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Week 2: (Setting Up and Setting Out)

September 1, 2025

Reminder: no synchronous class this week!
Texts to have read / watched
Writing to turn in
  • survey about your work environment, etc, including a letter to Ben in response to his, if you didn't during lesson 1
  • a public intro post to the discussion forum

I (Ben) know many of you have already signed up to meet in office hours some time this week – I’ll see you there! – and some I’ve already seen. But if none of those times work, let’s work out something else by email.

What to expect in those meetings

These first meetings are aimed not only at getting to know you a little better, but ideally to do so by talking through possible digital projects for you to work on this semester. That’s why I chose the reading & viewing assignments I’d chosen after week 01: they demonstrate a (partial) range of possible project formats, all of which neverthless can be productively framed as “sources, processed and presented” (in Posner’s formulation), and all of which are (to borrow phrasing from Nick Montfort) “tractable, computational, and interesting.”

To prep for the meeting, then, I encourage you to consider these questions:

  1. What questions do you have within your larger research agenda? What sources might help you gather evidence in pursuit of responses to those questions?
  2. What sources do you have within your grasp? What larger research questions do you have that these sources might help you address?
  3. Were there any projects you saw that made you say, "Zomg I want to learn how to do that"?

And if you don’t see this in time, we’ll think through it on the spot. :¬)

From those starting points, we’ll then look for ways to keep the project at a viable scale, which will mean asking Risam and Gil’s minimal computing questions:

  1. What do we need?
  2. What do we have?
  3. What must we prioritize?
  4. What are we willing to give up?

Planning on a small-scale deliverable from the outset, and then adding stretch goals if they turn out to be easier than expected, is a good way to keep your morale up and your learning visible.

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.

I’ll also ask you to write a post to a new discussion forum in response to the readings, to give you a chance to think in writing about the readings and to seed our in-class conversation. Please remember to ground these in a short quotation from one of the texts, and to pose or respond to a question.

Software setup

By the time we meet as a full class in week 03, please…

  • install a plain-text editor if you don’t already have one (e.g. Pulsar or Visual Studio Code).
  • create a GitHub account if you don’t already have one.
    • Think about your username: it can, but need not, indicate your real name or match your other online profiles. (Pros and cons either way.)
  • install the GitHub Desktop app and any dependencies it recommends. (NB: This may take up to 20 minutes, depending on what prereqs you already have installed, so please don’t wait until the morning of class.)
    • NB: If you get an error saying it’s not an approved app from the app store, don’t worry: it’s safe! In this case, instead of double-clicking to open the installer, right-click and choose “Open” to give yourself permission to open it anyway.

Ideas to think about

Please also read:

Seeding the class conversation

When you’ve read those texts at least once, please write a post to a new discussion forum in response to the readings. Remember to ground these in a short quotation from one of the texts, and to pose or respond to a question we can pick up and think through together in class.

See you soon!

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