Category Archives: Public humanities
Joint Statement from Museum Bloggers and Colleagues on Ferguson and related events
I am pleased to join a group of distinguished museum folks in this statement about the role of museums in addressing contemporary issues. The public humanities puts community at the center of its theory and asks: How might cultural institutions be useful to community? The recent events help to focus that question. We should ask not …
Public and Digital Humanities
I enjoyed speaking with Melissa Rayner as part of Gale/Cengage’s GaleGeeks webcasts. You can enjoy a recording here. (For those of you who listened closely and noted that I couldn’t remember the name of my favorite tool for visualizing collections: it’s viewshare, at http://viewshare.org/.)
My talk at Mt. Holyoke: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
Here are my slides and my notes from a talk I gave at Mt. Holyoke College for the (long name!) Five Colleges, Inc. / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Bridging Initiative in the Public and Applied Humanities. I greatly enjoyed the opportunity, both because writing the talk allowed me to look back over the past decade …
Beautiful Data
I spent the last two weeks of June at Beautiful Data, a workshop funded by the Getty Foundation and run by Harvard’s MetaLab. I’m not sure why the name, “Beautiful Data”: but it seems fair, given that the workshop address both data about beautiful things and data made beautiful by its utility. The question for …
Seven Rules for Public Humanists
If we want the humanities to be more than academic—if we want them to make a difference in the world—we need to change the way we work. We need to rethink some of the traditional assumptions of the humanities. I suggest here seven rules of thumb for doing public humanities. 1. It’s not about you Start …
Applied? Translational? Open? Digital? Public? New models for the humanities
How do the humanities change when we take engaged public scholarship seriously? Considering five adjectives that are being put in front of the word “humanities”—applied, translational, open, digital, and public humanities—helps us consider the possibilities of humanities beyond the academy. This essay considers the way these adjectives modify the humanities. It considers their history, the …
The presence of the past: Landscapes of history and tradition at Brown University
Trying out Medium. Here’s a version of the talk I gave to graduating seniors before they set out on a tour of the campus. My hope was to get them to see the campus in a new way. The presence of the past: Landscapes of history and tradition at Brown University.
Student Work for Public Audiences
Yesterday I participated in a roundtable discussion on “Student Work for Public Audiences” at Brown’s Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning. I talked about last year’s AMST1550, “Methods in Public Humanities.” I teach courses for students who want to learn how to work with the public. Many of my courses are for graduate students in a professional program, …
Jenks Society for Lost Museums
I’ve been blogging over at the Jenks Society for Lost Museums. You can see my thoughts on curatorial poetry and “Report on the food of the robin” and on taxidermy workshops, as well as reflections on the legacy of Prof. Jenks. And also many other reflections and considerations by fellow fellows of the Jenks Society. …
Teaching Digital Public History
Here’s the paper I would have given at the American Historical Association conference, had it not been for about a foot of snow and a cancelled flight.
On public humanities 