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.)…
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:
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…
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,…
[my talk to the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium, RISD, March 2015] The call for papers placed this conference in the context of RISD’s recent interest and success in “transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries to encourage more holistic, multi-faceted approaches to art and design practice.” In my talk I’d like to focus on disciplinary boundaries in how museums use artifacts, and offer some suggestions on how we might transcend some of those traditional boundaries for a more holistic, multi-faceted museum. The disciplines whose boundaries I’d…
Here’s the presentation I gave at the Mathers Museum’s “Museums at the Crossroads: Local Knowledge, Global Encounters” workshop last week. More on the workshop here. It was a delightful event: smart people from around the world thinking about the future of museums. Video and more coming soon.
The public humanities program has two required courses, one theory and one method Projects count for about 50 percent of the grade in the project course. For several years, large class projects that built an exhibition. We built some shows that I am proud of, but there’s not really enough time in a one semester course, the group’s too large for everyone to learn about all of the aspects of the show, and too much of the class turns into…
You can see my notes from the course, storified, here.
Part 3: How might we make it useful? How might we fix the Ph.D. so that it is more useful for work in museums, or alt-acc work more generally? What models are there? Before getting into this, though, it’s best to take notice of the ongoing conversation on new uses for the history degree. Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman of the AHA put it best: “No More Plan B.” He describes the expectations history departments set in vivid language: Yet…
