Jim McGrath, PhD

Month: March 2019

  • Generous Methodologies and Digital Scholarship (Notes from the 2019 CNI-ARL Digital Scholarship Planning Workshop)

    The view from the CNI-ARL Digital Scholarship Planning Workshop at Northeastern University, 18 floors above Boston.

    On Monday, March 25th, I spoke on a “Student Panel” at the CNI-ARL Digital Scholarship Planning Workshop (hosted by Northeastern University). While I’m not currently a student (unless this has all been a dream and I still am! Oh no!), I worked at the Northeastern University Library Digital Scholarship Group as a graduate student, in addition to my work on Our Marathon and with Digital Humanities Quarterly. I ended up talking a bit more about how digital scholarship centers support students, faculty, and other collaborators on and off campus, and I decided to share a revised version of some of those remarks here.

    I know “outreach” and “programming” become abstract contexts (often made real by limitations of our resources like staffing, space, money), and documentation doesn’t solve all of our problems, but I wonder how we think about “generous interfaces” in digital and non-digital contexts: not just for our digital assets, but “generous methodologies.” Generous avenues of access that extend beyond a well-designed web site, an “open office” policy that is less open than its rhetoric suggests if “office hours” alone are a new, unfamiliar, intimidating and unwelcoming site of pedagogy. Forms of generosity that demystify our communities, our forms of scholarly and non-scholarly output, our ideas of value.

    As someone who institutionally resides outside a digital scholarship group but serves as a mediator or collaborator with one at Brown, I think a lot about the legibility and the points of access available to a range of students and how things could be better. Here I’m thinking particularly about students (and faculty) who may not fit neatly with the dominant form of support, service, or collaboration at a particular institution. When we think particularly about students and their interests and needs, how do we move beyond a single abstraction (or beyond a binary like “undergraduates” and “graduate students”)? When we think of particular technologies and methodologies, how might we consider the ways that our investments in particular physical places, our forms of programming, instruction, and documentation, all should be designed to serve a range of publics and attendant contexts and use-cases?

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  • New Exhibit: “Insufficient Memories” (Brown University)

    Collage of text message materials used in "Insufficient Memories," an exhibit at Brown University.

    Last fall, a group of graduate students in Brown’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (specifically, Maggie Unverzagt Goddard, Julia Renaud, and Sophie Don) started Tiny Exhibits, a series of two-week installations designed for a small (or, uh, “tiny”) exhibit case in the Nightingale-Brown House. It’s been a fun initiative that has provided students in and around our Public Humanities program opportunities to stage some compelling curatorial projects.

    In March 2019, Tiny Exhibits played host to “Insufficient Memories,” a collaboration between myself, Kristen Iemma, Will James, and Andrea Ledesma. Here’s our curatorial statement:

    Insufficient Memories is an interrogation of the relationship between memory and materiality. Through an exploration of storage constraints in the cell phone (the most ubiquitous of contemporary digital technologies), we seek to illuminate the tensions between the digital and the corporeal. What happens to memory when “memory” is rendered physical? How do metaphors and mechanisms of storage mediate our lives? What stories of twenty-first century life lie beneath our collections of apps, unread notifications, and file names? We seek to create and investigate the portraits we create through the media we screenshot, redact, retouch, share, yet ultimately delete.

    Given the frequency with which I’m at the Center and my previous experiences on collaborative projects, I primarily served as the Project Manager of our collaboration: setting project benchmarks and deadlines, organizing meetings via Skype, etc. The project’s approach to ideas of memory and materiality was a true collaborative effort; our curatorial team was assembled because each of us had independently submitted exhibit proposals on this general theme (!), so it made sense to join forces. One of my favorite parts of the experience was just talking with Kristen, Will, and Andrea about our various experiences with devices and materials: our attempts to organize and make sense of our messy digital autobiographies, our ideas of order and disorder, our reflections on previous devices and forms of storage. I also really liked decontextualizing and printing out snippets of text message conversations, and I’d like to think more about that particular corpus and potential creative uses of it.

    Through the exhibit design process, we talked about how it might be fun to have a more interactive component to “Insufficient Memories.” Given that I’d been working with Twine in my “Digital Storytelling” class this semester, I pitched the idea of making a playful companion piece that viewers of the exhibit could access and play on their smart phones (the Center has reliable free wifi for Brown and non-Brown visitors). You can check that game out here. This project was my first work in Twine that made it off my desktop and beyond the speculative / drafting stage, and I’m already planning another game with this fun tool for interactive digital storytelling.

    It had been a while since I’d collaborated on curating a physical exhibit (at Northeastern, I worked with the amazing student-led Scout team on an Our Marathon exhibit) and it was fun to work in this sort of space again on a tiny-er scale.

    Questions, comments? Feel free to email me at james_mcgrath@brown.edu, or get in touch with me on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.

  • New Interview: Careers in the Public Humanities Podcast

    Catherine Winters, co-host of the Careers in the Public Humanities Podcast, invited me on the program to talk about my current gig as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities at Brown University. It’s a pretty candid conversation about the life of a postdoc in higher ed these days. I also talk about public humanities, digital humanities, and why “digital public humanities” seems like a productive term that creates space for particular kinds of work and methodologies in academic contexts. And I use the adjective “tricky” a lot, which seems worth noting in the historical corpus of descriptives for this kind of labor in this particular time and place. Thanks Catherine! I hope some folks find these reflections helpful!