Miriam Posner

Category: History & Technology

  • Hey, the internet worked!

    In theory, internet-based collaboration can improve the quality of scholars’ work. Though I didn’t have any reason to doubt this, I hadn’t actually experienced this for myself until recently. About a year ago I uploaded one of the films I’ve been investigating, Thomas Edison’s 1914 The Temple of Moloch, to the Internet Archive. The Internet…

  • Searchable database of AIDS-related obituaries

    I think this is really powerful: the GLBT History Society and the Bay Area Reporter‘s searchable database of all obituaries that have appeared in the Bay Area Reporter (a newspaper that serves the GLBT communtiy) since 1979. I realized this summer that my students, around 19 or 20 years old, talk about AIDS as though…

  • Beyond Bullet Points, or maybe not

    I’ve been thinking about PowerPoint lately, and about how I might use it productively. It seems pretty clear that the blizzard-of-bullet-points method is not useful. Who can make sense of such tiny print so quickly? What’s the point of slapping bullet points on a screen? One popular alternative method is the one Cliff Atkinson advocates…

  • Presenting, conferencing, sharing

    I spent the last couple of days in Cleveland, where I was taking part in the American Association for the History of Medicine annual conference. I gave a talk on a project I’ve been working on, about the largely forgotten twentieth-century tradition of physicians exhibiting for each other at medical conventions. I got some great…

  • I do not understand the point of curated databases

    Lately I’ve been volunteering to do usability testing for Yale’s library. Well, “volunteering” is probably too generous a word, since Yale pays pretty well, in the form of iTunes and Barnes & Noble gift cards. I like the gift cards, but I love the excuse to rant about what I do and don’t like about…

  • Technology and hyperbole

    I’m a little creeped out by the messianic quality of a lot of talk about technology and society. Take the TED talks. Don’t they have a weird, hucksterish vibe? I love me some social networking and whatnot, but spare me the long-tail-tipping-point-world-is-flat-crowdsourcing-flashmobs rhapsodizing.