I have an essay titled “Museums and Social Media During COVID-19” in the November 2020 issue of The Public Historian. A preprint copy of the essay is also available via Brown University’s Digital Repository. Thanks to the editors of The Public Historian and to Amelia Grabowski and Adam Kozsary for offering their own insights. This essay is short and I describe it as a “snapshot” because it is by no means comprehensive, but I hope it documents some relevant social media activity for current readers of TPH and for future researchers.
Questions, comments? Feel free to email me at jimmcgrath.us@gmail.com or get in touch with me on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.
This week saw the publication of Doing Public Humanities, a new collection of essays edited by Susan Smulyan and published by Routledge. Here’s the official book description from the publisher’s website:
Doing Public Humanities explores the cultural landscape from disruptive events to websites, from tours to exhibits, from after school arts programs to archives, giving readers a wide-ranging look at the interdisciplinary practice of public humanities.
Combining a practitioner’s focus on case studies with the scholar’s more abstract and theoretical approach, this collection of essays is useful for both teaching and appreciating public humanities. The contributors are committed to presenting a public humanities practice that encourages social justice and explores the intersectionalities of race, class, gender, and sexualities. Centering on the experiences of students with many of the case studies focused on course projects, the content will enable them to relate to and better understand this new field of study.
The text is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate classes in public history, historic preservation, history of art, engaged sociology, and public archaeology and anthropology, as well as public humanities.
I wrote “Teaching Digital Public Humanities With The Public Library: The Lou Costa Collection, The Updike Collection, and The AS220 Collection at the Providence Public Library.” The essay centers on a Fall 2017 collaboration between my “Digital Public Humanities” graduate course and my friends at Providence Public Library Special Collections. In addition to providing a case study that focuses on the collaborative, community-centered, and pedagogical dimensions of digital public humanities in the classroom, I provide what I call “An Early Twenty-First Century Snapshot” of digital public humanities and argue that the people doing digital public humanities initiatives should be valued and supported by institutions who claim to care about this kind of work. Many universities and institutions in cultural heritage still have a long way to go on this front, in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.
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 read the essay here; I’ll update this post with a link when a more publicly-accessible version of the piece and the issue is available (I’m told that will be soon!).
Our piece is part of a special issue of American Quarterly on American Studies and the Digital Humanities. The Contributors list is full of names I admire in DH and AMST, and I greatly appreciate the work of the issue’s co-editors and their encouragement throughout the process of writing and revising.
Our perspectives on precarious labor come from conversations and writing done as part of the American Studies Association’s DH Caucus. If you’re new to DH or AMST and you’re attending the annual ASA conference in November, I highly recommend checking out the DH Caucus meeting and sponsored session. It’s been a particularly precarious year for me, so I greatly appreciate having folks like the Caucus members in my professional life when I’ve needed guidance, advice, and support.
I’m still not sure if I’ll be at ASA this year, but I’m happy to talk with folks about American Studies and DH via Twitter or email (james_mcgrath@brown.edu).
In 2010 Matt Kirschenbaum wrote “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” for the Association for Departments of English (ADE) bulletin, in which he argued that “digital humanities has accumulated a robust professional apparatus that is probably more rooted in English than any other departmental home” [11]. While there were (and there continue to be) skeptics and vocal opponents of digital humanities methodologies in these institutional spaces, his point was that many English departments had already begun to embrace, cultivate, or otherwise contend with the impact of digital tools and contexts on literary studies. But in the case of Our Marathon, many of the questions we received about the institutional context of our project stemmed less from an aversion to digital humanities work and had more to do with the project’s self-identification as an archival initiative and its investments in the curation and preservation of particular kinds of material culture: items left at public memorials, social media activity, and first-person narratives, all of them related to a national tragedy. Why is an English major behaving like an archivist, a metadata specialist, a project manager? What more could they know about the long histories of curation, preservation, and community engagement, topics that may not be covered in English department coursework? How might English departments anticipate student and community investments in initiatives like Our Marathon and be prepared to support such work?
Thanks to editors Robin Kear and Kate Joranson for their feedback on our contribution to this project. And thanks, of course, to Alicia, for being great: it would be cool to co-write and/or collaborate on something again in the future. I look forward to reading the rest of the volume: if you’re interested, some of our co-authors have been putting links to preprint versions of their work on this Google Doc.
I had a lot of fun writing this book review, and I look forward to doing more writing in this vein. I’ve struggled for years to develop the “right” voice to use in “academic” writing, and the occasion of a book review for a supportive journal gave me some confidence and imagined leeway to write about popular culture, tell jokes, and reveal my personality a bit. Sometimes I feel like I was a few years too early (or maybe a few departments too removed from American Studies) to feel comfortable while writing stuff like this. I’ve still been doing some writing in more “traditional” academic styles and modes (though some of this work has also been collaborative writing, which has been fun and different in certain ways), but I do prefer this sort of thing. I was appreciative of the kind words people said about my writing on Infinite Jest and ebooks, which is in a similar mode.
While I’ve heard that the phrase “public humanities” makes some people want to set their hair on fire, I’ve found that the investments many digital humanities practitioners place in public-facing work have been particularly important, and I try to explore the various implications and challenges of doing public humanities work in my courses and in my own projects. My work in Brown’s Public Humanities program at times might begin (and sometimes end) with digital initiatives aimed entirely at non-academic audiences (i.e. audiences who might not be looking to use materials or data for their own academic projects or publications). Or it might entail working with a range of collaborators—librarians, community organizations, undergraduates, archivists—with various ideas about the kinds of intellectual labor they’re invested in, interests that don’t always privilege scholarly monographs or the critical lenses privileged by my graduate training in, say, an English department. These digital projects require skill in project management and development, attention to design choices and interfaces and their impact on user experiences, knowledge of long-term preservation issues, and discussions about various forms of public engagement, among other factors.
Common-place is primarily intended for early American Studies scholars, but I think this piece may be of interest to DH folks doing work outside that particular field as well. The roundtable discussion is made up entirely of recent graduates and current grad students from Northeastern University (all of whom were former NULab fellows as well!), and it documents graduate student experiences at at a moment in the school’s institutional history when its community of digital humanities scholars and researchers (including, of course, Northeastern’s awesome librarians and archivists!) was just starting to materialize. Anyway, it was fun to write: thanks to Liz, Ben, and Abby, as well as Ed Whitley, Kathy Foley, and the good people of Common-place.
