Jim McGrath, PhD

Category: Conference Talks

  • Public Humanities, Data, and Degrees (National Humanities Conference 2024 Remarks)

    Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking at the National Humanities Conference as part of a session titled “The Data Landscape of Public Humanities.” I’ve included the description of the session below:

    In this roundtable, presenters and the audience will explore the data behind public humanities. Speakers from faculty and staff roles, advocacy organizations, and state humanities councils will shed light on the range of public humanities practices they have observed, funded, and/or participated in. They will then engage with the audience to solicit insight on their methods and on the kinds of data that would inform a nation-wide survey and needs assessment on public humanities.

    Thanks to co-presenters Matt Farley, Araceli Hernández-Laroche, Roopsi Risam, Katherine Stevens, and Scott Wands for a lively and informative session. Each of us spoke for a few minutes about our interests in data and our experiences in public humanities. I’m sharing some lightly-edited remarks from my segment here. I approached this task with the hope of creating space for self-reflection on where “public humanities” seems to be at a field in the U.S. at our present moment and where we might go from here. I suppose there is a bit of “provocation” in these comments too, depending on where you stand regarding public humanities. Also please note that these comments represent my own current thinking and may not align with the sentiments of my co-presenters.

    It was interesting to attend the National Humanities Conference in Providence. For five years (2015-2020) I was a postdoc just down the road at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, which housed an MA program in Public Humanities. In December 2023, the Center was renamed the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Studies and the MA program was put on hold (the new Center does seem to currently employ a postdoctoral research associate who focuses on public humanities, though that position does not seem to be referenced yet on the updated website). The Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice offers an MA in Integrative Studies “with a focus in public humanities.” The language of public humanities persists in the program’s description and course offerings (and via some instructors who previously taught in the Public Humanities program), but it is interesting to see the phrase seemingly de-centered at such a prominent node in the field’s academic network. 

    My thinking about public humanities is greatly informed by the fact that I have never been employed in a permanent capacity to “do” public humanities (despite having a chapter in a book titled Doing Public Humanities). And I know I am not alone in that regard. For me, one of the more challenging aspects of doing public humanities and public history work in graduate program contexts has been acknowledging the realities of employment opportunities for students taking up degrees in these fields. I have mainly been employed in teaching and consultant / advisory capacities in public humanities and public history. The teaching work has been an extension of decades of work in higher ed and draws on my experiences doing public humanities and public history work in university spaces and contexts. Having a doctorate also seems to greatly help when these employment opportunities come up. The consultant and advisory work has been mostly enjoyable but also infrequent and very much in a part-time capacity, and my ability to pursue these opportunities often comes from the fact that I have a steady main source of income from work that is not explicitly aligned with public humanities and public history. I can be a bit selective in terms of projects and adjunct courses; that being said, I am also often taking on this work to more comfortably pay my bills.

    I am currently an instructional designer at Salem State University. I do take up work I would align with public humanities as part of instructional design work here. For example, I have developed metadata schemas and workflows in collaboration with librarians working on digital repository collections of teaching materials and I plan to do the same with our Center’s digital assets (when I have time). A great deal of my time is currently spent collaborating with colleagues on the university’s considerations of the impact of generative AI and open educational resources on teaching and learning. That work (and other work here) involves a great deal of collaboration, programming, data collection, and public engagement efforts to help our community reckon with a challenging and controversial topic. I have also taken on a few short-term contracts here: adjuncting in the History Department’s Public History program to teach a graduate course in Digital Public History; helping an instructor digitally curate materials from a recent exhibition on the emigration of Russian-speaking Jews to Massachusetts.

    Some of this work has been stuff that I have proactively sought out, or work that arose because folks on campus were familiar with my previous public humanities work. But this work is highly precarious in nature and at times extends beyond my daily instructional design responsibilities as not necessarily central to my day-to-day work. And to be candid, I am wondering why I spent $300 out of pocket to participate in this discussion today as I navigate the continued value of the term “public humanities” to me

    While I can steer graduate students to particular full-time employment opportunities and introduce them to folks I have met who work at museums, cultural heritage organizations, nonprofits, grant-funding agencies, and other spaces typically aligned with forms of public humanities or public history labor, I do wonder about the distance between the economic motivations of institutions offering degrees in these fields. And I also wonder about the legibility of public history and public humanities degrees in some of these professional spaces; are students with these degrees what employers are looking for? Or do many of them value other experiences, forms of professional development, degrees?

