories he’s loved his whole life. He’s just starting to become an insider in a new way.

These emotions watching an emergent literacy are inseparable from the writing that Katina and I have been exchanging back and forth in these pages. This is not just a work about writing; it’s a work about two lives writing, two people writing, two bodies writing. The journal shows the way in which life gets into the text, if you will just let it. It’s left me wondering how all of our lives would feel different if we had more writing in them, but also how much the writing that we have in the world might feel differently if more people let their lives into it.

Katina:

One of the things that I have noticed as I become a more seasoned and confident writer is that I’m much more likely to let all the different elements of who I am and how I think come together on the page. As a grad student, I absolutely did not do that—it was terrifying to think about letting the scholarly mask slip, even a little bit. As a reader, I am drawn to writers who weave together different ways of knowing: writers who talk about the way caregiving influences their thinking, or how much they love birds, or whatever the thing is that is on their mind but not necessarily on topic. I think part of why I love it so much is connected to what Brandon and I wrote about recently on surprise. It is profoundly human to have these messy lives, these untidy patterns of thought that mash together to-do lists and anxieties with theory and analysis. Letting all that onto the page is, to me, a sign of a confident writer. Writers who find ways to craft all of that complexity so that the chaos is there but legible and even beautiful is, at its best, astonishing.

Stepping outside of academic institutions made it so much more possible for me to explore some of that unruly writing. It feels scary, risky. I feel much more vulnerable sharing things about my life, my tastes, my emotions than I do with a scholarly argument, where I have some distance between my identity and what’s on the page. I wonder—maybe pushing into that terrain is also part of a more complex citation practice? I’m always interested in seeing ways that people make citations more than a mere formality (the way Katherine McKittrick is able to not only reference Sylvia Wynter’s work, but show through her citations the extent to which Wynter has influenced her thinking—I love it so much). But how do I find ways to acknowledge the things in my own life that influence my thinking? How can I possibly show how much my thinking is shaped by my kids, by where I live, by the things I love and the things I hate?

In the other collaborative writing project I’m working on right now about narrative justice and the complexities of storywork, Ashley Cheyemi McNeil and I have been been sitting with the idea of an epistemology of care, as Vrinda Dalmiya theorizes in her book Caring to Know. I’m so drawn to this concept—that care and relationship are not (just) an ethic, not (just) a practice, but also a way of knowing. That orientation completely changes the significance of letting life into our writing. Parenting changes my thinking because care is a way of knowing. Same with community work, with friendships, with the way I move through my neighborhood.

I think that’s part of what feels quite profound about this project—we are undertaking a writing project that has these elements of care at its core, which changes how we know. Add to that the layers of embodiment and physicality that Brandon mentioned—writing by hand, our kids adding stickers, the package being carried and sorted by postal workers from New York to Virginia—and no wonder we find ourselves grappling with questions of meaning that extend far beyond the stakes of the writing itself.

Writing Together on Surprise

2026-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

The following co-authored post refers to an ongoing writing project I am undertaking with Katina Rogers in which we mail a journal back and forth to each other over an extended period of time. In those pages, we engage in an extended dialogue about writing, reading, and life. Posts here are a space to share excerpts as well as to reflect on the process.

Katina:

July 28, 2026

Writing brings up a lot of feelings. As Brandon and I have jumped into the writing experiment we wrote about earlier this summer, one thing that has been incredibly clear is that there is a strong affective component to working in this way. As the journal goes back and forth, we feel anxiety, anticipation, connection. In my first entry, I wrote: “I wouldn’t say this is a comfortable project for me, but that’s part of what feels exciting. I wonder whether and how my ideas will take shape across these pages. I wonder how your thinking will affect mine, and vice versa. I wonder how our lives will intervene as we go, what that will look like and how we’ll make space in our writing for it.” Anxiety and uncertainty were top of mind as we started, as I wrote without quite knowing how Brandon would receive my words or how our collaboration would unfold.

