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 the workshop was what we might do with the newly available data about the collections in art museums. The workshop was pretty intense. Twenty two…
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 different emphases they bring to bear. How much are they about new kinds of outreach for traditional work, how much about changing the nature of…
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.
Here’s the talk presented at Bryant University’s Applied Analytics in Humanities and Social Sciences conference today. Paul Margrave, Nate Storring and I presented work done by the three of us, Allison Roberts, Mark Motte of Rhode Island College, and students in his GEOG339 class. Two parts to the presentation. The first is a very general overview of some of the types of work that might be called humanities analytics: a lot of it is digital humanities, but it also includes other…
Just back from my trip to the University of Glasgow. A delight to meet with faculty and students there and to learn more about their extensive community engagement programs. I gave a talk about public humanities programs in the United States, focusing on Brown’s program. Here’s the slides from my talk. When I have time to rewrite it, I’ll post the written-out version here. Any comments welcome.
My post on my summer of being a student, and watching students work as professionals, is up on the Public Humanities Center blog.
Friday was Workshop Day at THATCampNE, and Ian Russell and I talked to about 30 folks about your online persona. Ian mostly talked about websites, I mostly talked about twitter. Here’s the summary from the program: Building an academic and professional persona online Steven Lubar and Ian Russell, Brown University It’s important for new and emerging professionals to create and manage their web personas, their personal brands. It’s a way to meet people and keep up with ongoing discussions in your…
Here’s the talk I gave as the keynote for the New England American Studies Association. Or, rather, here are four versions of it, a cubist interpretation. There’s the notes I used, the slides I showed, the twitter stream that resulted, and, in the background, the collection of syllabi I used for evidence. The slides, but without all of the fancy transitions: My notes, not cleaned up – not a paper, just reminders of what to say: Most interesting, the Twitter…
It’s been a long time since I’ve done serious scholarly, research-intensive historical research and writing. I’ve spent the last twenty years or so teaching, advising and administering, and writing for a general audience. But I recently had the opportunity to write an article, using some of the new technologies of scholarship. This is a report on what’s changed, and what’s remained the same. Some background: I had done a lot of research for an exhibition and a talk at the…
Digital humanities has three areas: Digital tools that give us new ways to answer traditional questions: new tools to examine traditional texts and images, and perhaps open up new kinds of texts for examination The traditional questions of the humanities, applied to help us to interrogate and understand the contemporary digital world Public digital humanities: new forms of outreach using the web and other digital tools. This would include interactive presentations, mobile devices, and so on. works These overlap in…
