About

Contact

mincompdepot@protonmail.com

MinComp Depot is a NULab capstone project by RB Faure. I have not received any funding for this site. All writing and all data collection on the site is my own, except where noted. The site lives on GitHub Pages, and was built using Barry Clark’s “Jekyll Now” static site template. The content of the pages on the site is coded primarily in Markdown, with some HTML.

Goals

The goals of the Minimal Computing Cookbook are as follows:

  • To be a welcoming and clear starting point for scholars, teachers, and professionals who are interested in minimal computing but may not know where to begin implementing it
  • To provide a record of minimal computing scholarship and projects up to the present, so that visitors to the site can get a sense of what has been accomplished thus far
  • To model the process of learning about minimal computing as a beginner and building a minimal computing project

The Minimal Computing Cookbook is aimed primarily at digital humanists working in learning-focused settings. This includes secondary school teachers, as well as professors and students working in academia. However, I hope to show the potential applications of minimal computing beyond those spaces as well: for example, minimal computing may be useful to groups working to expand internet access in their community with limited bandwidth and hardware, or to users of social media who want to exercise greater ownership of their data. The possible new directions for minimal computing are many, and while I will not be able to fully explore all of them, I hope that the MinComp Cookbook will serve as invitation and inspiration to others who can carry this work forward.

Theoretical Background

In creating this site, I follow in the footsteps of the Minimal Computing Working Group, which coined the term “minimal computing” in 2014 and was the first example (to my knowledge) of minimal computing as a combined set of practices and critical framework. I orient the work I am doing here in the context of the definitions of minimal computing laid out in the introduction to Digital Humanities Quarterly’s recent special issue on minimal computing, edited by Roopika Risam and Alex Gil. Gil and Risam expand upon that first foundational question as follows: “minimal computing is perhaps best understood as a heuristic comprising four questions to determine what is, in fact, necessary and sufficient when developing a digital humanities project under constraint:

  1. ‘what do we need?’;
  2. ‘what do we have’;
  3. ‘what must we prioritize?’; and
  4. ‘what are we willing to give up?’” [Risam and Gil 2022].
    This introduction heads a series of articles that get into the weeds of minimal computing: its implications, its affordances, how it may be applied, how it is vexed (yet simultaneously productive, for many) in name and approach. It is incredibly exciting and promising to see how much more there is to explore in minimal computing, and the kinds of conversations it opens up with the publication of these articles and case studies alone. Documentation of exactly this kind of digital production, in hopes of showing how many exciting new places there are still for digital humanists to go with minimal computing, is one of the primary goals of the Minimal Computing Cookbook. With the Cookbook, I want to provide an overview of the past decade of minimal computing development and point out significant research gaps that could be explored in the next decade of minimal computing work by myself or other digital humanists. This is accomplished on the website by the “Resources” page.
    Even though minimal computing is still relatively new, it has already been applied, interrogated, and expanded in exciting ways by scholars from around the globe. Minimal computing asks us to get to the heart of how digital tools reify colonial and capitalist structures, and in doing so offers the possibility of subverting those structures. This should be of interest to everyone who works with digital tools, but digital humanists in particular–the kinds of best practices and solutions germinated by minimal computing have broad and urgent applications for humanistic inquiry.
    The Minimal Computing Cookbook also has a focus on outlining actionable, everyday ways to take minimal computing from theory to practice in digital humanities projects, for two reasons: my experiences supporting students with computing as a public school teacher, and my conversations with interested peers as a scholar. When I was teaching middle school, especially during the pandemic, the range of household access to and comfort with digital technology and platforms had an outsize effect on my students’ performance. Having learned subsequently about minimal computing, I saw a significant potential for the application of minimal computing principles to curriculum development in ways that could benefit students and teachers alike.
    In addition to the explicit invitation to try minimal computing extended by the tutorials, the Minimal Computing Cookbook will also implicitly invite visitors to the site to give minimal computing a try by modeling the process of building a minimal computing project by a beginner–that is, me. This is my first attempt at creating a project using minimal computing principles and tools, and I am following the digital humanities principle of working in public while I do so, both by hosting my site on GItHub (where all code will be publicly visible) and by maintaining a process blog. Weekly process blog posts outline my experience in trying to put together a static site for the first time and ensure that it meets accessibility guidelines, as well as my experience learning and attempting to apply minimal computing ideas as I gather research for the publication database and tools library. In documenting my challenges, the resources and help I draw on, my outcomes, and my reflections, the process blog will provide a portrait of what a minimal computing project (or a minimal-computing-inflected project) can look like. The process blog is also a space where questions of access can be raised and examined with regard to my own positionality as a digital humanist in a graduate program.

