I was faculty director of Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship in 2020-2023, an opportunity to revisit a long-standing interest in the field that started when I was at the National Museum of American History in the 1990s (hypercard exhibits!) and digital things (the internet!) was new. I’m back at it now with the latest rage of Artificial Intelligence, vibe-coding for museums and local history work.

• “AI Tools for Local History,” forthcoming in History News
• “Cataloging History,” four-part series on Medium, 2017 (with Emily Esten)
• “Beautiful Data,” Ars Orientalis, 44, 2015

• Vibe-coding for local historyFebruary 20, 2026
  AI makes it possible to write interesting and useful programs even if you don’t know how to code. Describe what you want, wait a few minutes, and wow! Here’s your site. It’s called “vibe coding.” It’s not quite that easy. The first draft appears in a minute or two. It… Read more: Vibe-coding for local history
• Rhode Island Industrial SitesJanuary 3, 2026
  An experiment to take the Historic American Engineering Record’s 1978 RHODE ISLAND Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites and make it an interactive website. Map generated with assistance from Google Gemini. My first vibe-coding experiment. It’s a map, but look closely and it’s also a bit of a mess.… Read more: Rhode Island Industrial Sites
• Brown’s Center for Digital ScholarshipMay 6, 2025
  CDS celebrated its 30th anniversary with a symposium and party. Here’s the remarks I gave. Thanks to Ashley Champagne and Tara Nummedal for the invitation to explore old emails and read old documents and explore CDS on the Wayback machine. Tara asked us three questions – our involvement with CDS,… Read more: Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship
• AI and Historical ResearchFebruary 16, 2024
  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… Read more: AI and Historical Research
• Short videos on collectionsDecember 7, 2020
  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.… Read more: Short videos on collections
• Open Access Articles! or, what happens to old articlesJune 19, 2018
  How best to make journal articles accessible? Over the years, I’ve published a few dozen essays, in a range of journals, books, encyclopedias, newsletters, and blogs. A recent discussion with folks from the Brown University Library about the Brown Digital Repository got me thinking about how accessible they were, and… Read more: Open Access Articles! or, what happens to old articles
• Announcing a new timeline of museum historyAugust 7, 2017
  I’m pleased to announce a new timeline of museum history. The timeline starts in the 17th century, with the 1628  Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest and Ole Worm’s 1655 Museum Wormianum, and comes up to the present day (Decolonize this Museum! and the Museums Change Lives campaign). It includes… Read more: Announcing a new timeline of museum history
• Catalog History: The New York Crystal PalaceApril 30, 2017
  A four part series on Medium, “Cataloging History,” on the history and practice of museum catalogs, focusing on the publications of the 1853 New York Crystal Palace fair: Part 1: A brief history of American museum catalogs to 1860 Part 2: The New York Crystal Palace Catalogs Part 3: Catalog as Book,… Read more: Catalog History: The New York Crystal Palace
• Primary-source twitterJune 20, 2016
  As I research my book on museums I tweet some of my sources. Gathering them here for your museum-history pleasure.
• The dark ride (on search)September 27, 2015
    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,… Read more: The dark ride (on search)
• History of museum exhibitions; a Pinterest experimentFebruary 22, 2015
  When I taught a course on the history of museums, I found it useful to have a ready source of historical images of exhibitions from the past 500 years of so. As an experiment, I added Pinterest to my workflow. It’s extremely easy to add an image to a Pinterest… Read more: History of museum exhibitions; a Pinterest experiment
• Public and Digital HumanitiesNovember 14, 2014
  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/.)
• Museumbots: An AppreciationAugust 22, 2014
  Meet the museumbot. Museumbots tweet random objects from museum collections, four or five objects a day. I know of three museumbots, and I’m sure there are more. @museumbot tweets Metropolitan Museum of Art collections, @cooperhewittbot, and @bklynmuseumbot their eponymous museums’ collections. Here’s the last few objects from @museumbot, as good… Read more: Museumbots: An Appreciation
• Beautiful DataJuly 4, 2014
  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… Read more: Beautiful Data
• Applied? Translational? Open? Digital? Public? New models for the humanitiesJune 5, 2014
  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.… Read more: Applied? Translational? Open? Digital? Public? New models for the humanities
• Teaching Digital Public HistoryJanuary 2, 2014
  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.
• Arts and humanities analyticsNovember 2, 2013
  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… Read more: Arts and humanities analytics
• The Humanities: Public, Open, Applied & EngagedSeptember 30, 2013
  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… Read more: The Humanities: Public, Open, Applied & Engaged
• MOOCingSeptember 9, 2013
  My post on my summer of being a student, and watching students work as professionals, is up on the Public Humanities Center blog.
• Building a Professional Persona OnlineOctober 21, 2012
  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… Read more: Building a Professional Persona Online
• Digital Public Humanities (and an out-of-body experience)October 14, 2012
  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… Read more: Digital Public Humanities (and an out-of-body experience)
• Scholarly Research and Writing in the Digital AgeJuly 22, 2012
  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… Read more: Scholarly Research and Writing in the Digital Age
• In response to a state humanities council question: What are the digital humanities, and what should we do about them?July 1, 2012
  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… Read more: In response to a state humanities council question: What are the digital humanities, and what should we do about them?