Skills Series

The Praxis Program is a project of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library. Praxis is a radical re-imagining of the annual teaching and training offered by the Scholars’ Lab, and it is meant to complement their work over the past several years with the Scholars’ Lab Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities. Each year, the Praxis Program funds a team of six University of Virginia graduate students from a variety of disciplines to apprentice with Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff as they learn to apply digital technologies to humanities and cultural heritage research. In the process, the students design, create, and promote a full-fledged digital humanities project or software tool. More specifically, the Praxis Program aims to equip knowledge workers for emerging faculty positions and alternative academic careers at a moment in which new questions can be asked and new systems built. The Scholars’ Lab regularly shares the evolving curriculum for the program, and staff and students alike are blogging about their experience.

Our students regularly gain experience with a variety of technologies relevant to humanities computing as they write and work with open-source code. They also become comfortable designing effective user experiences; engaging broad audiences; managing teams and budgets; and theorizing their work within the rich tradition of humanities computing. Alumni of the Praxis Program have parlayed the experience into a diverse range of career opportunities. Former students of the program can be found in alternative academic positions, GLAM sector posts, tenure-track professorships, industry jobs, or as holders of competitive digital humanities and library postdoctoral fellowships. Explore the program’s projects archive for more information about past and current work conceived and implemented by participants.