    Asking these questions or speaking candidly about the professional trajectories of public humanities students was sometimes not received positively by previous colleagues. I do know students who have gone on to careers that align with the work they pursued in public humanities or public history courses and programs. But I suppose I am particularly (and perhaps anecdotally) thinking about students who gravitate to these programs and do not possess some of the advantages that successful practitioners have benefited from: economic resources to support degrees or jobs that they may not have to depend on for income; social networks that introduce them to professional opportunities; an understanding of the realities of cultural heritage work and academic labor from relatives or friends; avenues of professional entry that circumvented the need to earn degrees in public humanities or public history. I think we owe it to these students, who are not inventions of my imagination, but are representative of real students I have encountered over the years. And I think data can help institutions and individuals invested in the methodologies, careers, projects, and possibilities of “public humanities” strategize how to expand or transform this field in more equitable, sustainable, and innovative ways

    Public humanities can be a malleable term in ways that are both encouraging and frustrating from the perspective of data, especially if we are thinking about data through the lens of “field-building.” I am particularly interested in what “field-building” constitutes from the perspectives of precarious labor, professional development, early career public humanities practitioners, and public humanities work that may challenge or run into conflict with institutional investments and preferences for what public humanities should be or look like. If the folks in this room agree that “public humanities” is a term worth investing in as a field (and maybe we don’t!), then how might we leverage data to expand and sustain that field for a wider range of practitioners, publics, and possibilities?

    More specifically, I am thinking about the role data might play in conversations related to:

    1. Degree programs and professional development (in relation to employment in public humanities)
    2. Public humanities funding (and allocation / distribution of funding)
    3. Metrics of public humanities impact (as a term, as a field, at the levels of projects, collaborations, publications, grant initiatives)
    4. Potential growth areas (and data-informed pilot initiatives related to growth)
    5. Public humanities subfields, co-conspirators, alternatives (prominent keywords within public humanities, parallel tracks, different types of labor and terminology, opportunities to find connections elsewhere)

    I am also thinking about clusters of questions surrounding some of the areas outlined below.

    The institutionalization (and perhaps the deinstitutionalization or institutional transformation) of public humanities

    Where does “public humanities” exist in terms of  institutional support, professionalization, impact? Who values this term and why? When is this term advantageous to claim in grant / funding contexts, and does it persist outside of those contexts? Who gets paid to do public humanities in employment contexts where the phrase “public humanities” is explicitly invoked or valued? What trends have we seen over the last 20+ years of the twenty-first century? What other terms have made headway, fallen by the wayside, risen and fallen in legibility and connotation?

    Demographic data on public humanities practitioners

    Where did the people doing public humanities work come from in terms of geographic regions, academic training, professional experience, economic, social, and cultural standing, age? Where did people who were at one point aligned with public humanities work go, and why? Here I am thinking about graduates of programs, precarious labor like postdocs and adjuncts, retiring practitioners, etc.

    Public Humanities and the Trump Administration, Then and Now

    We know that grant funding can play an outsized role in supporting public humanities work. What did that look like under the first Trump administration, both in terms of federal programs, grant recipients, staffing, and in other staffing and funding contexts at related institutions? What data makes sense to collect or analyze and where might it take us in terms of longer histories of public humanities, dependencies on federal, state, or other funding sources, public humanities under various political climates, public humanities under particular constraints, gaps, absences, distortions, and redactions of public humanities to suit particular ideological and political motivations?

    Impact (or “The Humanities: Now, More Than Ever?”)

    Can we have a candid conversation about outreach efforts beyond the people in this room or people who already find “public humanities” something they can tangibly support in explicit ways? Can we move away from stories we tell ourselves about our continued importance and value and move towards concerns in sectors where principles, projects, and activities we align with “public humanities” are under attack, at risk of defunding, but also not legible or resonant in ways we desire? How might data related to impact (or lack of impact) in certain sectors raise questions about methodology, staffing, funding, expertise? Who is doing this work better outside of the phrase “public humanities” and why don’t they value that particular term? Let’s not just simply claim them as evidence of the importance of public humanities. If we truly care about expanding and solidifying our field beyond cloistered and increasingly dwindling employment positions, what can data tell us about what priorities we need to set over the next five or ten years?

