AI everything! For a month! That’s one way to describe the talk I gave for Brown’s AI and Humanities Research group, part of the Center for Digital Scholarship. Less clickbaity: How might historians use AI in their research? I tried a variety of AIs—ChatGPT, CoPilot, JSTOR AI, among other—on projects I’m working on now. I also went back to some earlier projects to see what AI might have done for me. (My work is in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history.)…
[Here’s the short talk I gave at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society workshop on Theories, Practices, and Pedagogies of Telling Difficult Histories in Museum Exhibits. A wonderful group! ] There have been a few surveys that are useful for understanding what visitors think about museums as places for difficult histories. The best known is The Presence of the Past, a survey by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen in 1998. They found that most people believed that…
I have been involved with Brown’s public humanities program since it began: its founding director, for the first ten years of the program; a faculty member and advisor, for the entirety of the program; and, these past six months, interim director with the job of closing the program after nineteen years. I have been asked by students, alumni, colleagues and friends why the program is closing. Everyone has theories, and the university has never made an official statement. A combination…
[a short presentation to a Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning workshop on how teachers might deal with chatbots] I believe that ChatGPT is a new and useful tool and that we should try to teach students how to use it. But we should teach them to use it as a tool, not as a machine. That is, purposefully, thoughtfully, with skill, knowing its strengths and weaknesses, where it can help us do better work and where it does not….
A mashup of a course: book history, material and digital explorations, and making. This past semester (Summer, 2021) I taught a course titled “Books, Material and Digital,” a course that combined book history, hands-on making, and explorations of libraries, reading, and digital scholarship. (Kristen Iemma co-taught as TA.) Designed originally as a hands-on, special-collections intensive seminar for advanced undergraduates, pandemic rules changed it into a mostly remote first-year seminar with significant hands-on work, remote speakers Zooming in, and a final…
The slides from a talk for a group at the Rotch-Jones-Duff House in New Bedford, April 2021. A bit of history, some examples of what several cutting-edge museums are working on. Bonus: The history of museum period rooms!
In October I gave a talk about the history and future of historic interior spaces in museums. You can see the presentation here. And a few pictures from the talk:
Two more short videos prepared for my “Methods in Public Humanities” course. These address museum collections, one on registration and one on online access to collections. They’re designed as background for my students, but might be more generally useful. They join a larger group of short videos on exhibitions, here. More to come!
Remote teaching this fall meant figuring how to reduce in-class lectures, and so I recorded some of the talks I would normally give in class. And once recorded – why not share them? What you’ll find here are short talks about how to do exhibits. They are aimed at students interested in museum work, especially curatorial and education work. They are syncretic and idiosyncratic. That is, they provide a summary of different ways of approaching exhibit development, and also my…
Next year I will be teaching a new course on books that combines my interest in making with my new focus on digital scholarship. This summer I worked with three Brown undergraduates (Elena Newman, Malery Nguyen, and Mara Jovanovic) to invent the course, and especially to think about hands-on projects. Here’s a report on some of the work we’ve done. (First: A thank-you to the Dean of the College at Brown, who made this possible through the SPRINT program, designed…
