Season 3 Episode 1 Redux, or, Backing Up Your Work
photo by Markus Winkler, via Unsplash.com. These do not a backup make!
I wrote you all a wonderful newsletter, filled with pithy insights and wistful reflections on another fall, illustrated with poignant, carefully selected high-quality photography…
… and then something burped on my computer and all was lost, and I’m starting over again, and dammit I just don’t have the words. That one, beautiful newsletter will live only in my memory, a dim reflection on what could have been.
So. As we start another year, I guess the lesson here is: what’s your backup plan?
This is particularly important because, despite what the political leadership of our institutions would have us believe, the pandemic is most emphatically NOT over, and the consequences of multiple infections and exposures are likely going to be very bad indeed. But here we are, unmasked and meeting together in large groups.
What’s your backup plan? Clearly, we need to have digital backups. Your work is always at risk. Dropbox and Google Drive are, well, OK, but the former is suffering from feature bloat, and the second is nigh-on unusable as a simple folder. You might want to give Syncthing a try. It simply syncs from one computer to another, securely, and privately, which is super handy if you have more than one machine. If you had your own server storage space, say from somewhere like Reclaim Hosting you can also get it to drop things there as a back up.
What’s your backup plan? I know I’m going to get sick, despite everything I’ve done these last two (or is it three?) years to keep myself and my loved ones safe. I taught my first in-person class since 2020 on Wednesday, and later that afternoon, received notification from a student that they’d been sick but didn’t get tested until afterwards. My class can pivot to online to use an asynchronous structure that I’ve developed over the last few years. It’d take me a week to make the pivot though. Right now, I’m just addressing it one-on-one with students, making my slides available as html (using the Advanced Slides plugin for the Obsidian text editor/note taking environment) with embedded speaker notes, and directing them to the relevant supporting materials I’ve already put together for the course website. Maybe I’ll need to flip on the damned zoom camera on my laptop when I’m performing in class. Pandemic teaching requires a lot of up-front preparation, and a lot of thinking about modalities.
What’s your backup plan? As a student, how are you going to roll with the wide variety of approaches your profs take? I roll my own course sites; other people require the LMS; still others try to mimic lectures via zoom and mandatory cameras on; and of course, there’s the reversion to ‘normalcy’ and the live lecture hall. I don’t know what to tell you, other than to say that relationships matter and you’re going to need to rely on each other, and on your prof, to get through all of this. Invest in that time.
Have a backup plan. For your digital work, put it in multiple places. Use sensible folder structures and do not rely on your machine’s search capabilities to find things. Embed metadata and descriptive tags into the filenames themselves, eg ‘hist5706-m1-sept9-hci-webdesign’. (This makes searching a lot easier). Keep software up to date. For the non-digital ‘basic humanity’ parts of being a student or faculty… well that’s harder. Maybe get to know each other; get to know your professor, your students. Extend grace, care, and generosity.
Remember - it’s not just the DIGITAL humanities, it’s the digital HUMANITIES.
Welcome to the New Cohort!
And on that note, welcome to the new cohort of DH students! Again, we have another large group, from a range of disciplines, and it’ll be exciting to see what you get up to.
The Specialization brings students together from a wide swathe of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; your individual requirements for the Specialization might be slightly different, but all of you in the new cohorot will take the core class, DIGH5000 taught online by Dan Papagiannis. Dan comes to us with a deep media arts industry experience. There are two sections of DIGH5000, one in the Fall and one in the Winter. You should take this class in your first year (ideally, in the first term).
The new students should also enroll right now in DIGH5800. It runs from September to April. The DIGH5800 0.0 credit course is the ‘professionalization’ course. What this means – there are many events that go on at Carleton, U of O, and elsewhere around Ottawa (and online) that can enhance your engagement with DH. Webinars, lectures, workshops, game jams, coding events, what-have-you. For DIGH5800, I ask that students attend at least 6 (more or less; a full weekend workshop probably should count for more than an hour zoom meeting) events over the fall and winter terms. Students then make a brief 150-200 post in the brightspace lms sharing the highlights/thoughts on the event (I will make this space available next week) so everyone can have a read and learn.