Those dominant feelings shifted as soon as I opened the journal after it made its return journey, because now there was a truck sticker emblazoned on the front of the plain black notebook. I laughed out loud with surprise and delight, suspecting that Brandon’s kiddo had probably had something to do with it. Without using any language at all, the sticker signaled to me a kind of agreement not to take ourselves too seriously. It worked best because it was entirely unexpected. It surprised me.

Surprise is striking both of us as an incredibly important part of truly-human writing. Since AI generates a plausible text through prediction at scale, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which it creates a text that is truly surprising in a catch-your-breath kind of way.

I reflected on this in later entries:

Knowing we each have a dedicated reader heightens all these associations for me. The feeling of picking up a book and not yet knowing how the pages will transport you is lovely. Seeing the package in my apartment hallway, the anticipation and uncertainty is similar but sharper, because unlike the bookstore book we have created an accountability to each other. Seeing that package means I receive a gift, and also that I will be responsible for an action. Maybe that interdependence and shared responsibility is part of where the anxiety comes from. We don’t want to let each other down.

At the same time it creates a heightened possibility for delight. I opened the package late at night after a long day and broke into a smile when I saw the sticker. AI writing can’t do that. Anticipation and delight require something unknown and unpredictable, whereas an LLM does its thing by finding the flattest possible framing, the most benign and bland simulacrum of accuracy. But it’s the rough and unexpected edges that bring texture and personality — our messy but unique handwriting, the implied influence of others in the stickers, the bits of ourselves that a machine would certainly polish away in favor of a uniform surface.

Academic writing tends to train the impulse for surprise out of us, too. But if that’s one of the things that makes our writing most human, how can we relearn and reclaim it? So much of what Brandon and I are trying to do right now is an experiment in creating the conditions for something to happen—something that may surprise and delight us as writers. If we are lucky (and skillful), it may one day surprise and delight readers as well.

Brandon:

August 4, 2026

Perhaps the most striking element of this new project that Katina and I are working on is how surprising it has been! I think that’s been true about every step of the process, including the fact of it happening in the first place. The fact that Katina happened to message about a writing project she was just launching on. The fact that she was willing to collaborate. The fact that we were both willing to take this weird multimodal approach. All surprising, and that’s to say nothing of the fact that we’re relying so heavily on the United States Postal Service. Every single time that I drop this journal in the mail, I wonder if this will be the last time I see it. It’s a miracle every time this writing appears in my mailbox.

This sense of wonder is also reflected in how I experience the object itself. Katina talked about how joyful it was to find a sticker in the book. My own version of this small joy came in the form of the plant life she included: leaves and petals pressed between the pages. Katina even gave me a small sprout bookmark that I will treasure forever. I could never have expected these gifts, nor have I ever experienced anything like them in other collaborative work.

All of this has me thinking about what surprise feels like and means in different kinds of writing and reading contexts. I tend to write as a way to learn what I am thinking, as a way to process my thoughts on the page, so there’s a sense in which every piece of writing is a kind of surprise for me. Similarly, my background is in working on experimental prose and poetry of the last century, so I’m quite familiar with the surprise you can feel when you turn the page and find something new and shocking. Katina has me thinking about what it is that creates those moments of surprise, and what kinds of writing are devoid of them.

When messaging each other about these small moments of joy, one of us jokingly said, “AI could never.” I want to think about this further beyond the scope of this particular post. I think the joke reflects an assumption that a composite piece of writing sourced from GenAI is likely to try and reduce those surprises, to smooth them out in the hopes of generating something that can plausibly pass as a final product that was requested. But LLMs are built on large statistical models that carefully weigh the probabilities of words and phrases occurring in sequence; chance is fundamental to their work. The temperature of the model, its degree of randomness, is also a parameter you can use to adjust the level of “surprise” in the output. And that’s to say nothing about the creative prompting one might give to specifically ask for these unexpected left turns. I want to think more about this as we build this series into a larger project, not least because I feel as though I need to understand these aspects of GenAI better to approach them thoughtfully.

