Miriam Posner

Category: research

  • Several new publications

    I’ve published several things in the last few months, and thanks to UC’s institutional repository, I’ve been able to make them available to everyone.   “See No Evil” Logic Magazine no. 4 (buy a copy of this great magazine!) This is a piece for general readership that investigates the software behind today’s massive, sprawling supply…

  • “Stronger and Whiter Light Down Deeper and Darker Holes”: Jacob Sarnoff and the Strange World of Anatomical Filmmaking

    I have an essay up over on the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Movies on the Web site about Jacob Sarnoff, a Brooklyn surgeon who made thousands of anatomical and surgical films. I’m also so excited that the NLM posted Sarnoff’s weird 1927 film “The Human Body in Pictures.” From the essay: Motion pictures’ utility…

  • What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities

    This is a lightly edited version of the keynote address I was honored to give at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference at the University of Pennsylvania on July 22, 2015. Thank you to the organizing committee for inviting me! My sincere thanks, too, to Lauren Klein and Roderic Crooks for their advice and feedback on…

  • The Case of the Missing Faces

    As I’ve often mentioned,  I’ve been working for quite some time on a study of the photographs of Walter Freeman. Freeman, a Washington, D.C., based physician, was the world’s foremost lobotomist; it’s estimated that he lobotomized some 3,500 people. He was also a prolific and dedicated photographer. He almost invariably took photos of his patients…

  • Frequently asked questions about lobotomy

    Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time investigating the history of lobotomy, and particularly the kinds of visual evidence doctors used to support this practice. It’s part of the book I’m finishing, Depth Perception, which is broadly about the ways doctors have used film and photography during the twentieth century. In one of my…

  • What Alt-Ac Can Do, and What It Can’t

    This is a cleaned-up, lightly edited version of a talk I gave on November 22, 2013, as part of a panel on “Digital Humanities and the Neoliberal University” at the American Studies Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C.  Our original proposal for this session read like a lot of attempts to grapple with controversy in…

  • My “day of digital humanities”

    If you’re curious about what I do all day (and I actually do get that question a lot), I’ve documented my day here, as part of the Day of Digital Humanities project.

  • Very basic strategies for interpreting results from the Topic Modeling Tool

    Written with Andy Wallace, with methods and ideas borrowed from Zoe Borovsky If you’re reading this, you may know that topic modeling is a method for finding and tracing clusters of words (called “topics” in shorthand) in large bodies of texts. Topic modeling has achieved some popularity with digital humanities scholars, partly because it offers…

  • Flesh made light: investigating X-ray films

    I’m flying back from a trip to the George Eastman House (in Rochester, New York), where I did a couple days of archival research. I thought I’d write a bit about what I was doing there and what I found, in the hope that capturing the experience here will help me organize my thoughts about…

  • 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…