For a search engine to work well, it needs to know where to look. The streetlight effect offers a common metaphor. The drunk man searches under the streetlight because that’s where it’s easiest to find things. In a search of a museum collection database, we can search most easily, or only, in the categories that are well described, that we have good vocabulary for, that curators care about. I’d like to suggest another metaphor: the amusement park dark ride….
Robyn asked me to give “something like a trajectory of how we’ve come to understand ‘public humanities’ within the program’s history,” connected to the work you’ll be doing with this semester. That’s a fair assignment for me, as someone who’s been part of that trajectory. I know Robyn won’t mind if I question her assignment a bit, consider her assumptions. (That’s what you’re supposed to do in graduate school, especially at Brown!) There are two questions to consider. First Question:…
Earlier this week I met with the NY Council for the Humanities Public Humanities Fellows. This is a fairly new program (started by a former student, Leah Nahmias!) that connects PhD students at NY schools with local communities. The goals are ambitious: to bring humanities scholarship into the public realm, encourage emerging humanities scholars to conceive of their work in relation to the public sphere, develop scholars’ skills for doing public work, and strengthen the public humanities community in New…
It’s that more-than-half-way through the summer inflection point when suddenly it seems that school starts too soon. It’s time to think about fall semester. One of my courses this fall is my usual Introduction to Public Humanities, the seminar for new MA students in the public humanities program, along with a few others who seem to have interesting things to say. At the end of last year’s course I asked the students to fill out a survey on the course. They graded each…
Here’s what I told the graduating class. It refers back to what I told them when they arrived. Best wishes, everyone!
My article on the history and philosophy of collecting at the National Museum of American History has been published in the Federal History Journal. The issue is freely available, here, and my essay is here. It’s a good issue: I especially recommend the article by Margo Anderson, “Public Management of Big Data: Historical Lessons from the 1940s.” My essay was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the NMAH. I used to work there, and a former colleague asked me to write something. The director was…
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 what we should do now, but what should we have been doing all along to build the community connections we need to be useful now?…
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/.)
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 of the public humanities program at Brown, and also because it’s great to see smart people thinking through how public humanities might work for them…
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…