It’s interesting to me that surprise and the joy that comes with it are so key to what we feel as human-to-human interactions. I wonder how much of these joyful surprises we get from reading and writing come from the mind of the writer or the interpretation of the reader. Perhaps all reading and writing is a play between structure and surprise. How could you actually practice surprise and make it part of your craft, such that it’s a tool at your disposal and not a happy accident?

Effortless Digital Humanities

2026-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

When I first read Kenny Werner’s book Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within, I was in college studying jazz improvisation and musical performance. At the time, the book was powerful and transformative for its approach to thinking through performance anxiety and imposter syndrome— things I still struggle with in relation to musical performance. Recent conversations about GenAI and digital humanities left me wanting to revisit Werner’s approach to thinking through craft and difficulty.

The central conceit for Effortless Mastery is this: the degree to which we care about an activity can get in the way of our ability to do it. When we care deeply about doing something well, about performing at a high level, this sincere anxiety and the tension that follows interfere with our ability to prepare for the excellence we want to achieve. Approaching our craft with this heightened sense of the stakes reinforces a fraught relationship to our craft that comes out in practice, play, and performance. Effortless Mastery is about choosing a different path, centering mindfulness in our craft in a way that can be practiced. In the prototypical Effortless Mastery exercise, one sits at the piano and only practices a single note for 5-10 minutes a day. The goal is to approach this isolated note with such intention and care that it becomes effortless. Let your finger, in a childlike way, press down on a key with as little tension as possible. Only add new notes when the first one has become the most perfect and effortless thing that it could possibly be. According to Werner, performers will likely find this approach to practice excruciating. We feel like we have too much material to learn. Too much to do—not enough time. But Werner argues that, if approached diligently, his form of practice will actually pay dividends and elevate all parts of our performance. Our relationship to our instrument and to music will improve, and we will find it easier to enter a heightened state of flow and bliss as we perform. There are also affirmations that focus on changing the way you relate to the instrument.

I’m interested in how we can apply the same kind of approach to the work that we do in the academy. In some ways, the concept of effortless practice cuts against the way I tend to teach and write about DH. I’ve argued in the past that frustration is a feature for DH students. Learning is hard in a way that we can’t avoid, and we have to teach students how to live with these challenging emotions. But lately I’ve been thinking about how perception of difficulty can get in the way of our pedagogies, particularly as we all try to reckon with the impact of GenAI on our teaching. When a humanist sits down to learn something new, it can be easy to reach for GenAI as soon as they start to feel frustrated. Is it useful for them to sidestep challenging emotions? Would we rather they sit with the difficulty longer? How do we help students shift their own understanding of what is difficult and what is not? Finally, to talk back to myself, how might it change the possibilities students see for themselves if we framed DH instead as a space of effortlessness rather than one of frustration and difficulty?

The domains are different—how many of us would describe our DH work as a space of artistic bliss? But I still think there can be utility in thinking through the shape of an effortless digital humanities. What is the DH equivalent of putting your finger to a single note? What are the building blocks for all other digital humanities work? And how might we practice these techniques daily in 10 minutes to promote an effortless approach to doing so? To begin answering these questions for myself, I sat down at my laptop and mapped out how this sequence might work in my classroom. In what follows, I map out a way you might extrapolate this kind of approach over the course of a sixteen-week semester, slowly building up a daily practice in the spirit of developing an effortless digital humanities. Try it with your students and let me know how it goes.

Terminal

One of the first things I do when sitting down for DH work is open my terminal, so this is where my daily practice begins. The terminal is an essential tool for so many other DH activities, but it adds a layer of abstraction to learning that can take a while for students to overcome. Here are some ideas for playing one note on the terminal each day. Under each week I describe a sequence of activities meant to be performed daily, early each morning, in about 10 minutes. Each new week adds one or two new elements to the repeated sequence. Only advance to a new week when you feel you can perform the previous week with complete effortlessness. Feel free to repeat weeks. Better to go slow. And be sure to include (or adapt!) the light affirmations that I include. Our primary statement will be one directly from Werner’s text: “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.” A few caveats: in what follows, unless otherwise specified, code blocks represent lines that should be entered into the terminal. Throughout this post I am sharing MacOS terminal commands. Programming Historian has some useful lessons for those looking to adapt these for Windows. And, finally, things will, by design, become very repetitive. It is quite possible I will leave out a step while copying things over. Let me know if you find such a thing and I will edit accordingly.

