Jim McGrath, PhD

Category: blog

  • 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.


  • New Publication: Review of My Nola, My Story in Reviews in Digital Humanities

    The first issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities includes my review of My Nola, My Story, a digital humanities initiative led by Dr. Shearon Roberts at Xavier University of New Orleans that does the work of “gathering, documenting, classifying, contextualizing, and sharing the experiences and legacies of communities of color who have called New Orleans home.” Thanks to Reviews editors Jen Guiliano and Roopika Risam for asking me to join the other great contributors to this inaugural issue. And if you have time, check out their introductory note, which outlines the excellent motivations behind the creation of this journal.

  • Breaking Bandersnatch: Using Twine to Teach Digital Project Development

    Collage of visualizations of Choose Your Own Adventure narrative structures and Twine narrative trajectories
    How to make a Space Vampire: Just Add Twine

    In the press that followed the December 2018 release of the Netflix interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, several references were made to the use of Twine in the project’s development process. While early stages of planning utilized Post-it notes and whiteboards, the Bandersnatch team eventually turned to Twine, “which is often used to design video games with multiple story branches,” and even provided actors with copies of the script written and published in the program so “they could navigate” the various threads of the project. Many instructors and students in digital humanities, media studies, and game studies courses have gravitated towards Twine in and around the higher ed classroom, and most of this pedagogical work has focused on the immediate contexts of games and interactive fiction. Until reading the press around the making of Bandersnatch, I hadn’t thought of this software’s potential in the context of digital project development.

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  • Digital Storytelling Tools and Techniques (Wilson Center Digital Humanities Lab talk at the University of Georgia)

    Jim at UGA (Photo by UGA DigiLab)

    Last week I gave a talk titled “Black Mirrors and Melting Wizards: Digital Storytelling Tools and Techniques” at the University of Georgia’s Wilson Center Digital Humanities Lab. My mom is a UGA alum, so it was great to visit Athens and learn about all the exciting digital work happening on campus! I also found time to check out Bizarro-Wuxtry Comics, Toys, & Stuff, a store I highly recommend to fans of comics, toys, and stuff.

    Thanks so much to Emily McGinn for inviting me and for being an amazing host! The DigiLab wrote up my talk and has provided a recording of my remarks (accompanied by my presentation slides) here.

    I love sharing my research and thoughts on digital humanities, public humanities, and digital pedagogy, so if you’re looking for someone to talk about these topics or related things at your campus or conference, please get in touch via email (james_mcgrath@brown.edu) or Twitter (@JimMc_Grath).

  • Go Fast / Go Slow: Supporting Digital Public Humanities At Various Speeds

    Tweet by (the awesome!) Kristen Mapes, documenting the shared interest in “Slow DH” by many attendees at ACH 2019.

    Hi! This post is a revised version of some remarks I gave on a “Space and Place” panel at ACH 2019. It’s also a kind of roundup of some conversations that happened at this fantastic conference. Many of the images here are screenshots of slides from my talk. Thanks to everyone cited here who informed my thinking; any faults or bad takes are completely my own.

    One of the more popular tweets to come out of the first Association for Computers and the Humanities Conference (#ACH2019 on Twitter) was the observation by Kristen Mapes (who is great!) that there seemed to be “a call for slow DH, for spending time with archives and data and material and the people within them.” I agree that there seemed to be a lot of advocates for “Slow DH” in Pittsburgh, and I wanted to think about these investments from the perspective of a digital public humanities practitioner who works with non-academic community partners, collaborators, and publics.

    On the Minimal Computing roundtable at ACH, Marisa Parham asked “What does it mean to validate new kinds of work?” and I think this question has a lot of relevance to place-based digital public humanities initiatives, many of which involve forms of collaboration with off-campus stakeholders, non-academic publics, speculative dimensions, people in precarious positions. In considering when and how digital public humanities might complement “slow” work with faster and more public-facing benchmarks and outputs, I want to acknowledge that the validation of these forms of labor requires that our institutions reimagine and reevaluate how it staffs centers, labs, and departments, how our “conditions of possibility” (a phrase I have heard Thomas Padilla use in other contexts) are inevitably limited if we do not attend to the various institutional realities shaping the work of digital public humanities. 

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  • New Publication: Newest Americans Review in American Quarterly

    My review of Newest Americans appears in American Quarterly 71.1 (March 2019). This is the second time I’ve written for American Quarterly (the first was as co-author of a piece on precarious labor and digital humanities in issue 70.3). I’ve greatly valued my experiences with the American Studies Association’s Digital Humanities Caucus: if you’re in or around AMST and interested in DH, the caucus is a supportive and inspiring group of scholars. I’ve been happy to join ongoing conversations about DH in this journal.

