Digital contexts for public humanities take on many forms and require us to think carefully and creatively about the impact of the digital on our ideas of curation, collaboration, and audience engagement (among other topics). The Center for Public Humanities provides many opportunities for our students, faculty, and community partners to explore and interrogate these newer and constantly-changing dimensions of public humanities work. We are interested in digital reimaginings of older technologies like the tour, the exhibit, the archive. We encourage attention to the ways data and our ideas of data have transformed our relationships with cultural objects and the ways we read, share, and tell stories about these materials. We interrogate how relationships with audiences are changed by the ubiquity of mobile devices, by uses of augmented and virtual reality, by new opportunities for interaction and participation. And we cultivate productive and creative uses of digital forms of communication and publication platforms to share projects and perspectives on public humanities. It is difficult to imagine forms of public humanities in the twenty-first century that are not informed in some way by ideas of the digital.
In addition to offering courses in Digital Public Humanities and Digital Storytelling, providing in-house consulting on digital public humanities project development (via our Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities), and offering workshops and lectures on digital tools and topics (among other resources), we support several digital public humanities initiatives involving students, faculty members, and community partners.
Current Digital Projects
Suffrage in Rhode Island: A Lippitt Family Perspective
Digital Tours of the Nightingale-Brown House
The Modernist Journals Project
Public Work: A Public Humanities Podcast
Previous Digital Projects
Cataloguing History: Revisualizing The 1853 New York Crystal Palace