Slides from a talk I gave as part of the "Public Humanities In A Digital Age" panel (organized by Nicky Agate) at ACLA 2016 (Harvard University). Additional context will be provided via a blog post about this talk; I'll update info here with the link when it's up.

1. “Open To The Public”:
Cultural Institutions,
Digital Labor,
And Local Networks
@JimMc_Grath
james_mcgrath@brown.edu
Brown University
Jim McGrath

2. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE
How can humanities scholars employ digital tools
to talk with different publics?
How can emerging technologies help us better
demonstrate the value of our work?

3. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE
How do investments in digital projects transform
the kinds of academic labor that scholars do at
their institutions?
How do digital projects force us to think
differently about our research interests, our
departments, our cultural institutions, our
communities, and our methods of publication
and communication?

4. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE
What does “scholarship” look like? Who is doing it,
where is it published, how is it used and
disseminated?
How do universities, cultural institutions,
community organizations, and other publics
productively use digital tools / resources and
collaborate on digital projects?

5. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE
What professional identities and trajectories are
available to people interested in “public digital
humanities”?
How are digital objects created, contextualized,
curated, and circulated in academic and non-
academic contexts?
How can we plan for short and long-term use-
cases?

6. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE

7. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE
“Oh, I’m open to the public. Pretty, pretty open to the public.”

8. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE
What do we expect public-facing digital projects
and digital scholarship to look like, to “do”?
How do academics address the expectations of
collaborators and audiences?
What resources / tools / labor / $$$ do we have?
Why do so many digital humanities projects look
like digital humanities projects?

9. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE
What do we expect dissertations, book chapters,
and journal articles to look like, to “do”?
How do academics address the expectations of
collaborators and audiences?
What resources / tools / labor / $$$ do we have?
Why do so many scholarly monographs look like
scholarly monographs?

10. PUBLIC HUMANITIES in
a DIGITAL AGE

11. May 2013-August 2015*
2006-present (Jim: 2015-present)

12. ● Our Marathon (Case Study)
● What We Talk About When We Talk
About Public Humanities In A Digital
Age

13. “The Productive Unease of 21st-
Century Digital Scholarship” (Julia
Flanders; DHQ; 2009)
1. Digital scholarship is uneasy about the significance of
medium.
2. Digital scholarship is uneasy about the institutional
structures of scholarly communication.
3. Digital scholarship is uneasy about the significance of
representation in forming models of the world.

14. “Money and Time” (Miriam Posner;
miriamposner.com; March 2016)
If we want to produce truly challenging
scholarship and keep our best scholars from
burning out, we need to pressure our institutions
to, frankly, pay up. You can optimize, streamline,
lifehack, and crowdsource almost everything you
do — but good scholarship still takes money and
time.

15. “Untitled” (Patricia Lockwood;
@tricialockwood; March 2013)

16. 2013 Boston Marathon
Bombings

17. Build a lasting community memorial

18. Tell a wide range of stories

19. Preserve the historical record

20. 37
9,321
307
items
oral histories
memesphotographs
letters sent to City of Boston
2,886
4,849
9
community partners

21. Our Partners

22. #BostonBetter

23. “Dear Boston”

25. SHARE YOUR STORY

26. WATERTOWN FREE
PUBLIC LIBRARY

27. BOSTON PUBLIC
LIBRARY

28. What We Learned From
Our Marathon
● Participating in dialogue with communities
about value of archival projects
● Making the value of community-generated
metadata explicit and visible
● Highlighting the roles digital media play in
shaping and revising our cultural memory of
recent history

29. What We Learned From
Our Marathon
● Collaborations with external partners essential
● Collaborations with Library / Archives essential
● Preservation of items vs. interfaces
● Digital projects take time, money, and labor
● The need to take an active role in shaping the
value of the project to various audiences and
in a variety of contexts

30. What We Learned From
Our Marathon
● “Why are English PhD students doing this?”
● “No Story Too Small”
● Using (and customizing) Omeka
● Model for crowdsourcing?
● Digital Archives, Curation, Metadata
● Direct and public engagement between
cultural institutions and communities about
recent events

31. What We Learned From
Our Marathon
● Community Partners are Project Stakeholders
● How are partners defining the value of their
collaboration and their goals?
● Community Partners are not Free Labor
● Librarians and Archivists are not Free Labor
● How are you telling stories about your human
subjects? Ethical dimensions of doing so?

32. What We Talk About
When We Talk About
Public Humanities in a
Digital Age

33. ● Two-Year M.A. Program
● Courses taught by American Studies
Faculty, Adjuncts, Postdocs, (among others)
● Students collaborate with Brown, local,
national, and global partners on a wide
range of projects
● Digital components have been a part of
many recent projects
● I’m the first Postdoc in “Digital Public
Humanities”
● “Public Digital Humanities”?

35. ● digital storytelling
● digital curation
● digital archives
● digital tours
● educational outreach / initiatives
● Public intellectual activity on the
web (professional web sites, blogs,
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.)

36. Recent Course Discussions
● Using data to create visualizations for a
variety of audiences / publics
● Accessibility issues (particularly in global
contexts)
● Interface design (visible and invisible
interfaces and UX)
● Crowdsourcing that is not gamified data
entry
● “A Domain of One’s Own”
● The ethics of digital scholarship (Moya
Bailey)

37. Recent JNBC Activities
● Physical exhibits with digital components
(Stamp Collections; Umbrella Movement)
● Contributions to “Mapping Violence” project
(Monica Martinez; American Studies)
● Visualizations of Harvard Art Museums’
metadata (using its API)
● Preliminary stages of Asian-American family
photo archive (digitization / digital
storytelling)
● Crowdsourcing
● Digital Tours (web-based, mobile, and
tablet)

38. Questions
● How to navigate access to digital tools,
technology in particular collaborations?
● How to discuss best practices re: digitization
and digital storytelling / curation?
● How to meet communities in spaces they
use already in digital contexts?
● “Small data” (Brian Croxall)
● How to manage expectations of “digital
collaborator” (what we’re expected to know /
do)
● Where to begin?

39. Final Thoughts
● DH Projects that look like the rest of the
web?
● DH Projects that work with available
resources
● Where is there room for “exploratory work”
in these contexts?
● You don’t have to build a database, an
archive, digital stories, tools, tours,
simultaneously
● How do we assign value to this work and the
people who know how to do it?

40. Final Thoughts
● How “Open to the Public” is your project?
● Consider multiple sites of engagement for
particular audiences
● Consider the benefits of a range of entry
points (Search, Browse, Visualize, Map)
● Multiple uses of digital assets
● Collaborators should share assets and
methodologies (“How’d you do that?”)
● “User Stories”: Test site navigation, use
cases (and consider spec writing)
● The afterlives of digital projects

41. james_mcgrath@brown.edu
@JimMc_Grath
#acla16
Special thanks: my students in #dhJNBC at Brown,
Alicia Peaker, Julia Flanders, and Larry David

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