@elotroalex

[Cross-posted on the Scholars' Lab blog]

After two and some years hanging around the Scholars’ Lab and earning my badges in the DH community, I finally learned a lesson that should be required learning for all new-comers: plumbing is real. I mean, I was more or less aware of its existence, brief-sightings, a shudder here and there from a ghostly presence. Problem is, I’ve been focusing on the flashy, large, important, big, fancy, loud, loud, loud uses of already-made tools or those tools I dream of, five-million dollars and the-rest-of-your-life tools. You know: The shiny stuff.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been working instead on the small stuff that needed to be done to roll Prism into production. Enter the plumbing. What I thought would be a series of small tasks turned out to be a major time vacuum. At issue was getting Heroku to play nice with what we had built in the development branch. The first two weeks, Heroku would not even display our site. A series of ‘Application Error’ messages was all I got. The culprits, in no particular order: the Asset Pipeline, Devise and Jasmine. Eventually, with help from above (i.e. E. Rochester and W. Graham), we got the site running …and then the Herokulypse.

Once in a while a bug comes, so uncanny, so daunting, that it makes you want to become a novelist. That was the Herokulypse. I obsessed about it for three days at the expense of my dissertation and everything else, with no results. The great obi-wayne-kenobot finally found the problem. To my relief I was on the right track trying to solve it. I just didn’t figure out the part about disabling page caching on the pages controller. Live and learn, and learn I did: Plumbing is real.

I found the lesson timely at a moment when we are debating the obstacles and affordances of coding for digital humanities. The experience with the Herokulypse really brought home for me the idea that code is labor, and that the digital humanities really puts pressure on our notions of leisure, labor and power. I am still working out these issues –issues which all my predecessors seem to have encountered in one way or another– and will be sure to report back to the public when I have more insights.

In the meantime, I won’t ask you to be careful of what you wish for. On the contrary, I will encourage you to scurry down the rabbit hole of code, that you may never think yourself superior to anyone who leans on the side of hack over yack.

[Cross-posted at the Scholars' Blog]

I’m finally settling back into my C’ville routine. My last stop this winter break was the MLA convention in Seattle. Like many of my colleagues, I also felt that “the MLA’s heart (like a post-holiday Grinch) grew at least three sizes over the four days of the 2012 conference.” While last year echoed a prominent informer‘s assessment that DH was “the next big thing” with anxiety, this year felt more like “Hey, I like that. How do I do it?” This was especially a good year for those in the business of rethinking the future of graduate methods training (ahem, ahem) and of graduate futures in general. Needless to say, I felt really great about being part of the first cohort of Praxis.

Saturday evening I had a chance to catch up with one of my early undergraduate mentors. He had questions. He wanted to know what I knew about the DH world. I’m sure half of his curiosity came out of an earnest desire to hear the tale of my travels. The other half was a shrewd (and responsible) move to build a vocabulary for conversations his department will inevitably have this year with the dean, other departments, the library, etc: Can an isolated DHer work well with limited resources? Do you need a center? How do you get graduate students involved? Our conversation went on for a good three hours and it was very rewarding to offer a candid assessment of the field from where I’m standing.

I also realized that where I’m standing is what in battle we would call higher ground. I don’t mean the privilege of hobnobbing with the enormous DH talent we have on grounds. Nothing, of the sort. Although projects are a whole different affair, you could develop decent DH skills and ideas were you connected from Pie Town. I mean the privilege of seeing graduate methods transformation first-hand. I agree with Brooke that there is a continuum that links us to analog models in the department (at least at UVa). But the continuum does eventually lead to new ground.

What I’ve seen, of course, has been well recorded by all the Praxis bloggers. If this is your first time hearing about Praxis and you are interested in the fresh air blowing our way, I encourage you to read more…