Week 1:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 2:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say “I am currently in my user folder. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 3:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say, “I am currently in my user folder.”
- Change to your Desktop with cd Desktop. Confirm you are in your desktop with pwd. Say, “I have changed to my Desktop. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 4:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say, “I am currently in my user folder.”
- Change to your Desktop with cd Desktop. Confirm you are in your desktop with pwd. Say, “I have changed to my Desktop.”
- List out the contents of your desktop with ls. Say, “I am looking at the contents of my desktop. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 5:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say, “I am currently in my user folder.”
- Change to your Desktop with cd Desktop. Confirm you are in your desktop with pwd. Say, “I have changed to my Desktop.”
- List out the contents of your desktop with ls. Say, “I am looking at the contents of my desktop.”
- Make a new folder with mkdir test_folder. Say, “I have made a new folder.”
- Clean up your workspace by deleting the folder with rm -rf test_folder. Say, “I have deleted the new folder. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 6:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say, “I am currently in my user folder.”
- Change to your Desktop with cd Desktop. Confirm you are in your desktop with pwd. Say, “I have changed to my Desktop.”
- List out the contents of your desktop with ls. Say, “I am looking at the contents of my desktop.”
- Make a new folder with mkdir test_folder. Say, “I have made a new folder.”
- Change into the new folder with cd test_folder. Say, “I have changed into my new folder called test_folder.”
- Return to your desktop with cd ... Say, “I have returned to my desktop.”
- Clean up your workspace by deleting the folder with rm -rf test_folder. Say, “I have deleted the new folder. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”

For many experienced DH practitioners, these steps would take maybe 10 seconds. But if you’re new to the terminal entirely each of these things could take quite a bit longer and cause a great deal of anxiety. Encourage students to move slowly, repeating each week’s steps regularly moving on to the next step. After several weeks, hopefully, they will feel a greater sense of comfort with the idea of what the terminal is, where to find it, and how to use it. Working incrementally in this way can take something from challenging to rote practice.

Git

Version control systems seem especially good for this kind of regular work. Git and GitHub are tools that students often find very difficult to conceptualize and master, but 90% of what you need to do can be handled by the same set of steps. Perhaps by making Git practice an everyday routine we can make more room for understanding the concepts. The next several weeks will build on the previous terminal sequence.