Participation in the DH grad student society totally counts towards digh5800; participation on their executive even more. The idea is to encourage folks to network, to get out and see what’s going on, to foster some community across the cohorts. Let me introduce you to Alex McClean who is the current president and founding motive force of the society! Alex is starting her second year in the program. Last year, she led the Society in running its first ever Graduate Student Conference (fully online), with participants from across Canada. It was a well-attended and successful event.
Friends of the programme can help support the Society here. The Society puts on get-togethers, trivia nights, student-led workshops, and is open to all of you. The Society will be sending out its own email to stduents before too long to invite them to its Discord server. The society is also on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carleton.dhgss/
Now, one’s individual programme for DH courses can vary in terms of the number of credits required; make sure you check out your programme’s individual requirements. We maintain a list of possible options for DH credits, updated every summer. The current list is at https://carleton.ca/dighum/annually-listed-digh-courses-2022-23/ but it’s entirely possible that you find another course in English or Canadian Studies or History or wherever (including, in some circumstances, the University of Ottawa) that intersects with your interests and contains a DH component. These might be swapped in, with permission. We have some flexibility in determining what courses might count as ‘DH’ – generally, there should be a digital component to the content of the course, OR the professor is open to the idea of the student introducing a DH perspective to the course work. Sometimes, given the wording on the ‘requirements’ page, folks think they MUST take DIGH5011 the practicum or DIGH5012 Directed Studies, but these are just two of the options which that other list (or courses you might find on your own) merely complement. If you find a course, just let me know and I can help determine yay or nay with regard to its suitability to meet the requirements.
If you’re interested in the (unpaid) practicum or the directed studies course, do get in contact with me well in advance of the term you think you might want to pursue them, so I can give you more information about what’s involved. You have to obtain permission to take these, and there is a bit of paperwork and legwork (for both you and me) involved in getting things set up.
Eventually you’ll arrive at the final project, essay, or thesis for your programme. Those requirements are set by your department – we, as the Specialization do not judge or check up on the ‘dh’-dness of your work. HOWEVER, I do recommend that you bounce ideas when you’re in the planning stages by someone like myself or another of the DH faculty you might meet, and I am always happy to chat about these things! I am also happy to talk with your main supervisors and offer feedback or advice on digital elements to your work: I have your back.
Oh, and I also try to put together the DHCU Irregular, this newsletter you’re reading about all things DH’y going on (which can be helpful for your digh5800). You can find back issues of it at buttondown. You’ll find in those back issues things like advice on DH theses, discussions of what makes a good practicum, past events that have happened, examples of people’s work and so on.
I would be delighted to meet you one-on-one; we can chat via zoom or on campus (I like the picnic tables in the quad, and when I meet with people right now I prefer open spaces rather than the stuffy confines of an office) if you have any questions, or you’d just like to shoot the breeze about all things digital humanities!
- Shawn
Events
In no particular order, some upcoming events that might be of interest -
Our Welcome BBQ is today, 4-6, Oxbow Park between the Butterfly House and the River. Hope to see you there!
Via our friends at the U of O -
22 September, Léon Robichaud of the Université de Sherbrooke is speaking on ‘Spatial visualization of archaeological data from Place d’Youville (Montreal)’ More details here.
19 October, Claire Appavoo, Executive Director of CRKN is speaking on ‘Digital Cultural and Heritage Collections: Enabling Innovative Access and Expanding Research’ More details here.
The Digital Humanities Research Seminar at the University of Helsinki has a number of interesting zoom-enabled talks coming up:
- 9/22 Tony McEnery (Lancaster): Keywords, Clustering, Discourse and Time
- 10/6 RiCEP project (UH): Computational and Linguistic Approaches to Commercial Society and Eighteenth-Century Publishing
The Canadian Historical Association is offering a variety of virtual professional development workshops and roundups that might be of interest to some of you; see their webpage
And if you’re into games and would like to find out about potential funding, see this live event coming up - Megan Leduc from the Canada Council for the Arts will be doing a workshop and hear 1 minute game pitches! September 13, 1 pm.