Extending the “Hello World” workshop series supported by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL), the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), and the MLab at the University of Victoria (UVic), “Building Public Humanities” is a series of free and informal workshops intended primarily for humanities graduate students. The workshops respond to an important yet often overlooked issue at the intersection of public humanities and digital humanities, namely the demand for digital projects not only responsive to current social, cultural, and political issues but also invested in mobilizing knowledge within and beyond the academy. Recognizing that such mobilization demands approaches all too rare in many humanities graduate programs, the workshops give participants at UVic a concrete sense of how to plan, prototype, develop, revise, and assess public digital projects.
Topics for the workshops include problem-based modelling, speaking for/with community partners, building and sharing process narratives, producing interoperable data and documentation, social justice action planning, and project management. Importantly, the construction and delivery of the workshops relies on a broad range of expertise and a wide array of investments that allow the inter-professional series to draw from generative differences across perspectives and practices.
Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships
“Building Public Humanities” was organized by Nina Belojevic and Jentery Sayers, both of whom are also the project’s research leads, with contributions from Miriam Bartha (UW Simpson Center), Jon Johnson (UVic English), Lynne Siemens (UVic School of Public Administration), and Katie Tanigawa (UVic English). It was made possible by support from the ETCL, with events and outreach facilitated by the MLab.
Project Status
This project began in 2013-14 and continued through 2014-15. During 2013-14, several “Building Public Humanities” workshops took place on the UVic campus, and information about each was published here at maker.uvic.ca. In 2014, the MLab published “Digital Humanities, Public Humanities,” a special issue of NANO. Additional workshops occurred during the 2014-15 academic year. See details below, and please do not hesitate to either comment on a log or email maker@uvic.ca with feedback.
Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the BuildingPH project, with the projects tag. Featured image for this post, of Shaun Macpherson (left) at HASTAC 2013, care of Jentery Sayers. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)
