Skip to main content

Lesson 1: Digital + Studies

August 25, 2025

Texts to have read
  • The course description
  • Ben's email from last week
Writing to turn in:
  • (at end of class) survey about your work environment, etc, including a letter to Ben in response to his

Plan for the day:

  • First half: What are we getting into here? (90 min)
    • Entering the room (preliminary announcements + setup) (~5 min)
    • Writing to seed discussion (~10 min)
    • Discussion: What are we studying in “digital studies”? (~60 min)
    • Writing to remember (~15 min)
  • Break (10 min)
  • Second half: Getting to know each other (70 min)
    • Letter from Ben (~15 min)
    • Letter to Ben (~20 min)
    • The briefest intro to GitHub (~10 min)
  • Homework for next time (~15 min)

Entering the room

As you’re settling in:

  • I invite you to make yourself a little name-plate on a tri-folded piece of paper – or adjust the way your name displays in Zoom. For example, I want you to know that you can call me Ben, and that I use he/him pronouns. How would you like us to address you?

  • For a little more getting to know you, please fill out this first day survey via Google Forms. If you can’t get to it now, then at your earliest convenience. And if you have a device but not this page, you can get here by loading benmiller314.github.io/dsam2025fall, clicking Schedule, and scrolling down to click on Week 01. (Or use the “current lesson” shortcut link at the top.)

  • Last pre-class note: I want this class to welcome everyone. While I have not received word from Disability Resources and Services (DRS) about challenges to hearing or vision, that doesn’t mean the challenges don’t exist. If you would prefer that I speak up, slow down, or zoom in, or if there’s any other class feature that’s impeding your success, please do let me know!

We begin with writing

With those preliminaries out of the way, let’s begin with some writing! I won’t collect what you’re about to write, but I will ask you to share something from it, out loud, a little later today. Take about 5-6 minutes on these two tasks together:

  1. List your associations with the word digital. When you hear it, what (else) do you think of? What does that make you wonder?
  2. Think about an area of research, teaching, or practice you know well (or have been recently engaged with) in which the word studies is used in a compound phrase. For me, for example, that might mean "Composition Studies" or "Writing Studies" as opposed to "Composition" or "Writing." Within your chosen area, what do you see changing when you add or take away the "studies" part?

EXT: What makes something digital different from something non-digital? What can digital things do (or not do), or what can we do with them?

Discussion: What are we studying in “digital studies”?

Part 1: Studies

Let’s talk! Please tell us (1) your name, (2) your preferred pronouns if you’d like, and then (3) your brief answer to the second of the seed prompts above: What’s an area or field you’re familiar with that uses “studies” in its name, and what does it mean to add that term or take it away?

Oh, also! Should we want to take notes, we have a shared google doc just for that purpose, which you can access and edit at bit.ly/dsam2025fall-notes.

Part 2: Digital

Janet H. Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck and Inventing the Medium, posits that there are four main “affordances,” or salient enactable properties, of digital media. As she summarizes her argument,

Everything made of electronic bits is potentially:

  • procedural (composed of executable rules)
  • participatory (inviting human action and manipulation of the represented world)
  • encyclopedic (containing very high capacity of information in multiple media formats)
  • spatial (navigable as an information repository and/or a virtual place)

(To read more, see Murray, Janet H. “Affordances of the Digital Medium.” Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice, The MIT Press, 2011, pp. 51–85. Pitt libraries has a digital copy.)

Take a look back at your notes from the start of class.

  • What do these affordances help you see about the digital examples you'd chosen?
  • What do your examples help you understand about how Murray defines these affordances?
  • How well do Murray's descriptions line up with your own expectations of what's entailed by being "digital"?

Again, let’s try to use the shared notes doc if possible.

EXT: another framework

Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media, proposes five "principles of new media," or essential features that shape how digital media behave:

  • numerical representation: new media objects can be described or manipulated mathematically
  • modularity: new media objects are composed of independent elements that can separated or acted on independently
  • automation: actions on new media objects can be performed by other new media objects, seemingly without direct human action, allowing humans to "collaborate with the machine"
  • variability: new media objects have no fixed form, but maintain their identity through changing representations
  • transcoding: we understand culture through the lens of computers, and computers through the lens of culture
Where do these new terms map neatly onto Murray's, and where do they highlight something else? What affordances follow from these principles/features? What questions do they raise?