Week 7:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say, “I am currently in my user folder.”
- Change to your Desktop with cd Desktop. Confirm you are in your desktop with pwd. Say, “I have changed to my Desktop.”
- List out the contents of your desktop with ls. Say, “I am looking at the contents of my desktop.”
- Make a new folder with mkdir test_folder. Say, “I have made a new folder.”
- Change into the new folder with cd test_folder. Say, “I have changed into my new folder called test_folder.”
- Make this folder a git repository with git init. Say, “I have made this folder into a git repository.”
- Return to your desktop with cd ... Say, “I have returned to my desktop.”
- Clean up your workspace by deleting the folder with rm -rf test_folder. Say, “I have deleted the new folder. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 8:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say, “I am currently in my user folder.”
- Change to your Desktop with cd Desktop. Confirm you are in your desktop with pwd. Say, “I have changed to my Desktop.”
- List out the contents of your desktop with ls. Say, “I am looking at the contents of my desktop.”
- Make a new folder with mkdir test_folder. Say, “I have made a new folder.”
- Change into the new folder with cd test_folder. Say, “I have changed into my new folder called test_folder.”
- Make this folder a git repository with git init. Say, “I have made this folder into a git repository.”
- Make a few file in your folder with touch index.html. Say, “I have made a new html file.”
- Confirm you have a new file to add in git with git status. Say, “I have shown that git acknowledges the new file.”
- Return to your desktop with cd ... Say, “I have returned to my desktop.”
- Clean up your workspace by deleting the folder with rm -rf test_folder. Say, “I have deleted the new folder. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 9:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say, “I am currently in my user folder.”
- Change to your Desktop with cd Desktop. Confirm you are in your desktop with pwd. Say, “I have changed to my Desktop.”
- List out the contents of your desktop with ls. Say, “I am looking at the contents of my desktop.”
- Make a new folder with mkdir test_folder. Say, “I have made a new folder.”
- Change into the new folder with cd test_folder. Say, “I have changed into my new folder called test_folder.”
- Make this folder a git repository with git init. Say, “I have made this folder into a git repository.”
- Make a few file in your folder with touch index.html. Say, “I have made a new html file.”
- Confirm you have a new file to add in git with git status. Say, “I have shown that git acknowledges the new file.”
- Add your new file to your git staging area with git add index.html. Say, “I have added my file to staging.”
- Confirm you added the file successfully with git status. Say, “Git status shows that I did this successfully.”
- Return to your desktop with cd ... Say, “I have returned to my desktop.”
- Clean up your workspace by deleting the folder with rm -rf test_folder. Say, “I have deleted the new folder. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 10:
- Open the terminal. Say, “I have opened my terminal.”
- Print out your current directory with pwd. Say, “I am currently in my user folder.”
- Change to your Desktop with cd Desktop. Confirm you are in your desktop with pwd. Say, “I have changed to my Desktop.”
- List out the contents of your desktop with ls. Say, “I am looking at the contents of my desktop.”
- Make a new folder with mkdir test_folder. Say, “I have made a new folder.”
- Change into the new folder with cd test_folder. Say, “I have changed into my new folder called test_folder.”
- Make this folder a git repository with git init. Say, “I have made this folder into a git repository.”
- Make a few file in your folder with touch index.html. Say, “I have made a new html file.”
- Confirm you have a new file to add in git with git status. Say, “I have shown that git acknowledges the new file.”
- Add your new file to your git staging area with git add index.html. Say, “I have added my file to staging.”
- Confirm you added the file successfully with git status. Say, “Git status shows that I did this successfully.”
- Commit your new file with git commit -m 'My first commit. Say, “I am committing my new file to git.”
- Confirm you added the file successfully with git status. Say, “Git status shows that I did this successfully.”
- Return to your desktop with cd ... Say, “I have returned to my desktop.”
- Clean up your workspace by deleting the folder with rm -rf test_folder. Say, “I have deleted the new folder. It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”

At this point, I might have students continue to repeat these steps for several weeks. Again, an experienced practitioner could do this in no time at all. Newcomers will find this to be quite a lot. At some point, after enough days have gone by, things might start to get annoying. Good! You’re experiencing effortlessness. Only add new steps when you feel like what you have done so far is effortless. Remember: it is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.

Building a basic website

At this point, my bulleted list is getting overly complicated, so I’ll simplify things going forward by using shorthand and sandwiching the new steps inside of a “set up” and “clean up” phase. Refer above for the associated commands. It is probably clear where I am going at this stage: I think designing a basic website and understanding how to view it on your computer is another foundational DH skill. And we can make this sequence a very light daily activity.

