A funny thing about academic life, and perhaps digital humanities in particular, is that you end up building solid friendships with people you've spent very little time with, physically in the same room. Before I started my current job at Stanford, I didn't have many friends in the same time zone, let alone the same metro area. Having friends in the same county is still pretty new for me, mostly in the last year.

As a result, it's probably no surprise that I'm a fan of "virtual coffee" -- you've got your coffee, they've got their coffee or a snack or something, and you catch up like you were at a cafe together. I've gotten to see other models for connecting across distance, too. I've had the recent honor of playing a few one-shot RPGs with the Wednesday gaming group my girlfriend has with her friends from grad school. Wednesday at 8 PM is sacred: it's no exaggeration to say that I proposed the custody schedule in my divorce planning around the fact that my girlfriend is absolutely unavailable on Wednesday night.

This week I found another way to hang out with a far-away friend: live-texting thoughts, reactions, and comments while reading their manuscript draft.

Brandon Walsh sent me his current draft of "Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change", and I dug out my tablet to have a more pleasant device to read on than phone or laptop. Waiting for the first train of my 2-hour commute, I opened it up. And read. And read. And was irked when I got to work and had to put it down. A meeting got canceled. I picked it up again. I didn't miss the irony of my annoyance at a student meeting taking me away from a book on DH pedagogy. I read it the whole commute back. I bailed on my planned errands to sit down at my girlfriend's place and finish reading it. I couldn't put it down.

Throughout the whole time and into the next day (the "after I slept on it Bonus Feedback Round"), we exchanged over 500 messages on Slack, totaling nearly 6,500 words. Brandon had his own job and life and band practice to take care of, so it wasn't always synchronous, but it felt a lot like sitting together while I read it.

A Voyant word cloud of the chat, with big words being "yeah like people just book going know"

Reading on a non-networked device and texting on my phone meant that it was awkward to send annotations on the text itself, but sometimes it was important and worth the hassle.

A screenshot of a blurred out text and blurry heart around it with purple sparkles coming off the heart, and text highlighted in red and blue and also underlined in purple

Reading Brandon's book with him in a meaningful (if virtual) way was a source of delight and joy, a bright spot in a moment that feels like a grind in many ways. Not well captured by the word cloud are the many and assorted combinations of emoji, and multiple variants on "lol" that were counted as separate tokens and so don't appear as a frequent word. Granted, it probably helped that this book is on fire and the sort of thing I've wanted to see someone write for a long time. But regardless, if you're missing a friend, and they've got a book or article draft they've been working on, offer to read it and send your thoughts as you're reading, even (especially?) when it's just "lololol at ..." Those 500 messages felt like one of the most major social interactions this week, and I'd do it again in an instant.