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Author: Steven Lubar

Brown’s Public Humanities Program Closes

Brown’s Public Humanities Program Closes

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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…

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Teaching with ChatGPT

Teaching with ChatGPT

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[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….

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Books, Material and Digital

Books, Material and Digital

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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…

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Short videos on collections

Short videos on collections

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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!

Exhibition How-to Videos

Exhibition How-to Videos

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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…

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Paper, ink, type, books

Paper, ink, type, books

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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…

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Boatbuilding

Boatbuilding

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In Fall semester 2019 I co-taught a course called Boatbuilding: Design, Making, and Culture, with Chris Bull and Shep Shapiro. Here’s the description: This course introduces the study of the design, engineering, work, material culture and history through the construction of a traditional workboat, a Maine peapod. As the class builds the boat we’ll gain a hands-on understanding of issues of engineering, design, skill, and workmanship. At the same time, we’ll do historical research and visit museums to gain insight…

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Little Compton Landscape Stories

Little Compton Landscape Stories

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Last year (summer 2019) the Little Compton Historical Society took on the topic of landscapes. (Each year the organization focuses on a different topic.) We edited a book on Little Compton landscapes. (Available here.) We did an exhibition that showed off maps, landscape paintings, and some of the tools that shaped our landscape history. Students in the public humanities program at Brown contributed several virtual extensions of the exhibit. One group used StoryMaps to tell focused stories of the landscape,…

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