Week 11:
- Set up:
  - Open your terminal, change to your desktop, and make a new folder called “test_folder.” Change into it. Initialize a new git repository. Make a new file called index.html. Add and commit this change. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
- New:
  - Add a new line inside your index.html file that says, “This is a basic webpage.” Describe what you have done.
  - Open that file in the web browser of your choice. Say, “I am viewing my html file in a web browser.”
- Clean up:
  - Change back to your Desktop and delete the folder. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 11:
- Set up:
  - Open your terminal, change to your desktop, and make a new folder called “test_folder.” Change into it. Initialize a new git repository. Make a new file called index.html. Add and commit this change. Add a new line inside your index.html page and open it in a browser. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
- New:
  - Stage your change with git add . Describe what you have done.
  - Commit your change with git commit -m 'Made a change'. Describe what you have done.
- Clean up:
  - Change back to your Desktop and delete the folder. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 12:
- Set up:
  - Open your terminal, change to your desktop, and make a new folder called “test_folder.” Change into it. Initialize a new git repository. Make a new file called index.html. Add and commit this change. Add a new line inside your index.html page and open it in a browser. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
- New:
  - Include the basic skeleton of an HTML page by pasting the contents of this page in index.html.
- Clean up:
  - Add and commit all changes.
  - Change back to your Desktop and delete the folder. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 13:
- Set up:
  - Open your terminal, change to your desktop, and make a new folder called “test_folder.” Change into it. Initialize a new git repository. Make a new file called index.html. Add and commit this change. Add a new line inside your index.html page and open it in a browser. Paste the basic skeleton of an HTML page into your index.html. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
- New:
  - It’s a review week. Each day, write down comments, in your index.html file, explaining what one of the lines in the HTML file does.
- Clean up:
  - Add and commit all changes.
  - Change back to your Desktop and delete the folder. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 14:
- Set up:
  - Open your terminal, change to your desktop, and make a new folder called “test_folder.” Change into it. Initialize a new git repository. Make a new file called index.html. Add and commit this change. Add a new line inside your index.html page and open it in a browser. Paste the basic skeleton of an HTML page into your index.html. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
- New:
  - Each day, write down comments, in your index.html file, explaining what one of the lines in the HTML file does.
- Clean up:
  - Add and commit all changes.
  - Change back to your Desktop and delete the folder. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 15:
- Set up:
  - Open your terminal, change to your desktop, and make a new folder called “test_folder.” Change into it. Initialize a new git repository. Make a new file called index.html. Add and commit this change. Add a new line inside your index.html page and open it in a browser. Paste the basic skeleton of an HTML page into your index.html. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
- New:
  - Make a CSS file with “touch style.css”. Describe what you have done.
  - Link it to your index.html file by adding the following line within your <head> tag: <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
- Clean up:
  - Add and commit all changes.
  - Change back to your Desktop and delete the folder. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
Week 16:
- Set up:
  - Open your terminal, change to your desktop, and make a new folder called “test_folder.” Change into it. Initialize a new git repository. Make a new file called index.html. Add and commit this change. Add a new line inside your index.html page and open it in a browser. Paste the basic skeleton of an HTML page into your index.html. Make a new CSS file and link it to your index file. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”
- New:
  - Change the background color of your <body> tag to be:
    body{ background-color: red; }
  - Save your file. Refresh your browser to see the new page. Describe what you have done.
- Clean up:
  - Add and commit all changes.
  - Change back to your Desktop and delete the folder. Describe what you have done. Say, “It is not hard, it is just unfamiliar.”

Again, step away from things if at any point the exercise starts to feel like they are causing effort or friction. Reduce what you’re asking yourself to do for the next session. I think you will find if you proceed like this for a week or two you will very quickly develop proficiency with a range of DH building blocks. A webpage with red background (my go-to example for teaching CSS because it is very obvious something has happened) might not feel very exciting to an advanced practitioner, but I would be immensely pleased with a student able to go from nothing to this level over the course of a semester.

These kinds of exercises might feel trite and meaningless, but you can’t put a price on confidence. Effortless fluency and literacy with the basics provide a strong foundation for more advanced study. Spend 5 to 10 minutes on them every day. As Werner would say, “What do you have to lose?” We can all find 5 or 10 minutes, and that unit of time is a small sacrifice that ultimately will not take that much away from other work. Wouldn’t it be great for students to approach their work with a sense of confidence that they can inhabit a DH space that works for them? Exercises like these can help our students make DH a daily part of their lives. Daily work building a personal, effortless digital humanities will prepare our students to face the bigger and more advanced problems they will inevitably face. They will do so with confidence that they can find the answers within themselves and their own process. The next time they reach for a GenAI prompt when faced with a problem, they just might pause and look inwards first.

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.