Makerspaces: Aotearoa New Zealand: Rabble: Libraries and the Public Humanities

Tuesday, 3 November 2015

Rabble: Libraries and the Public Humanities

The Rabble team is back on the site today to talk about how the intersection of Humanities research and their software-as-service model for libraries that will allow communities to create their own local music collections. Check out all of their for us HERE. ~Erinn

Rabble: Libraries and the Public Humanities

by Lisa Hollenbach

I recently joined Rabble as a Public Humanities Fellow. If you’ve been following LAIP posts about Rabble (like this one, or this one), you know that we partner with libraries to build software for sharing and supporting local music. I started right around the launch of Capital City Records, Edmonton Public Library’s awesome digital public space. So right away, I witnessed the dynamic collaboration between artists, librarians, software developers, entrepreneurs, and community members that make projects like these possible.

My position represents another of Rabble’s partnerships–with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for the Humanities, and with humanities scholars more generally. The Public Humanities Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation, creates opportunities for humanities Ph.D. students to broaden the impact of their research and gain professional experience at Madison-area cultural institutions. Similar initiatives at institutions like Brown University and the University of Washington are part of a new wave of public-oriented scholarship and collaboration. Just as libraries are embracing their “expanded roles” in the communities they serve in response to new economic and technological needs, the public humanities represent universities’ efforts to build stronger networks in their local communities.

Libraries and universities are natural institutional partners, and of course libraries have always been incubators of research. But how can librarians, researchers, and artists (and those of us who inhabit these roles multiply), connect and share resources to grow local communities for art?

How can we connect “incubators” of art and research with “incubators” of technology to create better tools and digital public spaces?

As a library technology start-up, Rabble is an interesting and unusual example of a public humanities initiative. Kelly Hiser, Rabble’s CEO, has a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology, and was one of UW-Madison’s first Public Humanities Fellows. In her position with the Madison Public Library, Kelly helped to launch the Yahara Music Library. Out of that experience, and in collaboration with Preston Austin and Matt Wheeler of Murfie Music, she co-founded Rabble.

Kelly’s expertise as a musicologist and her training as a humanist deeply inform Rabble’s mission, policies, and partnerships. Humanities thinking lies behind the non-exclusive, direct licenses we facilitate between libraries and musicians. It also drives our mission to build better software that reflects values shared by libraries, artists, and open-source developers. And it enables strong partnerships with libraries, universities, and musicians.

But to me, what’s most exciting about Rabble is the way Kelly and Preston, and their development team and library partners, are also helping to reimagine what the humanities can do–and what we can do better.

Now that’s music to my ears.

Lisa Hollenbach is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a 2015-2016 Public Humanities Fellow at Rabble, she loves finding ways to make libraries noisier. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and recently completed a dissertation about the poets, independent record labels, FM radio networks, and readers and listeners that made poetry central to the sound of dissent in the 1950s and 1960s.