Miriam Posner

Category: History & Technology

  • Why I went (back) to the AHA

    Last week I attended the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. Although I’ve always thought of myself as a historian, I hadn’t been to an AHA meeting since my first year of grad school in 2004. In part, I hadn’t been going because I’m affiliated with so many disciplines that it’s difficult to keep…

  • Research tools redux: What I use

    I posted recently about tools for managing a research workflow, and one of the points I made is that no set of tools will be right for everyone. I’ve tried and failed to foist my favorite tools on enough people to know that this is true. Still, after I wrote the post, a few people asked…

  • Reading Steve Jobs: labor, race, and growing up in the Bay Area

    Not long ago I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Or I should say I listened to it, as an audiobook, on my iPhone. The experience was riveting, though not always pleasant. Like Steve Jobs, I grew up in the Bay Area. In fact, I was growing up in the Bay Area while Jobs…

  • Embarrassments of riches: Managing research assets

    Last updated May 15, 2013 There’s research, there’s writing, and then there’s that netherworld in between: wrangling all the digital files you gather over the course of your work. Digital files are often easier to deal with than stacks of paper, but they can also proliferate frighteningly quickly. I teach a workshop on this topic,…

  • My Ada

    Today is Ada Lovelace Day, which celebrates women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics by honoring Ada Lovelace, whom many name the first computer programmer. My Ada is Dora B. Goldstein, or Dody, as everyone called her, who died Sunday. She was a pioneer in so many ways: one of the first women to enroll…

  • The iPad in academic settings: what I like, what I’d like to see

    One of the developers here at the library asked me to tell him a little bit about my experience using the iPad in an academic setting. Here are his questions: Where do you find your self using the device the most? What do you really enjoy/hate about the device? Is there anything that you think…

  • Film Study: an iPad app built for cinephiles

    I’ve been using an iPad for about six months now. I like it, don’t get me wrong, but it hasn’t been the life-changing device I’d sort of been expecting. I haven’t found that many apps that really take advantage of the specific qualities of the iPad: its shape and size, the multi-touch surface. (Some exceptions:…

  • Batch-processing photos from your archive trip

    Today at THATCamp Southeast I helped organize a session (with Andrew Famiglietti from Georgia Tech) called Research Hacks. We brainstormed ways to use technology to enhance research, both at the archive and when examining born-digital sources. After I proposed the session, I had a moment of panic when I realized I didn’t really have any…

  • Technology postcards, which are exciting to me (but probably not to you) because I made them!

    Here’s something kind of silly: a set of postcards I made for Yale’s Instructional Technology Group to advertise the Teaching with Technology Tuesdays series of workshops on technology and pedagogy. Each one is an image of older reading technology, which I have improved and modernized! This was a really fun project for me because it…

  • The internet worked again!

    I was thinking about my last post, in which I said my experience with The Temple of Moloch was my first encounter with Internet-ty Scholarly Synergy. I remembered, though, that this is actually untrue. Back when I worked at the Museum of the Moving Image, I had an awesome and totally nerdy online encounter with…