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h+d Portraits: An interview with Jeremy Grubman
By Josh Cowls on May 18, 2017
Welcome to the second edition of h+d Portraits, an ongoing series of interviews with scholars and practitioners of the Digital Humanities. In this series, we aim to explore what the label Digital Humanities means in practice – by assembling a diverse set of perspectives from those engaged in this still-emerging field.
Our second conversation is with Jeremy Grubman. Jeremy has been at MIT since 2009, first as manager of an MIT Libraries collection, and since 2012 has been an archivist in the Arts, Culture and Technology (ACT) program. As our discussion demonstrates, ACT sits at the intersection of the artistic and the digital, and the program’s holdings contain a remarkable range of artefacts covering MIT’s decades of experimentation with emerging technologies.
As such, Jeremy is expertly placed to comment on the intersection of subject matter experts, information scientists and “technologists”, whose collaboration, as Jeremy sees it, gives rise to Digital Humanities.
So our first question is always the same: What brings you to your existing institution, and in this case to your department?
Sure. So I received a Masters in Library and Information Science from Simmons College in 2008, and almost immediately after I began working in spring 2009 for the MIT Libraries, so that’s what brought me to MIT, and in the summer of 2012 I was asked to come and bring the kinds of work I was doing for the Libraries to the program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), which owned a significant amount of archival materials, covering the history of MIT’s experiments with emerging technologies in art over the past 60 years or so.
Maybe for people who don’t know quite so much about ACT, what makes ACT quite unique inside MIT?
Well ACT is born from two different organizations, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies which brought artists from all around the world to collaborate with MIT’s scientists and engineers as research fellows, beginning in the mid-1960s, and the Visual Arts program which was an academic arts program that began in the late 1980s. And the two merged to form ACT which is where we are today, which is both a research center and an academic graduate program in the arts and we also provide classes for undergraduates.
Can you tell us about how the interplay of different stakeholder groups works in practice?
I think that DH really emerges from the needs of the subject matter experts in answering complex research questions. To get at those materials they encounter the information science professionals, the librarians, archivists, museum professionals who are the gatekeepers and enablers of access, and then you have the people I refer to as technologists for lack of a better word, who build the tools and applications that promote that level of access. And DH as I see it is the convergence of those three areas of practice.
What makes these collections special – maybe not just in terms of their artistic or cultural qualities, but in that process of making them digital?
“Special collection” is a very specific term in the library world, it’s somewhat different from an archive, but what makes the collections themselves so interesting and unique is, on one hand, the breadth of material, the difference of material types. Currently I’m working most prominently with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies special collection, and it’s a challenge to do research in that collection, because if you’re looking at a particular project that was done here at MIT you need to be able to access a poster, a film, a catalog, a publication, the records of meetings and memos that reveal a process of collaboration. … It can be really challenging, in just a physical space, to go around a room and pull all of those materials from their different locations.
At the same time, in a digital space, it can be really difficult to ensure that a user can discover all of the materials that they need to discover on a given topic. So I think that the breadth of material types in a given collection is one thing that makes it challenging to deal with, and then also … there are some really complex research questions that people tend to ask about these projects. “Who were all the people who came to work on holography and MIT, and where did they all come from? And then where did they produce their work?” And so in order to be able to answer that question it takes a lot of digging, and not in the sort of approach that is typically used when you’re looking at just raw data.
What makes ACT a particularly interesting place to work in this space?
Well it’s very interesting to not work under the umbrella of the MIT Libraries, or the MIT Museum, which is typically where these materials would sit at an institution like this. It just so happens that the materials were collected and retained by ACT, and on one hand this allows me to move very freely without the weight of a larger institution behind me, but on the other hand it means that I have to do a lot of things on my own. ACT’s a very interesting place, because even though it’s a relatively small program we have a really broad range of different kinds of people coming to experiment, produce work, conduct research, and it’s always changing every semester too, because we have all kinds of people coming in, whether it’s our graduate students or visiting faculty.
How do you see archives evolving in the longer term?
I think there is a clear trend toward reaching wider audiences, and the way to do that is to develop repositories and methods of retaining information and providing access to them that are much more global, in the sense that when you build a digital collection you don’t want it to just necessarily be accessible in that one mode, in that one repository; we need to stop building these sorts of silos of information and build repositions that can really rapidly import and export collection information. And that’s an incredible challenge because we all have different kinds of information and we all have different kinds of metadata, and there’s different schema that we use to describe it. So the challenge there is to be able to build repositories that can incorporate collections from other institutions, so that you might be able to access related materials in one spot, even though the materials themselves might physically be held by very different institutions across the world.
That’s one thing that needs to happen. And another thing is greater collaboration between libraries, archives, museums, galleries – any of these types of organizations that collect materials. When we build these types of global repositories we need people to contribute to them. And I see very often these types of DH projects that are typically spurred by a particular need, for a particular collection or a particular topic, and there’s often collaboration at the project level, where you might get input from your expert users, you might have the technologists working very closely with the information professionals, and the program moves forward. We need to see collaboration at a much higher level, at an institutional level and at an extra-institutional level, as we begin to answer questions like, how are we all going to describe our data in a way that will be intuitive for users to access and discover it?
Is that kind of collaboration a more formal, institutional framework or is it just doing different things with the same people in the same ways?
I think it needs to be a mix of both. I think we need a sort of administrative buy-in, that that collaboration matters and at the same time we need some sort of more serendipitous conversations happening, between these different groups. And very often we like to sort of close our doors and work on our own, we can all be guilty of that, but the more conversations we have about enabling access to wider audiences, and how we get at more intuitive ways of helping people discover things, the better the products are going to be.
Do you have any ideas about how you would enable those conversations?
I think that it falls at least on the institutions themselves to have the conversations between the sometimes disparate departments that exist, whether it’s the MIT Libraries talking to the Museum, talking to ACT, talking to HyperStudio, or the IT department in a museum or a school getting in touch with the various academic departments to see what kinds of tools the need to manage their information to promote access to research data. I think it can start at that institutional level again with a larger administrative buy-in, and also I’ve seen the most success when people become closer colleagues and collaborate with each other, just to keep each other updated on the different things we’re working on. We often discover that we’re reinventing the wheel of someone else’s project. And when we can sit and put our heads together and share that information of the process then we all tend to learn from it, in ways that make our projects much more expansive.
