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On a definition of “open humanities”

April 2, 2012 in Digital humanities, Libraries, Museums | 3 comments

In considering recent definitions of digital humanities, I’m often struck by some common aspects of many of them—the ones that have nothing to do with the digital:

“. . . essentially collaborative . . .”

“. . . a commitment to the openness of knowledge.”

” . . . interdisciplinary; by necessity it breaks down boundaries between disciplines . . .”

“Making stuff, and using it to collaborate and connect with the public . . .”

“. . . genuine interdisciplinarity . . . open communication.”

“. . . an inclusive, open community . . .”

“. . . using interdisciplinary approaches that may go beyond the comfort level of traditional scholars . . .”

They speak to me in large part because I really come from the museum (specifically public history) and library worlds, and many of those celebrated features of DH are fundamental aspects and approaches of those other fields as well—and have been for a long time. The practitioners in those fields? Well, they’re my people.

Libraries, museums, the digital humanities, and other public-facing humanities efforts share some or all of the following values:

    • Collaboration
    • Inclusivity
    • Interdisciplinarity
    • Open Access
    • Open Process
    • Open Source
    • Involvement of the public and/or public “communities of passion”

I’ve started referring to this larger perspective as the open humanities. It’s a broad term that encompasses those values outlined above, values shared by many libraries, museums, public humanities projects and practitioners of all kinds and standing in opposition to much of the traditional approach of “solo scholar” research and closed publication.

If I were to offer a first-pass attempt at capturing these elements in a definition, I might say something like: the open humanities are those aspects of the humanities aimed at democratizing production and consumption of humanities research.  It makes no judgment on the precise manner or praxis in which this work is done or delivered.

And because I work in a digital humanities shop, I wanted to show my take on the relationship between digital humanities and the wider open humanities:

 

The digital humanities are a part of the open humanities to the extent that those same values are held, though of course the purely digital elements (the code, the markup, the hardware) are unique to the digital humanities and live largely outside of OH. That being said, much of DH—the commitment to open source, the collaborative nature of the field, the interdisciplinarity—is open.

As a comparison, the public humanities are virtually entirely open by my definition, so they are included entirely within the circle of OH almost entirely open by my definition, but as Sheila Brennan points out there are still elements even within those institutions that don’t support openness at every turn. (See my original diagram here.) There is also some overlap between public humanities and the digital humanities, as some—but not all—public humanities projects are also digital.  You see how this starts getting a little overly-Venn-diagrammatical, but you can probably see where I’m going.

Those who know me know that I’m no coder—some might say that means I’m not much of a digital humanist. I’d say I’m a proud open humanist with one foot solidly in the digital. That counts as DH for me.

The walls are tumbling down: my 2.0 world

July 14, 2009 in Libraries, Museums | 1 comment

We live and work in a 2.0 world*: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Museum 2.0, Classroom 2.0, Chocolate 2.0, Pepsi Bottling 2.0, 2.0 2.0, etc., etc., etc. Everybody’s got their own definition of what makes 2.0 different from what came before. 2.0 means “collaborative to the extreme” or “latest technology” or “easier to use” or “user-centered” or “interoperable” or “hip and now–you know, like groovy.”

For me, there is one core characteristic for “2.0” in the web, library, and museum worlds in which I live, move, and have my being: 2.0 = the lowering of barriers.

On the web, the main barrier to participation is code. So barrier-surmounting technologies include blogs and Twitter and WYSIWYG website editors–anything characterized by its ability to get users up and running as participants in the conversation without a lot of effort (read: coding).  Ajax, CSS, XML–these things, while critical behind the scenes for many a 2.0 tool, are not themselves 2.0.**  They are not intuitive; they do not lower the barriers between average user and participation.  YouTube and Flickr and their simple interfaces do.

For museums, the big barrier is between the public and the institution as monolith.  It is that fabled voice of authority that so often gets in the way of public participation. The conversation has too often (until more recent years) been very much one-way, with the public seen as supplicants at the Temple of Knowledge: lucky to be there and expected to be quiet and take what is given them by those who know better than they.

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This is why we do what we do

April 4, 2009 in Museum informatics, Museums | No comments

Last Sunday, before Computers in Libraries, I had time to kill after joining my sisters and mother for an early lunch of tapas at the always-fantastic Jaleo in northwest Washington.  Kill time?  In Washington?  That means one place for me: the Smithsonian.  Growing up in northern Virginia meant school and family trips downtown, and there was always, always something fascinating to see and do in the museums on the Mall (and heck, my first job was at a Smithsonian unit: four summers at the National Zoo).

It’d been too many years since I’d been to the National Museum of Natural History, so I decided to check out the new Sant Ocean Hall and hit the slightly-less-new Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals.  There, amid the exhibits on biodiversity and mammalian inner ear structures, the displays of snow-adapted animals and of bottled cephalopods, the models of whales and the specimens of white-footed mice, I found an unlooked-for reminder of just why it is I love working in museums.

They inspire such a palpable and immediate sense of wonder.

And so often they do it in the simplest way possible: by putting cool objects in front of people.

None of the exhibits I saw was filled to the gills with whiz-bang gadgetry.  Sure, there were small video screens and the occasional touch screen, simple interactives and the requisite orientation films–but so often I get the sense that some believe that without producing the equivalent of quick-cutting, hyper-animated, Grand Theft Auto-inspired museum technology infostraviganzas, no child–no modern person–will ever want to set foot in a museum again.

Could have fooled me, that’s for sure.

I couldn’t stop smiling as I wandered through the exhibit spaces.  Here was a teenage girl jumping back and squealing after lifting the door on a shrew’s-nest of earthworms.  There was a posse of what looked for all the world like tattooed skinheads snapping cell phone pictures of themselves in “Going to Sea.”  Everywhere were little kids with mouths agape, eyes popping, and fingers pointing.

And the stuff that was getting them so excited was, again, so essentially simple.  Phoenix the whale, right overhead.  The giraffe arcing its neck by the door.  The bats–and more bats.  The giant squid.

They tugged their parents over and said, “Oooooh.  Look!” again and again.  And the parents dutifully looked.  And took pictures, as if the animals were alive.  And a lot of them read the exhibit labels and told their kids–or their college buddies or their spouses–more about what it was they were looking at.

It wasn’t about the technology.  It was about the stuff.

Computers are great.  Heck, computers are at the heart of the work I do.  But it’s good to be reminded from time to time that computers aren’t the end of what we do; computers are a means to the true end.  The best museum technology helps the institution accomplish one of the its most essential missions: evoke wonder.

The tech needn’t be complex. It just needs to be true to that mission.

The wonder will follow.

—

And to be sure, there’s nothing really revelatory in the above for most museum professionals. I would wager a lot of us–whether we’re librarians, curators, maintenance workers, managers, interpreters, visitors services personnel, or something else–got into museum work because of just this sort of feeling.  But I will say this: it did me a world of good to lift my head from the day-to-day work I do and see the amazing effect of the work we do together as “museum people” on the visiting public.

So I say: get on out there and check out another museum in action.  Preferably a place for which you have no responsibility whatsoever.  You’ll probably get recharged, just like I did.

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