
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.
Here’s a quick excerpt from my essay:
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