Project Report

In beginning the Cookbook, I first set out to examine my goals using minimal computing principles.

  • What did I need? I needed a site that would be easy to navigate, accessible to disabled users, and which would load up without problems for a wide range of possible hardware and connectivity configurations. I also needed site infrastructure that would be relatively easy and quick to set up for one person with minimal (ha!) coding knowledge.
  • What did I have? I had several years of teaching experience, the time afforded to me by two semesters of class dedicated to this project, an extensive support system of experts and fellow learners who were generous with their knowledge and their time (my professors and classmates), a very basic grounding in the principles of digital humanities and code thanks to my completed graduate coursework, and a willingness to bang my head against new and potentially unintuitive skills on my own time (thanks, dad).
  • What must I prioritize? For me, the highest priority was access as broad as I could make it–I wanted parity of functionality across devices, bandwidths, and user abilities. I wanted to make sure that nobody got a watered-down or dysfunctional experience of the Cookbook compared to other users, to the extent that I could make that possible. I also wanted to invite a new group of users into the world of minimal computing: specifically, secondary school students and teachers. For myself in the process of creating the Cookbook, I wanted to pick up new skills in coding that would allow me to create lightweight websites where I had a greater measure of control over the back end.
  • What was I willing to give up? Images, embedding, and other dynamic site features, for starters. They would certainly have been eye-catching but they didn’t really have to be there for me to accomplish my goals.

While I had experience with web hosting services like Squarespace and Wordpress, which allow one to set up websites without no coding required, I wanted to create a simpler site and learn a little more about coding in the process. For this Reason, I chose to create a site on GitHub Pages using a Jekyll theme - a compromise between speedy setup and a hands-on approach to the Cookbook’s back end.
With each major addition to the Cookbook, I’ve made sure to test the functionality of each page on a variety of devices and browsers, including mobile, and the site loads correctly in all cases. I unfortunately have not yet been able to test the site’s loading speed on lower speed internet such as dial-up, but will hopefully be able to in future. I also hope to create a USB-downloadable version of the site, to ensure that the Cookbook can be visited by users no matter what their connectivity status. While Jekyll Now certainly made my task easier since I didn’t have to learn Javascript, or additional HTML and CSS on top of my current basic knowledge, the learning curve was still somewhat steep for me. Successfully forking the Jekyll Now repository and adjusting it to create my own site still required a fair bit of teaching myself new skills from forum posts or by trial and error, as well as a few sessions of getting support form my professors with particularly intractable problems. I think this was worth it, though-the feeling of having made a breakthrough, and seeing the results show up online, is an amazing confidence boost! I hope this encourages others to “get under the hood” in their own digital lives, in a spirit of both empowerment and playful experimentation. The largest single original contribution of writing in the Cookbook is the “Guides” or tipsheet page, which is my answer to the consistent feedback I’ve gotten from peers and colleagues that they are interested in minimal computing but unsure where to start introducing into their current professional practice. I decided at the suggestion of my NULab professors that I should focus on an area where I had unique expertise: secondary school teaching. Since one of my primary motivations was my desire to share minimal computing frameworks with students and teachers grades 7-12, I chose to frame my second guide to cater to this audience, creating an introduction to minimal computing specifically tailored to creating middle school curriculum and in response to teacher workflows that I am familiar with. Minimal computing is still gaining traction and as far as I can tell hasn’t been developed or spread much beyond the academy at this point (although I suspect the next major wave of adoption may be among librarians based on the appearance of multiple minimal computing presentations by librarians in the past year, which may lead to k-12 school librarians implementing minimal computing in their work), and I am hopeful that I will be able to bridge the gap between existing scholarship and the unique needs of secondary school teachers given my experience in both areas.