When I saw the theme of this week’s readings on our class syllabus, I knew that I would encounter questions and topics previously raised in my professional life. I work for a nonprofit cultural organization, and, having recently submitted grant reports and applications to the National Endowment for the Humanities, think often about the complexity of advocating for public work. When considering my own work, I am often troubled by the issues of reach and sustainability: I’ve seen great projects get funded, executed, and then become almost immediately obsolete. Throughout my reading this week, I was most interested in learning about the relationship between the public and the relevance of a humanities project: I considered the question of whether the creation or the presentation of a project matters more in engaging the public. Through Sheila Brennan’s thorough examination of public DH initiatives, I can more clearly see a connection between the potential longevity of a project and the impact the project has on its audience. 

I appreciated Brennan’s enumeration of the steps to take into account when “doing public digital humanities”. In her description, a successful project will 1) identify its audience, 2) make the project accessible on platforms and in languages familiar to the target audience, 3) make the project’s navigational paths easy to understand and welcoming to users, and 4) have a meaningful name. I compared these necessities to a recent grant application that my coworkers and I submitted to the NEH. Although we did not apply to the Digital Humanities Advancement Grant that Brennan writes about in her NEH blog posts, we did apply to funding for a specifically public humanities project. Our application was rejected, and I think that this was largely due to a failure to place the public first. The project I submitted an application for involved a discussion series, which relied on public engagement in order to gather together a national audience. However, information about the discussion series — both in past iterations of the project and in the application — was difficult to find. By hosting the humanities project within the organization’s larger website, details about upcoming talks were buried. Website users had to know specific search terms in order to locate event details on the site, which drove away potential audience members. Furthermore, the discussion series was not very collaborative with the communities it intended to serve. The project sought audience feedback after each event, but did not include the audience in the process of designing each talk. This imbued the overall public humanities project with a paternalistic feeling: the organization entered communities with pre-prescribed information, and then administered a survey about what could be done differently “next time”, without even guaranteeing that there would be a next time. After reading through Brennan’s suggestions for designing a successful public digital humanities project, I can see clearly that the role of the public is essential in designing a project and then facilitating its preservation. If the public can see their own interests and perspectives represented in a project, then they will be more likely to support efforts to recreate the project, share it widely, and continue adding knowledge into the project’s database. 

After I read Brennan’s piece “Public, First”, I wanted to get a better sense of what might constitute a public digital humanities project. I visited the website for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and browsed through some of the work led by this institution. I loved the creativity and participation embedded in projects like “Hearing the Americas” and “Amboyna Conspiracy Trial”, and wondered the types of cultural preservation practices used in these projects could be applied to other niches of the humanities as well. History seems to lend itself very well to public digital humanities work: why is this? Can other areas of scholarly inquiry — even outside of the humanities — invite the public in?