Recomendados
Mais conteúdo relacionado
Mais procurados
Semelhante a Esten OAH18: Digital Public Humanities for Historians
Semelhante a Esten OAH18: Digital Public Humanities for Historians (20)
Último
Último (20)
Esten OAH18: Digital Public Humanities for Historians
- 1. Digital Public Humanities For Historians Emily Esten MA Public Humanities Brown University @sheishistoric
- 2. Some Clarifications 1. Not a historian (well, kinda) 2. Not digital history (well, kinda) 3. Not new
- 3. Definition of Digital Public Humanities Lazy Answer: “anything that makes the humanities accessible to the public!” Better Answer: “using tools & methods of DH in service of public audiences”
- 4. Framework It centers the public (rather than methodology) It has a critical, artistic, and research side It engages with technology appropriately
- 8. What does Digital Public Humanities do for History? Building on the work of digital history Interdisciplinary, interrelated conversations Flipping the viewpoint from input to output
- 9. What does it do for Grad Students in History?Exposing the limits of the discipline Contributions to the field What it means to be a 21st-century scholar
- 10. Digital Public Humanities For Historians Emily Esten MA Public Humanities Brown University @sheishistoric
Notas do Editor
- Good morning everyone! I want to thank you all for being here to participate in our discussion. And I especially want to thank Marc and Matt for asking me to join them on this wonderful journey to OAH and Tom for agreeing to chair our panel & value grad student experiences here today.
- Before I start, I just want to make a few things clear. One, I’m not a historian, or rather I’m not a history grad student. Second, I’m not talking about digital history - there are some great digital historians here at OAH - Jeffrey McClurken, Miriam Posner, Jessica Marie Johnson, Sharon Leon - and they all inform my work, but I do think there is a distinction that we can get into a bit here. And third, and this one is the most important, despite me maybe slipping up and using the term "new," nothing here is new. There are many panels, workshops, discussions here at OAH talking about various digital interventions into history, but these discussions are not new in themselves. Digital humanities has been going on for longer than I have been alive, and adding another word to it certainly is not going to “save us” if we need saving. I'm also talking two fields – digital humanities and public humanities – that have longstanding work and methodologies, and we as scholars have to respect that. What I‘m here to do is think about digital public humanities as a framework in relation to the work of historians, and I think it’s valuable to have this conversation under OAH's larger theme of the forms of history and for graduate students right now.
- So first, the big question: what is digital public humanities? That question is the bane of my existence as a student, largely because definitions are so difficult and debated. The lazy answer is, of course, "anything that makes the humanities accessible to the public through technology!" Which, yes, digital public humanities does what that definition describes – public humanists like myself are interested in taking scholarship and marrying it with communities. A better definition might be this: using the tools and methods used to make arguments in digital humanities in service of public audiences. Which I think is what digital (public) history projects largely do. But neither of those definition help us think about what's at stake here: we're combining two interdisciplinary fields and putting them together, so definitions are going to be nebulous. As Miriam Posner pointed out yesterday, it's nearly impossible to define what types of projects are a part of digital humanities, so I think it's even less valuable to do that here. A better definition might be this: using the tools and methods used to make arguments in digital humanities in service of public audiences. Which I think is what digital (public) history projects largely do. But neither of those definition help us think about what's at stake here: we're combining two interdisciplinary fields and putting them together, so definitions are going to be nebulous. As Miriam Posner pointed out yesterday, it's nearly impossible to define what types of projects are a part of digital humanities, so I think it's even less valuable to do that here.
- For me, it's most valuable to think of digital public humanities not as a definition or a field in its own right, but as a collection of values, ideas, and concerns. Here, the strengths and limitations of what we can actually accomplish as scholars seem clearer. And here: I see these values as the following: public, creativity, and critical tech.
- For one, this framework centers on the public. Borrowing from Robyn Schroeder's blog post "What is Public Humanities," people are the purpose of the work, rather than alternative methods of working.[1] Digital public humanities helps us ask the following: who is included? Who is excluded? What communities do I make in this work, and how does this work support existing communities? As Sharon Leon mentioned in her presentation yesterday on Reviewing Digital Projects, public projects have a different set of values: work in the world, shared-authority, co-creation, and dialogue. Good public humanities projects work backwards from traditional historical scholarship: they start with the community and then move towards sources, rather than starting with the sources and finding the audiences. [1] https://dayofph.wordpress.com/what-is-public-humanities/ In the project "A People's Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, the Archivists explicitly considered how they can empower city community members through promotion of principles. They involved local community members in the decision making process about what materials are collected, how materials are described, and who has access. Community members are directly involved in the custody and direction of the Archive over time. They also explicitly define who public contributions are coming from – in this case, any self-defined Cleveland resident or community member who has observed, experienced, or otherwise been directly or indirectly impacted by police violence in Cleveland. Being clear about how a project works for and with a public frames the foundation and values of how this work shall be presented.
