The Praxis Program is a project of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library. In its first two pilot years (2011-2013), it was generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Scholarly Communication Institute. Praxis is now fully supported by the University of Virginia Library.

The Praxis Program funds a team of six University of Virginia graduate students from a variety of disciplines to apprentice with us each academic year. Under the guidance of Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, they design and create a full-fledged digital humanities project or software tool.

It’s a radical re-imagining of the annual teaching and training we offer, and is is meant to complement our work with Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities, a program now in its fifth year at UVa Library.

Recognizing that up-to-date methodological training is often absent or catch-as-catch-can for humanities graduate students, we see the early years of the Praxis Program as an opportunity to experiment with an action-oriented curriculum live and in public. We situate our program in a larger conversation about the changing demands of the humanities in a digital age.

Praxis hopes 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. We’ll share our evolving curriculum and our staff and students alike will be blogging about their experience.

We invite you to watch as we see what it takes to produce thoughtful DH scholars who are comfortable designing effective user experiences, writing and working with open source code, engaging broad audiences, managing teams and budgets, and theorizing their work within the rich tradition of humanities computing.