NB: My preferred way to read more about this hasn't actually been Manovich's book, but rather a webtext by Madeline Sorapure, “Five Priniciples of New Media: Or, Playing Lev Manovich.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol. 8, no. 2, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/8.2/coverweb/sorapure/. Unfortunately, that article was built using the now-deprecated Adobe Flash, so it no longer displays the interactive features that illustrated each of the principles. (You can still read a PDF description of what used to be there.) On the plus side, Sorapure's examples were actually created by her students, so if anyone is looking for an independent project, you could do worse than creating a new set of illustrative examples for Manovich's principles (or Murray's, for that matter)!

Writing to remember

Spend some time putting marks on a page to help you think through, and consolidate for yourself, what we discussed today. What do you want to remember? What are you left wondering?

After a few minutes, I’ll ask everyone to share one thing, to which the only response will be “thank you.”

EXT: why I sometimes call this "grok-writing"

I sometimes call this practice "grok-writing," but you're not likely to hear anyone else call it that – unless they've taken my classes, I guess. The phrase "to grok" comes from Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel >Stranger in a Strange Land (first printing, Putnam 1961). Leaving aside, for now, the uncomfortable gender-relations of the novel, Heinlein spends a lot of the book harping on how hard it is to translate the word "grok" from Martian to English. It's often rendered as "drink" or especially "drink in." But in general (albeit nerdy) use — and certainly as I will use it from time to time in this course — to grok [something] means "to understand [something] fully," in the sense that (a) you no longer need to think consciously about how [something] works, and (b) you could make modifications if the need arose. It's drinking in the sense of absorbing, making it part of you.

More detail and some fun quotes

Here's an example of the original usage:

The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed. This new work of art was one of many attempts to grok the whole beautiful experience in all its complexity in one opus. But before it could be judged it was necessary to grok how to judge it. (Heinlein 93)

Wikipedia's current page on "Grok" features the following definition, which matches my experience of the term's usage:

The Jargon File, which describes itself as a "Hacker's Dictionary" and has been published under that name three times, puts grok in a programming context:

When you claim to "grok" some knowledge or technique, you are asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental way but that it has become part of you, part of your identity. For example, to say that you "know" Lisp is simply to assert that you can code in it if necessary — but to say you "grok" LISP is to claim that you have deeply entered the world-view and spirit of the language, with the implication that it has transformed your view of programming. Contrast zen, which is a similar supernatural understanding experienced as a single brief flash.

Grok-writing, as I will use the term, means using writing to internalize a discussion: to drink it in and set it down and make what had been only air and vibrations – ephemeral sound – into something you can return to, perhaps repeatedly. One implication: please save your grok-writing somewhere you'll be able to find it again!

Procedurally, this also draws on the Canadian tradition of "inkshedding," whereby we all write privately in a public space, but knowing that we will be expected to share >something from what we just wrote. I won't collect it, and we won't discuss it. Instead, we'll go around and each read some excerpt (how long is up to each of us) and then say, simply, "Thank you."

Today's grok-writing and -sharing starts off already a bit disrupted by this explanation, but as the weeks go on I hope we'll be able to transition more smoothly from the writing to the talking to the sharing... and then into the break, where the ideas we share can linger and buzz and mix.

Sharing

Don’t forget to say “Thank you!”

Break (10 min)

Assuming we left off at 10:30, let’s aim to start up again at 10:40 or so. That should beat the elevator rush for 11am classes.

A letter from Ben

You can download it from the website in MS Word or HTML format if you’d like to follow along.

A letter back to Ben

I’d love to know what you’re thinking, after hearing what I’ve been thinking! To help you all answer at once, without talking over each other, I’d like to find out in writing.

Please do this on the last page of that same survey from the start of class, which you should still have open – or, if you missed your chance to answer the survey questions at 9:00, go ahead and do it now. If you’ve misread the instructions and already turned it in, email’s a good fallback option: I’m at millerb@pitt.edu.

Not sure what to say? Perhaps consider:

  • What were your expectations for the course coming in? What were your goals? If they’ve changed at all after the first half of class, how?
  • What, if anything, surprised you in my letter? Why? If you have any questions or concerns, please ask them!
  • If anything in my letter particularly excites you, or helps you, please let me know that, too!
  • What assets or experiences do you bring to the class that might help you or your classmates? What challenges do you think you’ll face?

Don’t feel that you have to answer every single one of these questions, and especially don’t feel you have to answer them in order. Similarly, don’t feel your letter must be limited to only those questions covered in the bullet points.