- This framework also makes use of its wide variety of disciplines to value creativity, artistry, and aesthetic on an equal level of importance as the research itself. It challenges to think about new ways of presenting our content and questions, and how design, form and functionality inform the work itself. Here, the argument is not just presented with tools and technologies, but actively presented through them in service of a greater idea and public. So Freedom's Ring is one of my favorite digital projects ever, taking visitors through the historical context of King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Mixing primary sources with artistic depictions of scenes, multimedia context moving words around…it builds on its primary text – the speech – to create an interactive but also beautifully artistic experience of what that speech means now. It is both artistic retooling of King's speech, but also an exhibit of where "I Have A Dream" fits into nonviolent action and the civil rights. And for that, I think it's an effective digital project. DESIGNED BY the MLK Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford, this launched in 2013, but I'd love to see more scholarship and frankly museum work that engages with this type of interface. FREEDOM'S RING IS, I THINK, AN EXAMPLE OF GOOD HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP DESIGNED FOR AN EDUCATIONAL AUDIENCE – SHOWING HOW CONNECTIONS ARE MADE FROM IDEA TO IDEA, WHILE STILL BEING AESTHETICALLY ENGAGING AND BEAUTIFUL IN ITS OWN RIGHT. Digital storytelling does this, public humanities does this, digital history does not largely not.
- And finally, by placing the digital first, it makes it descriptive of "public humanities." As Sheila Brennan in her piece "Public, First" for Debates in the Digital Humanities, Digital humanities scholars are defined by the digital – much in the same way of digital history. Here, we want to think about the public first, and so it's about what digital can do for that public. If public humanities is a field interfacing and engaging with communities, digital public humanities provides methodology and questions for bringing technology to that conversation. How does technology change the way we perform research, interpret cultural heritage, or communicate with publics? Taking from the RAT technology integration framework, technology should augmenting or transforming the learning, instruction, or curriculum in ways that were unattainable without it. Tech should change established practices, processes, or goals. I might live in the digital world, but not everything should be digital – why is this different?
- So what does digital public humanities for history? Historians are expert researchers, writers, and critical thinkers. Historians know how to find answers and questions better than any other discipline I've come into contact with. Historians are good at investigating primary sources, presenting new interpretations and making connections among ideas. Historians have great content, ideas, and messages to bring forth – which is why digital history and public history have been fruitful voyages for scholarship so far. What history is not so good at switching that focus: moving away from the content to exploring that workflow & processes of being a historian. We're so focused on the output and the interpretative contribution that these other ideas – audience, design, and tools - often fall through the cracks. Digital public humanities gives a different starting point. Borrowing from Andrea Ledesma's blog post, "What's public about the digital humanities?", open documentation of processes, labor, and decisions can not help communicate these decisions of scholarship, but help define what scholarship entails and can be moving forward.[1] And furthermore, borrowing from the 2014 introduction of the special issue of NANO: New American Notes Online, history as a discipline is trying to invest in many new methods, technologies, and theory-based inquiries. Digital public humanities as a framework highlights that these aren't distinct, but rather interrelated conversations about how the field can change.[2] [1] https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/news/2016-10/what’s-public-about-digital-humanities [2] https://www.nanocrit.com/issues/issue5/introduction-digital-humanities-public-humanities
- Tailoring this for history graduate students specifically, I think there is a way for these generation of historians, digital, public, or otherwise, to work with this framework in developing new projects and research. In thinking of what this framework does for history and scholarship, this different line of questioning challenges us to define our scholarly values head-on. As a field that's already thinking of digital interventions, history using digital public humanities allows us to think generally – not about training in the tools and technologies themselves, but the people for whom we're hoping to reach and do justice in using these new methods. If digital history in its last twenty years has been about learning how to work with technology, I think the next twenty years is about transforming the type of scholarship that we develop. And sure, to throw it in here, grad students in the twenty-first century are in a unique position – where they are expected to take on all these different methodologies and adopt it into their practice. Being a scholar in the 21st century means having all these hyphens in front of your name – digital, public, social, cultural, intellectual, and so on. The most amazing projects happening in digital scholarship right now, history or otherwise, are often coming from grad students looking to push boundaries. Interdisciplinary work exposes the limits of our discipline's knowledge and helps us to reimagine what scholarship can look like moving forward. Graduate students expose these limitations of the history as a discipline – which can often be a drawback - and advocate for changes within history departments. The academy moves slowly, but we are being empowered by the foundations of the field to push forward.
- I'm not saying all grad students have to take this on– but rather we can think about how different frameworks define what scholarship means to our generation. We don't all have to learn tech, we don't all have to learn how to work with the public, we don't all have to become artists. But we do have to know how to ask questions – which historians are very good at doing.