Tag: Brown University

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New Publication: Doing Public Humanities

Front cover to Doing Public Humanities, a collection of essays edited by Susan Smulyan and published by Routledge in 2020

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.

Screenshot of title page for "Teaching Digital Public Humanities with the Public Library," an essay by Jim McGrath in the Doing Public Humanities collection.

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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On Collaborations with Archivists in Digital Public Humanities

Archival materials in the Providence Public Library Special Collections room.

In the Fall of 2017, I taught a graduate-level course in Digital Public Humanities for the second time here at Brown. The first iteration of this course, which I taught in the Spring of 2016, took a survey approach to digital humanities and DH contexts for Public Humanities. Students were invited to create speculative or “proof of concept” applications of our readings to public humanities contexts they were interested in exploring further. These student projects (which they described on the course’s blog) were extremely innovative and inventive, and they documented the class’ various interests in minimal computing, provenance metadata, augmented reality, and other topics. At the time I was pretty comfortable with both the survey model and an approach to student project development “ that clearly situated itself as the first step in an iterative, still-developing process.” For many students, this was their first DH class or their first time working with and thinking about digital tools and methodologies. It was also my first course in Public Humanities, so I wanted to learn more about student interests and expectations in our program.

For this second iteration of Digital Public Humanities, I was interested in having students work with an external collaborator (something our program actively encourages instructors to consider when developing courses). Thankfully, I didn’t have to look far: as I was beginning to brainstorm, Jordan Goffin, Head Curator of Special Collections at the Providence Public Library, reached out to me (via Twitter: see, Twitter can be useful sometimes!) to see if I’d ever thought about collaborating with the PPL on a digital project. Some readers familiar with Brown’s resources may be surprised to learn that an archives-oriented Digital Public Humanities course here wasn’t collaborating with The John Hay Library, The John Carter Brown Library, The Haffenreffer Museum, or other more “local” resources on campus. These organizations are all thinking a lot about digital contexts for their materials, and they have in the past collaborated or consulted with our students and faculty on these (and other) topics. But beyond the fact that the PPL reached out to me, I was also ignorant about what materials it held in its Special Collections and curious to find out more. What I quickly learned was that the Providence Public Library had been thinking a LOT about digital spaces. More specifically, they were really interested in how these digital spaces informed and encouraged use of materials by local communities in Providence, as well as how digital contexts for archival materials might reflect the value of these materials by the communities represented in these collections.

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DH2017 Poster Roundup: Mapping Violence and Day of Public Humanities

2017 marks my third trip to the biggest DH conference in the game, and for this go-round I wanted to bring the work of some of my awesome collaborators (and some of the collaborators themselves!) at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage to the event.

The work documented in these posters is highly collaborative and it involves undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members in American Studies and Public Humanities. It’s been interesting to think through the relationships between these two fields and DH during my time at Brown; the ASA’s Digital Humanities Caucus has been super helpful in the former, and I wonder if there’s more people interesting in talking about the latter. I was excited to see “public DH” in Amanda Visconti’s paper title, for instance. And while “public humanities” isn’t explicitly named in the titles of any other posters and discussions, there’s clearly a lot of interest in questions of “access” based on the number of presentations here utilizing that keyword. “Access” is this year’s conference theme, but public humanities folks might find the range of uses interesting nonetheless. Additionally, “public humanities” is showing up in several tweets about presentations (like here and here, in tweets referring to a talk by my pal and partner in digital public humanities, Lauren Tilton!), suggesting that attendees invested in the term are recognizing its presence in methodologies and project emphases.

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New Project: Day of Public Humanities (#DayofPH)


I’m excited to announce my involvement in Day of Public Humanities (#DayofPH), a public humanities initiative about public humanities. So meta! When I started working at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, I inevitably got questions from friends in and beyond academic contexts about what this “public humanities” thing is and what kind of work I do. Many of us here get these questions, so myself, Robyn Schroeder (Postdoctoral Fellow and Director of Graduate Studies in Public Humanities), and Inge Zwart (graduate student in Public Humanities) decided to spend the past year researching the term, its uses, its limits, its past, present, and future. While doing this work, we became particularly interested in how and why public humanities practitioners came to embrace the term “public humanities” and what forms of labor they do on a daily basis. Like the Day of Digital Humanities (#DayofDH) initiative, #DayofPH asks practitioners to make their labor visible, reflect on the field and where it’s going, and show people what cool things they’re up to. We hope you can join us on May 9th, 2017!

You can learn more about #DayofPH on our web site. Specifically, you can find suggestions for how to participate on May 9th, blog posts highlighting some of the day-to-day work we do here at the JNBC, and recommendations for further action before and after May 9th. We also talk about the project on the JNBC blog. We’re excited to see what other people are working on, what “public humanities” means to them, and how we might all learn to become better Public Humans.

I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about this project on Twitter (@JimMc_Grath) or via email (james_mcgrath[at]brown). And if you’re attending NCPH next week, I’ll be there too, so please get in touch if you’d like more info!

 

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Digital Public Humanities: Reflections On Teaching A Graduate-Level Course in Digital Humanities and Public History

I recently wrapped up teaching duties on a course in Digital Public Humanities, a class offered via Brown University’s Public Humanities M.A. program. You can view the course site, which includes our syllabus, major readings, and a blog, here. This class was both my first digital humanities course and the first class I ever taught as part of a graduate program. I wanted to debrief (and maybe also decompress) here, in the hopes that thinking out loud about the shape and outcomes of the course might help me as well as other people interested in digital humanities, public humanities, public history, and/or graduate-level teaching (among other topics).

Before diving into the debrief, I’d like to thank the students who took this course, because they were all great. Thanks again to Dylan Cole-Kink, Bárbara Elmudesi, Nico Larrondo, Eddie Robles, Caroline Stevens, Sandra Strauch, and Liza Yeager. Thanks also to Alyssa Anderson, Andrea Ledesma, Reya Sehgal, and Marley-Vincent Lindsey for stopping by at various points in the semester and for contributing to class discussions. I’d also like to thank Susan Smulyan for her comments on my syllabus and for our (continuing!) conversations on how the Public Humanities program and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (JNBC) might support students interested in digital humanities tools and topics. Jim Egan and Steve Lubar patiently helped me think through ideas related to the course. The Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship supported our class with access to the library’s new Digital Studio, and Bruce Boucek, Brian Croxall, Elli Mylonas, and Patrick Rashleigh graciously took time to meet with students and provide recommendations for digital tools and resources.

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