-
Generous Methodologies and Digital Scholarship (Notes from the 2019 CNI-ARL Digital Scholarship Planning Workshop)
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…
-
New Exhibit: “Insufficient Memories” (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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Dance Like Somebody’s Watching: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Forms of Digital Expression
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,…
-
2018 Year-In-Review
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…
-
“This is Fine”: Reading, Making, and Archiving Memes after November 2016 (NCPH Twitter Mini-Con, October 2018)
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…
-
Hyperlocal Histories and Digital Collections (DLF Forum 2018 talk)
This is a slightly extended version of a talk I presented at the Digital Library Federation 2018 Forum, held in Las Vegas in October 2018. Thanks to students in my Fall 2017 “Digital Public Humanities” course; the Providence Public Library Special Collections department; Diane O’Donoghue; Julieanne Fontana, Angela Feng, and Jasmine Chu; Monica Muñoz Martinez; Susan Smulyan;…
-
New Publication: “Precarious Labor in the Digital Humanities” (American Quarterly 70.3)
I’m excited to share the news that “Precarious Labor in the Digital Humanities” is now available via the new issue of American Quarterly! It was a great experience co-writing this essay with an amazing team of authors: Christina Boyles, Anne Cong-Huyen, Carrie Johnston, and Amanda Phillips. Readers with institutional or subscriber access to the journal can…
-
Mapping Marvel Comics with StoryMap
Like many other folks in digital humanities who are in positions where they consult with students, faculty members, and community partners on tools and resources, I’ve frequently steered interested parties to the suite of digital storytelling tools offered by the Knight Lab (a group that operates out of Northwestern University). While the Lab’s work is…
-
Media Literacy in The Age of Fake News and Big Data: Course Debrief and Reflections
Earlier this month I taught a two-week course titled “Leadership and Media Literacy in The Age of Fake News and Big Data” for the Brown Leadership Institute. My first teaching job (way back in 2003!) was with a summer reading enrichment program for K-12 students, so it was fun to pick up teaching high school…
-
Digital Public Humanities: Pedagogy and Praxis, Notes and Errata
Note: This post informs my contributions to a roundtable on “Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Praxis” at the 2018 Digital Humanities Conference (#DH2018) in Mexico City, Thanks to the conference organizers and to my roundtable conveners and collaborators (Brandon Walsh, Lisa Rhody, Matt Gold, Amanda Heinrichs, James Malazita, Miriam Peña Pimentel, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Adriana Álvarez…
-
New Project: A New Digital Home for Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive
On Friday April 15th 2018, Northeastern University launched the new version of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive. Why a new site? Given that materials were being added to Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service for long-term preservation and that the five year anniversary seemed like an ideal deadline for that migration work, I recommended that…
-
Memories, Medals, and Bookshelves
Note: I wrote this back in the fall of 2012 for Rosie’s Basement, a storytelling project started on Tumblr by a friend. I’ve always liked this piece, so in the interest of longer-term preservation and increasing its visibility, I’m posting it here. I will always remember my grandfather as one of the first adults who…