    I’m sharing a revised version of my remarks here because one of my co-panelists recommended that I do so. If you have done work that seeks to address some of these areas or questions, I would love to hear about it! You can find me on Bluesky or email me: jimmcgrath.us@gmail.com. Thanks!

    "Data Landscape of Public Humanities" presenters (November 2024). Araceli Hernández-Laroche, Roopsi Risam, Jim McGrath, Scott Wands, and Katherine Stevens.
    “Data Landscape of Public Humanities” presenters (November 2024). Araceli Hernández-Laroche, Roopsi Risam, Jim McGrath, Scott Wands, and Katherine Stevens.

  • 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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  • 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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  • “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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  • 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; and the Rhode Tour project team for their contributions to my thinking and work on this topic. And thanks to Bethany Nowviskie for making DLF Forum a supportive space to consider these and other issues

    So, “hyperlocal histories.”

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  • 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 Sánchez, and Ethan Watrall). You can find more thoughts from these roundtable participants via this Twitter thread (thanks Brandon!). 

    Introduction

    When the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University (JNBC) announced that it was in need of a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities in the spring of 2015, it was also announcing that there was apparently something called “Digital Public Humanities” and that there were people who were specialists who could share their professional perspectives on the theory and practice of Digital Public Humanities in the classroom. The digital humanities work I’d been most interested in as a graduate student at Northeastern was committed to a notion of “Public, First,” (to borrow a phrase from Sheila Brennan), but I hadn’t thought of naming these investments in the particular way that “Digital Public Humanities” does. I joined the JNBC in the fall of 2015, and I quickly realized that part of my job was to help the Center figure out the implications of this act of naming at the levels of pedagogy and praxis. Unlike digital humanities labs, centers, or certificate programs, the JNBC’s focus is public humanities, and DH (or digital initiatives tied to other names or methodologies) is a component of this larger set of aims and interests.

    The JNBC institutionally resides in Brown’s American Studies department, and it offers a two-year Master’s Degree program in Public Humanities as well as a graduate-level certificate in Public Humanities. Our program notes our emphasis on “collaborative, applied, and experiential learning” as one of its major selling points, and we offer opportunities for these forms of learning in coursework as well as through student internships and independent studies. In addition to our course offerings, the JNBC creates and supports public humanities projects with faculty and community partners, and we offer a range of programming including exhibitions, lunch talks, conferences, and workshops. Our MA students are interested in a range of professional contexts and research interests: the museum sector, historic preservation, sites of informal education, cultural heritage organizations, archives, libraries, cultural policy (among many others). I’m providing this context to explain what’s been informing my work, and I hope that these thoughts are useful to anyone who is considering how to teach about, develop, and support public-facing digital humanities initiatives.

    My pedagogical investments are documented via the web sites for the three graduate-level courses I’ve taught at Brown: “Digital Public Humanities” (Spring 2016), “Digital Storytelling” (Spring 2017), and “Digital Public Humanities” (Fall 2017). But these syllabi, reading lists, and blog posts are only part of the story. Because that story is particularly long (three years long!), I’ve decided to provide some “Scenes from Teaching Digital Public Humanities” below. I’ll wrap up with some thoughts on what it’s like to be a postdoc in this particular position and what the JNBC and institutions like it might consider in terms of scaled-up and long-term investments in the teaching of digital public humanities.

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  • “I am in here”: Reflections on Reading Infinite Jest on Kindles, Trains, and Airplanes

    I presented this paper at the Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference back in 2015. The paper was NOT well received by some members of the audience, mainly because I was suggesting that reading a digital edition of Infinite Jest wasn’t the end of the world. During the Q&A, one person said something like “If David Foster Wallace were here today, he’d say you were wrong.” It was amazing. There were some nice people there as well, but I’ll always remember that comment and the glares some people in the audience gave me. All in all this conference was not my particular cup of tea, but a good friend asked me to tag along with him on a panel and I’d never been to a conference dedicated to a single author before, so it was worth the experience. After our panel was done, we spent most of the remainder of the conference down the block, playing darts at an Irish bar. Thanks again for the good times, Ben. I’ve always liked this piece so I’m posting it here.

