Eric Schooley
HIST381
Dr. Leslie Madsen-Brooks
18 September, 2012
New Media and Ambiguity:
An Interview with Dr. Patrick Murray-John: Digital Humanist
Most of the stress this assignment caused me was from the intimidating prospect of contacting a professional, who would be a stranger to me, in hopes of securing some of their valuable time. So, when you offered up Dr. Patrick Murray-John and his time on a silver platter, I jumped at the chance; it was dumb luck that he happened to be just the type of humanist I wanted to talk to: someone closer to the programming side of things with their fingers in a lot of pies. However, this meant that I had little to no idea what Dr. Murray-John does, except that he works for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
Patrick, as I’ve come to know him, has many roles at CHNM. This seems to be the case with most good digital historians, and key to his success. His primary role is management of the Omeka development team at the Center (Omeka is a free, open source web-publishing platform for the display of collections and exhibitions). This means he spends a lot of time trying to tie related, but somehow separated, information into a cohesive idea, but not just in his own projects. Like all digital curation, the idea is to source it to as many scholars as possible, so he must facilitate themes from other, similar projects like WordPress. A large part of Patrick’s work in Omeka also involve what he calls the “Omeka Commons,” which, if I understand correctly, is a system designed to aggregate data from a variety of Omeka sources. At this point I should make a confession, a good deal of the technical terms Dr. Murray-John used, along with the names and uses of programs, was beyond me. This is a good thing, though: it gives a list of things to go learn! As I mentioned, a major goal of Digital Humanities is to help other humanists preserve and present their own work, so in the noblest vein of curation, all of the tolls and plug-ins Patrick creates are available to anyone building an Omeka site. So, I see quite a bit of his work finding its way into my projects in the near future.
Like I said, a lot of this stuff is over my head, but that’s exactly why I wanted to talk to someone like Patrick, he can lend me valuable insight into which areas I should be focusing and some things I can do to make life easier for anybody involved in these future undertakings. For the efficiency of a team and the quality of the work, the advice is what you might hear if asking any professional about choosing the people they work with. Dr. Murray-John says, “Choose your team carefully. Look for people with overlapping interests. Respect them, and how their interests and expertise can contribute to the project.” Seriously, I’ve heard almost the exact phrase from people putting together a film crew, or a band, or a construction project, or even deciding who rides with whom on a road trip. Anything repeated this often, across this many demographics, must have some truth to it! Here’s a paraphrasing of some other tips I gleaned from his responses: Be honest, about what you know and what you don’t; Don’t be afraid to ask for help to better understand a tool or concept, remember the people you’re dealing with are humanists (read: “talkers”); It’s important to respect the programmers, they know how perform necessary work that I do not. On the other hand, I also know stuff they don’t, so don’t be a doormat either.
Patrick recommended quite a few programs to start experimenting with, but I don’t yet understand any of them well enough to describe them now, that sounds like fodder for a later blog post anyhow. The gist of the advice I can pass along from Dr. Murray-John is to become as familiar with the “production” side of things as you comfortably can, this will not only allow you to better communicate with the programmers, it will help you to appreciate the complex and laborious work they do to help transmit your ideas. Would it kill you to take these guys out for drink every now and then?
The main purpose, and simultaneously the biggest payoff, to choosing a team wisely, then learning as much from each other as possible in a group setting is this: the line between “humanist” and “technologist” is becoming more and more blurred. Digital Humanities isn’t just wearing away long-held distinctions between information sets, molding them into tools to generate new ideas and foster understanding, Digital Humanities is also eroding the distinctions between people. We would not be fools to expect similar outcomes we’ve seen with data happening with the people who curate it. When we no longer adhere to titles on business cards and diplomas, we can get closer to the truth of our world and, more importantly, each other.