Jim McGrath, PhD

Tag: providence public library

  • 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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