New Course: Digital Archives and Digital Publics (Spring 2020; Brown University)


Home page image for Jim's "Digital Archives and Digital Publics" course of a file cabinet and course metadata

This semester (Spring 2020) I’m excited to teach “Digital Archives and Digital Publics,” a graduate-level course that builds on my own experiences with digital archives and digital public humanities and attempts to survey a wide range of perspectives from archivists, librarians, digital humanists, artists, and more. Here’s the official course description:

This course considers the (perhaps surprisingly) long history of digital archives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, surveying the various efforts of academic institutions, community organizers, activists, amateurs, and anarchists, examining digitized and “born-digital” materials, reflecting on relationships between ideas of cultural value and forms of materiality, technology, access, and dissemination. Particular attention will be paid to imagined audiences and uses of digital archives: scholarly, political, speculative, creative, memetic, and otherwise. This course provides students with opportunities to learn from archivists (and to visit local special collections on and off-campus) and to develop projects informed by best practices in digital public humanities.  

If you’re interested in other courses I’ve taught in my 15+ years in higher ed, check out the “Teaching” portion of my site. Please be in touch if you’d like to talk more: I’m always happy to discuss pedagogy and digital pedagogy, and I’m interested in working in educational environments that are invested in and supportive of these sorts of courses. And thanks to everyone who has supported my teaching at Brown and elsewhere!

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