  • EXT: If you finish early, think about making the letter multimodal. e.g. What images or sounds would you want to add? How might you arrange the images and text?
  • EXT: If you finish that, too, consider audience: how might you want to change this letter for posting an introduction to yourself on the course’s (public) website, vs. just sending to me?
  • EXT: Finally, if you’ve considered those and still feel pretty satisfied, feel free to read ahead, and possibly to post what you just imagined! You will need a (free) login to GitHub.com, for which I recommend using a .edu email address: it grants you a free update to a pro account.

The briefest intro to GitHub

We’ll talk about GitHub a lot more when we get back in two weeks. For now, here are some essentials:

  • It’s a site where a lot of people share code.
  • And not just code files: the entire revision history of all the files.
  • But not just code: any file can be shared and its revision history tracked.
  • This makes it pretty awesome for project management.
  • I think as digital studies scholars, you should at least be familiar with GitHub, even if you never use it again after this course.
  • To start, I’m going to use one (I hope familiar) feature of the site: a built-in discussion forum.
    • You’ll need a (free) account. If you don’t have one, I recommend you register using a .edu email address: it grants you a free update to a pro account.

If time allows, please log in and post a quick intro at the link above! I’ll try to demonstrate some of the affordances.

Homework!

This is probably the most time I’ll need to explain homework, both because it’s our first time and because we have two weeks to cover.

Next Monday is a holiday, so there's no synchronous class next week.

In lieu of a whole-class meeting, I'm asking everyone to schedule a one-on-one meeting with me for some time in the next two weeks (ideally by next Friday, September 5): I want to help you brainstorm some ideas for your semester-long independent project.

Thank you for bearing with me!

For next week

The first set of assigned readings below is in prep for that office hour visit; they’re about the scope and range of digital projects, so it makes sense to schedule your meeting for after you’ve looked through these texts. See the office hours page for how to claim a slot or request an alternative if the usual slots won’t work for you. That page also has directions to my office.

  1. Getting to know each other
    • If you missed the opportunity earlier, please do fill out and submit the first-day survey to help me get to know you.
    • Please also post a quick intro on the discussion forum from a moment ago; doing it early should surface any login problems before you have to post the reading discussion later on.
      • NB: You’ll need to create a GitHub account if you don’t already have one. Think about your username: it can match your real name or your other online profiles – but it doesn’t need to. (Pros and cons either way.)
    • Did you know that Canvas lets you record your name as you’d like it to be pronounced, and listen to the name pronunciations of your classmates? Look for the NameCoach Roster, which will work for for our class and others!
    • All the course policies and project descriptions are on this website, but if you’d like a more traditional single-stop document, here’s the same content formatted as a syllabus.
  2. Sign up for a one-on-one meeting with Ben.
    • NB: These hours are extended for the first few weeks to accommodate these meetings. Most of the time, I’ll only be in the office Monday and Thursday 12:30-2:00.
  3. Before that meeting, watch / read the following:
  4. Attend your scheduled office-hour meeting.
  5. Begin your Mindful Practice Journal by taking notes in prep for, and in the aftermath of, that meeting.

For week 3

When we get back together on September 8th, we’ll be talking about GitHub, filetypes, and version control, and we’ll have two new readings – and we’ll be joined by one of the authors, Dr. Alison Langmead. There are also downloads that you should make sure to start early: that way, if you run into trouble, I can help you troubleshoot during office hours.

There will also be another discussion forum post besides the introductory one, to give you a chance to think in writing about the readings and to seed our in-class conversation. I’ll remind you to look for the link next week.

Click to see download instructions.
  • install a plain-text editor if you don't already have one (e.g. Pulsar or Visual Studio Code). If you're new to this sort of thing, I find Pulsar's interface is a little more straightforward.
  • install the GitHub Desktop app and any dependencies it recommends. (NB: This may take up to 20 minutes, so please don't wait until the morning of class!)
    • NB: If you get an error saying it's not an approved app, don't worry: it's safe. Instead of double-clicking to open the installer, right-click and choose "Open" to give yourself permission to open it anyway.
  • Be aware that both of these applications will work on Mac, Windows, or Linux – but will probably NOT work on Android or iOS. In other words: you'll want a laptop, rather than a tablet, for this class. If you don't have a laptop (or you'd rather not bring it to campus), you can borrow one at the Hillman Library service desk for up to 8 hours. </ul> </details>
    Click to see readings.
Back to the calendar