    Newest Americans has been a project that’s given us a lot to think about here in public humanities at Brown, and I’ve had positive experiences discussing it this semester in my Digital Storytelling course. If you don’t have institutional access to American Quarterly and you’re interested in reading my review, please email me (james_mcgrath@brown.edu) or send me a message on Twitter (@JimMc_Grath).

  • New Co-Authored Publication: Postdoctoral Bill of Rights

    As part of the Postdoctoral Laborers Group, I was happy to contribute to the discussions, writing, and revision that went into the Postdoctoral Bill of Rights. It’s been great to see the positive reception this document has received on social media, and it’s been particularly gratifying to see the implications of our thoughts resonating with people responsible for creating and supporting postdoctoral positions in the humanities. There’s still lots of work to be done and the life of a postdoc is difficult in many different ways for many of us, but one aim of the Bill of Rights was to document and circulate perspectives held and shared by postdocs across various institutions, to make these concerns manifest, to hopefully make individuals in this positions or thinking about applying for them aware of the professional and institutional realities around them. It was cool to see the document cited as a resource by Digital Humanities Now, and in addition to the contact information included on the Bill itself, I know folks like me are happy to talk more with people who are interested in changing our professional working conditions for the better.

    Thanks to Amanda Henrichs for seeing the clear need for this sort of document and for keeping it a priority for the Postdoctoral Laborers Group, and to Hannah Alpert-Abrams for all the work that went into the Bill of Rights and into making the Postdoctoral Laborers Group a group with a clear sense of community, purpose, and momentum. And thanks to fellow group members like Heather Froelich and Kim Martin (among others!). The Bill of Rights was a collaborative document informed by a number of voices and perspectives, and I was glad to be part of this work. It’s been great talking through our shared and varied experiences at conferences like DH 2018 and DLF 2018, on Twitter, and through less-public channels like Slack and email.

    If you’re a postdoc in the humanities, or someone whose career trajectory is leading you to consider postdoctoral positions, join us! Our next meeting is May 3rd: see this page to learn how to join our Slack and email channels. And my guess is that a number of members of the group will be in attendance at ACH this July, so hopefully we’ll see some folks IRL soon!

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

  • 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!

  • New Publication: “Mapping Violence: A Case Study on Project Development, Iterative Approaches to Data Collection and Visualization, and Collaborative Work With Undergraduates” (Design for Diversity Toolkit)

    You can now read the “case study” I authored on behalf of the Mapping Violence project for the Design for Diversity Learning Toolkit. This piece of writing focuses on an important moment in the project’s lifespan and documents our approach to collaborative and iterative work. It also highlights the many contributions undergraduates have made to Mapping Violence, offering recommendations on how to treat these students as collaborators. I learned a lot from the various speakers and collaborators who attended Design for Diversity events hosted at Northeastern University, and I hope this contribution is of value to readers interested in developing and refining their own digital projects.

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

  • New Course: Digital Storytelling (Brown University, Spring 2019)

    In the Spring of 2019, I’m teaching “Digital Storytelling,” a graduate-level course that institutionally resides in Brown University’s Public Humanities program. You can view the course site here. As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ll be using the blog on the course site to think out loud about the class from my vantage point as its instructor. The first post, which will hopefully be up soon, will focus on pre-course development stuff: how I’m wrapping my head around a course called “Digital Storytelling,” how this course fits into other courses in our program and at Brown, the thinking behind course objectives, assignments, and readings, etc. I’m viewing the blog primarily as a resource for other instructors and educators, but it may also be of interest to students here and elsewhere. Stay tuned!

    If you’re interested in other courses I’ve taught in my 15+ years in higher ed (including the version of “Digital Storytelling” I taught at Brown in the Spring of 2017!), 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.

  • Dance Like Somebody’s Watching: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Forms of Digital Expression

    Screenshot from a Lisztomania / Brat Pack mashup video uploaded to YouTube

    As a Boston University undergraduate, “Sandy” Ocasio-Cortez joined other students in making a “Lisztomania Brat Pack mashup” video, a short film that was locally used as a promotional video for the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground (and, according to its director, broadcast on TVs across campus) but also uploaded to YouTube in September 2010, joining many other professional and homemade variations of a mashup between Phoenix and The Breakfast Club that was posted by “AvoidantConsumer” in 2009. This video resurfaced on Twitter less than one day into Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tenure, dug up from the past in an odd and ultimately ineffective attempt at shaming the popular progressive politician (though there are certainly vocal users of social media who believe that the film is a record of her limitations and flaws).

