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The Praxis Program is a project of the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library. In its first two pilot years (2011-2013), it was generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Scholarly Communication Institute. Praxis is now fully supported by the University of Virginia Library.
Praxis is a radical re-imagining of the annual teaching and training we offer in the Scholars' Lab, and is meant to complement our work with the Scholars' Lab Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities.
The Praxis Program funds a team of University of Virginia graduate students from a variety of disciplines to apprentice with us each academic year. Praxis training takes a variety of shapes meant to reflect the full-range of DH work. As a part of their training with us, student cohorts regularly publish a range of values statements describing the intentional communities they want to build together. They also design and teach digital humanities workshops based on their own interests as a means to exercise minimalist pedagogical approaches to DH. Students design speculative projects and events that might go on to be implemented by the Lab. They also participate in a range of technical and design activities meant to reflect the range of digital practices they will encounter in their research. At times, Praxis teams have developed and launched specific, named projects.
Recognizing that up-to-date methodological training is often absent or catch-as-catch-can for humanities graduate students, we see the Praxis Program as an opportunity to experiment with an action-oriented curriculum live and in public. We invite you to follow our work in progress, and to cheer on this year's cohort of thoughtful digital scholars and scholar-practitioners, as they become comfortable designing effective user experiences; writing and working with open source code; engaging broad audiences; managing teams and budgets; and theorizing their work within the rich tradition of humanities computing. We share our evolving curriculum and our staff and students alike are blogging about their experience.
We situate our program in a larger conversation about the changing demands of the humanities in a digital age. The Praxis Program aims to equip knowledge workers for emerging faculty positions and alternative academic careers at a moment in which new questions can be asked and new systems built. To that end, and with the support of the Scholarly Communication Institute, we have also brought together information about model programs taking different approaches to the problem of methodological training in the humanities. Called the Praxis Network, this associated website offers a snapshot of the intersections among various policies, people, and practices that make this work possible.
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In our Praxis Program staff charter, one of our central commitments is to re-evaluate the work we do. We promise to not only consider how things are going, but also to take action to improve them. Over the years, this has resulted in many changes to the program—some big and some small. Our Head of Student Programs has chronicled a range of these decisions in blog posts on the Scholars' Lab website, but there has no clear chronicle of the program's evolution to its current state—until now. Many of these changes might be invisible to the outside world, so we share them now in the interests of further elaborating on the pedagogical process that has brought Praxis to where it is today.
Searching the Scholars' Lab blog for the first evidence of Praxis is actually somewhat challenging. While Bethany Nowviskie, then Director of the Lab, first announced the program on August 24, 2011, the program's first murmurs actually started earlier. On June 9, 2011, Nowviskie posted a call for graduate student jobs in Scholars' Lab R&D.
For the first several years of the program, the centerpiece of the experience was a digital project which the students would design, implement, and publicize under the shared supervision of the Scholars' Lab staff. The very first project, Prism, grew out of a vaporware activity in SpecLab, one of the precursors to what would eventually become the Scholars' Lab. Nowviskie describes the activity:
the original game involved shared, Xeroxed page images, transparent overlays, dry-erase markers, a common interpretive prompt, and a moment in which somebody yelled ‘Stop!’ and the transparencies were stacked up for discussion. (Nowviskie)
The first two years of Praxis focused on conceiving, developing, deploying, and expanding Prism. The end result was a moderately successful web application for crowdsourcing interpretation. Over time, the tool was a victim of its own success. In its day, Prism had been used to record about a million distinct interpretations. While the tool was originally conceived in the context of higher education, it saw the bulk of its use in K-12 classrooms to teach basic literacy skills. Championed by a few power users, particularly in Texas, usage of the tool quickly outstripped the infrastructure built—by students during a fixed fellowship—to sustain it. The Scholars' Lab staff eventually made the decision to shut the tool down and stand up a simple static page describing the tool, its intervention, and its legacy.
The next two years of the Praxis program again focused around a single project, once more drawn from the early SpecLab days. Ivanhoe was a game of textual intervention, wherein the participants assumed particular roles in a text, acted them out, and re-interpreted the original material with specific assumptions, aims, and critiques in mind. A witty combination of collaborative fan-fiction and academic criticism, years three and four of the Praxis cohort were tasked with re-imagining a new life for the project. The groups produced a WordPress theme that helps facilitate the collaborative interventions at the game's heart. Users adopt specific roles, make moves to describe their character's intent, and intervene in a collaboratively told story along specific interpretive dimensions.
These early approaches made strong pedagogical decisions, many of which remain at the heart of the cohort to this day:
- Graduate students can make intellectual contributions to the field even as they learn.
- Cohort and project-based activities provides a better introduction to digital humanities work than individual research projects.
- Digital Humanists require specific methodological training different than what is typically offered in departmental silos.
- Close collaboration among students, faculty, and staff can offer transformative experiences for everyone.
Eventually, the program moved away from multi-year reinterpretations of older projects. The design meant that the students' interventions were likely to go much further. After all, the long lives of the projects before the students' fellowship year meant that they were taking the baton in a race that was already underway. At the same time, however, the structure made it difficult for students to feel full ownership over the project. Even as the program is an experiment in student self-governance over their own training, a raft of decisions had been made prior to their joining the project. And it required a certain degree of buy in among the students for them to give other this decision making authority. The idea of working on a topic far afield from one's own research, a topic over which you have limited control, was an easier sell for some than others. And this dynamic had clear pedagogical implications. In many ways, this early tension between pedagogical freedom and constraint runs throughout the many changes the Praxis Program has undergone over the year. The next iteration of the program would experiment with two key components of the framework of the curriculum: time and origins.
Clockwork and UVA Reveal
Land Legacy
Development of a clear curriculum Addition of the pedagogy unit Praxis Network CodeLab and Design Lab Current portfolio-based structure
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