     

    Cover to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

    I finished reading Infinite Jest for the first time on Thursday, December 29 2011, somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 feet above sea level. I did not expect to finish the book on Spirit Airlines Flight 126 from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Boston, Massachusetts, wedged in the sky, returning to my Allston apartment after a long Christmas vacation with my retired parents and my occasionally employed brothers. Though I had spent many reading sessions flipping back and forth between the hyperlinked “Notes and Errata” and the book’s main text on my second-generation Amazon Kindle, I had misjudged how much space the novel’s “appendix” took up, and felt there was more to read. The ending, its image of Gately “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand,” seemed abrupt, a quiet moment following one of the more grotesque sequences in the novel. I was not prepared to conclude on this particularly off-putting note, trapped in the sky in an uncomfortable seat aboard one of the worst airlines in the history of airlines, unable to talk, or text, or tweet about how it felt to finish a book that had held my attention over most of the last seven months.

    This paper uses my particular experiences reading Infinite Jest to examine the public and social dimensions of reading and the ways digital media – specifically, ebooks – color those dimensions. My decision to read an ebook version of Infinite Jest was in part determined by my sense of where and how I planned to read it: primarily in transit, mainly in and around a Boston both familiar and removed from the city described in the novel. I was conscious of a variety of factors while reading Infinite Jest: the logistics of reading such a large book in close quarters on overcrowded rush hour Green Line trains, the clichéd image of young, white men reading Serious Literature in public spaces, the desire to remain anonymous while inhabiting two Allstons at once.

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  • Days of Future Past: Augmented Reality and Temporality in Digital Public Humanities

    Uncanny X-Men #141 (1981 [1980])
    In July 2017, I presented a version of this talk on a panel on “Temporality” at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference (#keydh on Twitter) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The project  I discuss here, a digital tour of the Nightingale-Brown House, will debut in September 2017. I’ll update this post with a direct link when we go live!

    I wanted to start by outlining three of the major questions I hope to raise in this discussion of a digital house tour I’ve been working on at Brown University’s Public Humanities program. This presentation will focus on the details of our particular project, but I hope this overview is useful to people who are specifically interested in the metaphor of the tour in DH as well as anyone who might have thoughts on temporality as it relates to DH work and the interfaces we rely on (or develop) in various initiatives.

    Excerpts from Uncanny X-Men #141-142 (1981 [1980])
    This talk takes its title from “Days of Future Past,” a 1980 storyline from Marvel Comics’ Uncanny X-Men serial in which a member of the superhero team travels back in time to stop the bleak future she calls home from existing in the first place. “Welcome to the 21st century,” reads a caption box on the opening splash page of #141. Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and their collaborators present readers with a dystopian vision of 2013 and a ragtag team of surviving heroes so desperate that they’re “toying with the basic fabric of reality” in an attempt to travel back in time to literally rewrite history.

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  • “Our City”: Images of Home in Our Marathon, The Boston Bombing Digital Archive

    Source: Our Marathon
    Source: Our Marathon

    Note: The following post is adapted from remarks I gave at the 2016 American Studies Association Conference on a panel titled “Home Screens: Digitizing Belonging and Place in American Studies.” Thanks to my fellow presenters and attendees for their participation, to Alicia Peaker and the rest of the Our Marathon project team, and to Carrie Johnston for organizing the panel.

    In his remarks at an interfaith prayer service in Boston on April 18th, 2013, three days after the Boston Marathon bombings, President Barack Obama noted more than once to his audience that “Boston may be your hometown, but we claim it, too.” In the hours, days, and weeks following the events of April 15th, 2013, many people used social media to document how “at home” they feel or once felt in Boston.

    I’m interested in ideas of home and digital spaces in the context of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive. Our Marathon, a community project hosted by Northeastern University, is a crowdsourced digital archive of close to ten thousand stories, photos, and social media about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and their aftermath. I started working on it as a graduate student research assistant in May of 2013, became Project Co-Director (with Alicia Peaker, now at Bryn Mawr) in the fall of that year, and I continue to work on it as we preserve our digital assets and make them more accessible in the short and long-term via Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service.

    Slide by Jim McGrath
    Slide by Jim McGrath

    I’m particularly interested in discussing Our Marathon and what it might tell us about home and digital regionalism, home and digital archives, and home and digital public humanities.

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