    As far as digital records of college behavior go, it’s extremely innocuous. But it is an interesting object of analysis for folks interested in media history and archaeology, as Parker Higgins effectively documented on Twitter on the same day the video resurfaced. And the reception to the video in 2019 offers an interesting glimpse at where and how the long histories of social media, viral content, remix culture, and the professionalization of the web are going to be studied, remembered, and archived. I wanted to think out loud about some of these implications here.

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  • 2018 Year-In-Review

    "Library" by Coco Berkman (a black-and-white print of a man reading in his library with his dog)
    “Library” by Coco Berkman (Brianna bought me this print in 2018: get your own here!)

    For the last few weeks I’ve been reading The Terror (2007), a work of historical fiction about a doomed nineteenth-century Arctic expedition. This deeply flawed but engaging novel spans almost a thousand pages and features a range of characters reflecting on the circumstances that brought them to their current state, literally frozen in place on a sea of ice, with little hope of escape or rescue, with little company but their memories and inner demons.

    I don’t regret my time with The Terror, but it’s a tricky book to manage for someone who tends the view the end of one year and the beginning of the next through the lenses of his reading and viewing choices. Most of mine these last few weeks have been a bit on the bleak side: The Terror, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (another work preoccupied with mortality and cruelty, a funhouse mirror reflection of popular images and narratives of the American West), The Office (particularly the third season, where its characters start to realize that there are no search parties out there looking to bring them to a better world), My Sister, The Serial Killer (a hypnotic and funny novella about the ways dramatic scenes of violence reveal more mundane horrors we surround ourselves with daily).

    The other day I was talking with a friend about the threat of “death by a thousand cuts,” a cruel fate arrived at not immediately but slowly, almost invisibly, over time, until we find ourselves weakened to a point of exhaustion by the constant presence of minor threats. 2018 has felt at times like a year spent enduring and recovering from these sorts of injuries. But some of these wounds in my case have been self-inflicted, or created by imagining a more severe blow has been dealt when in reality I’ve encountered a minor inconvenience, a worry not worth having, a voice better left unheard.

    In taking stock of the mood of 2018 and my plans for a better 2019, I thought about all the work I was proud of finishing over these twelve months, and I realized that I’ve actually had one of my more productive years as a person doing work at the intersection of digital humanities and public humanities. In 2019 I hope to remind myself more regularly that I have many things in my personal and professional worlds to be thankful for, that many of the traps in the dark are ones I’ve set for myself, and that I’m not resigned to a life stuck on the ice. There’s a lot to learn from my 2018, and some things to do differently, but I’m proud of what I’ve collected below as some of my accomplishments.

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  • “This is Fine”: Reading, Making, and Archiving Memes after November 2016 (NCPH Twitter Mini-Con, October 2018)

    Title slide for NCPH Twitter Mini-Con talk, featuring the infamous "This is fine" dog from K.C. Green's Gunshow comic
    this is fine

    On October 18th, 2018, I presented a talk as part of “(Re)Active Public History,” a Twitter Mini-Con put on by the National Council on Public History. Here’s the abstract I submitted for the conference (which you can also find here):

    A cartoon dog sits with a cup of coffee in a room that is engulfed in flames. “This is fine,” he says to no one in particular. These images, which originally appeared in K.C. Green’s webcomic Gunshow in 2013, have become a kind of shorthand for the mood in America after the 2016 election, an example of the ways that memes are increasingly relied upon by social media users to document their experiences in uncertain times. Social media encourages and profits from our impulses to document our present moods with image macros, reaction GIFs, screenshots, and other multimodal forms of expression. Memes have been remediated as protest signs at various marches, and it is increasingly common to see memes in political campaigns and in the Tweets of sitting senators. In July 2017, President Trump infamously circulated a meme in which he attacks a professional wrestler whose head has been digitally replaced by the CNN logo, an act of online speech that was interpreted by many as an endorsement of violent reprisals against journalists.

    Memes, in other words, are an undeniable part of contemporary American culture. This presentation will consider the roles memes have played in defining and subverting American political discourse in The Age of Trump. More generally, it considers where, how, and why public historians might read, historicize, preserve, and make memes about the American experience.

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