Jim McGrath, PhD

Tag: digital public humanities

  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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