Projects

In addition to shared in-class assignments and weekly reading responses, everyone in the class will be expected to work on an independent project for several hours a week outside of class, and to iteratively update a public-facing archive of your progress as you go. You will present your project to the class several times over the semester for generous, formative review by your professor (me) and each other (writing two letters each).

These projects can vary as much as your interests do, and should incorporate tools and theories appropriate to the questions each person is asking. I’ll expect everyone to meet with me before the end of week 3 (in 2025, that would be by Friday, September 12th) – and ideally before the end of week 2 (September 5th) – so I can help point you in productive directions.

We’ll generally reserve some time in class to collectively troubleshoot your independent projects-in-progress, which will surely help everyone to learn both about a wider range of tools and about the process of finding paths forward! But you can also always ask me for follow-up advice during office hours.

Readings and Responses

In most weeks, I will assign several texts or videos to review as preparation for the subsequent class. I’ve tried to keep these relatively light, so you can continue working on your own research, analysis, and/or programming – they peak at just over 100 pages, and average closer to 75. That said, I will also suggest some optional extended readings for those of you who want to dig in deeper. (Some of these are already in the schedule, marked with EXT.)

To help you process what you’re reading, and to seed our in-class conversation, each week I’ll ask you to post a reader response on a shared discussion forum. To keep these grounded, I’m asking that everyone (a) include at least one quoted passage from the text, and (b) either ask a question or respond to a question from another post. Beyond that, they can include your connections, excitements, confusions, or incitements. If you aim to write at least 100 of your own words, that should give us a place to begin.

Direct responses to other students’ posts are optional but encouraged; to make that more possible, please try to post by Friday evening when you can.

Mindful Practice Journal

h/t to Alison Langmead for some of this language

There is a myth that “computers make things faster,” but this is as misleading as the idea that “practice makes perfect.” In both cases, repeating certain tasks can indeed make them more automatic, but defining those tasks and refining how they’re carried out requires a great deal of time, effort, and mindfulness. In the context of interpretive disciplines, mindful work with digital computing can, in fact, take much longer than working in modes you’re already used to.

You should plan to spend at least two to six hours on your project each and every week. Some of that time will be spent reading documentation, debugging or reformatting, or searching for answers to questions about provenance of your objects of study; some will be spent in direct analysis or composing; some will be spent in preparing presentations, translating notes-to-self into a format more amenable to a wider audience. It is common, faced with this kind of “grey” work, for students to become frustrated with their research because it is hard to see how far they have progressed week by week; what’s more, the heart of this transformative learning is often not visible in sharable products, but is rather a transformation in mental state.

To keep you present in this work, and in fact to help you see all the learning you’re engaged in, I ask that you keep a daily journal of what hours you worked on your project and what you did in those hours. I will not ask you to share the journal itself with anyone, but as you will see below, you will be asked to draw on it – to interpret and present what you have learned from the journaling for our classroom community.

Palimpsest of public iteration

In addition to the private accounting for time described above, I am asking that you periodically update a “deliverable,” public-facing version of your project that you host on the web. This will develop iteratively: whether you begin with ideas in pursuit of materials or materials in pursuit of ideas, you will most likely need to move back and forth between those poles multiple times, each time sharpening your sense of what you need or what you have. The palimpsest of these over-writing refinements will be a core component of your final portfolio for this class.

In other words: while your Mindful Practice Journal is written for yourself, this web-based palimpsest is best written for an audience that includes me as well as your peers.

You may use any web-based publishing platform you’re comfortable with, e.g. Wix, WordPress, SquareSpace, Medium; there are many free options. One option you should be aware of, if you’re not already, is GitHub Pages, which integrates with the change-tracking software I’ll already be asking you to try out early in the term. Even if you’re not (yet) comfortable with web design, you could begin by using Open Fuego: a templating structure designed from the outset to make it easier to work with HTML while you’re learning, and developed right here at Pitt by Dr. Stephen Quigley (English).

This being an introductory seminar, I’m not expecting everyone to get to a complete, publishable argument or exhibit; I am expecting everyone to make progress toward defensible claims and presentable artifacts. By the end of the course, you should be ready to propose a semester-long project you could take to completion in DSAM 3100: Practicum. Follow your curiosity, and be prepared for some frustration. As long as you can find some pleasure in the difficulty, you should be in a good spot for learning.

Presentations and Peer Review

In several designated weeks across the semester (see the course calendar), you will prepare a short presentation for the class. In addition to sharing the latest iteration of your palimpsest, these presentations afford the opportunity to talk about process breakthroughs and moments of stuckness. By discussing these together, we gift each other the chance to learn about more subjects, more tools, more questions, than we would have time to engage with individually – as well as a chance for a change in perspective that might suggest a promising way forward (or, for that matter, around).

Toward that end, after each in-class discussion of the projects, I will ask you to prepare written comments to your peers. This act of writing will help you as a reviewer articulate what you’re noticing, what you’re wondering, and what you’re taking away; it will also ensure for the person and project under review that the conversation doesn’t simply vanish into air. In your final reflection at the end of the semester, I will ask you to review the notes you’ve received and cite the most helpful ones.

For both your presentations and your peer feedback, you should begin by asking yourself: What am I excited about? What am I wondering? Additional questions, designed to take you deeper into the project with each iteration, can be found on the course calendar in the weeks before each presentation is due. For full credit, your presentation must address these iteration-specific questions, and I will expect you to share a digital visual aid for your presentation. You may use any software you’re comfortable with, e.g. a slide deck (PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, slides.com, reveal.js), zooming presentation (Prezi), etc.

Final Reflection

Reflecting on what you learn in the process is at least as important as reaching any particular goals you set early on. The last assignment for the semester is a reflective letter to me and your own future self, both articulating your learning in the class and illustrating your claims about that learning by calling attention to features of your products or your processes. The goal here is less a restatement of what you’ve already written than an opportunity to think synthetically, across iterations and into the future.

In particular:

1. What methods and workflows have worked for you (perhaps as compared to those that have not)? What were the challenges and the joys that keep you moving through them?

2. What surprised you, or what surprises you now as you look back? e.g. What things did you learn that you did not expect to learn, or not learn that you had expected to? What realizations or questions do those surprises point you toward?

3. What feedback has been most helpful to you, and how did you receive it? What have you done as a result of that feedback? Did giving feedback help you as well? In what ways?

4. Thinking about the digital tools and digital objects of study you encountered this semester, are there any you want to explore further? What are your plans for doing so?

5. Finally, what evidence of engagement with the course as a community can you share that isn’t covered by the above? You might, for example, point to successes in the recurring seminar activities from the syllabus, or offer answers to the related questions.

To help you get there, I’ll periodically ask you to take stock in writing of both your projects and our in-class discussion, linking the theories we’ve read to your independent work and vice versa.